I
I had been out, I do not remember how long, but long enough to confirm
my belief in the Philadelphia way of doing things as the only way, when
I found that Philadelphia was involved in an enterprise for which its
history might give the reason but could furnish no precedent. To
Philadelphians who were older than I, or who had been in Philadelphia
while I was getting through the business of education at the Convent,
the Centennial Exposition probably did not come as so great a surprise.
Having since had experience of how these matters are ordered, I can
understand that there must have been some years of leading up to it. But
I seem to have heard of it first within no time of its opening, and just
as I had got used to the idea that Philadelphia must go on for ever
doing things as it always had done them, because to do them otherwise
would not be right or proper.
The result was that, at the moment, I saw in the Centennial chiefly a
violent upheaval shaking the universe to the foundations, with
Philadelphia emerging, changed, transformed, unrecognizable, plunging
head-foremost into new-fangled amusements, adding new duties to the
Philadelphian's once all-sufficing duty of being a Philadelphian,
inventing new attractions to draw to its drowsy streets people from the
four quarters of the globe, and, more astounding, giving itself up to
these innovations with zest.
[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL: THE ORIGINAL DESK ON WHICH THE
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WAS SIGNED AND THE CHAIR USED BY THE
PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS, JOHN HANCOCK, IN 1776 (BOTH ON PLATFORM)]
I looked on at the preparations,--as at most things, to my infinite
boredom,--from outside: a perspective from which they appeared to me
little more than a new form of social diversion. For they kept my gayer
friends, who were well on the inside, busy going to Centennial balls at
the Academy of Music in the Colonial dress which was as essential for
admission as a Colonial name or a Colonial family tree, while I stayed
at home and, seeing what lovely creatures powder and patches and paniers
made of Philadelphia girls with no more pretence to good looks than I,
felt a little as I did when the coloured dignitary rang at our front
door with the Assembly card that was not for me. And between the balls,
the same friends were immersed in Centennial Societies and Centennial
Committees and Centennial Meetings and Centennial Subscriptions and
Centennial Petitions, Philadelphia women for the first time admitted,
and pining for admission, into public affairs; while I was so far apart
from it all that I remember but one incident in connection with the
Centennial orgy of work, and this as trivial as could be. When we moved
into the Third Street house we had found in possession a cat who left us
in no doubt of her disapproval of our intrusion, but who tolerated us
because of the convenience of the ground floor windows from which to
watch for her enemies among the dogs of the neighbourhood, and for the
comfort of certain cupboards upstairs during the infancy of her
kittens. She kept us at a respectful distance and we never ventured upon
any liberties with her. Those of our friends who did, heedless of her
growls, were sure to regret it. Our family doctor carried the marks of
her teeth on his hand for many a day. It happened that once, when two
Centennial canvassers called, she was the first to greet them and was
unfavourably impressed by the voluminous furs in which they were
wrapped. When I came downstairs she was holding the hall, her eyes
flaming, her tail five times its natural size, and I understood the
prudence of non-interference. The canvassers had retreated to the
vestibule between the two front doors and, as I opened the inner door,
another glance at the flaming eyes and indignant tail completed their
defeat and they fled without explaining the object of their visit. I
must indeed have been removed from the Centennial delirium and turmoil
to have retained this absurd encounter as one of my most vivid memories.
II
Upon the Centennial itself I looked at closer quarters. I was as removed
from it officially, but not quite so penniless less and friendless as
never to have the chance to visit it. Inexperienced and untravelled as I
was, it opened for me vistas hitherto undreamed of and stirred my
interest as nothing in Philadelphia had until then. As I recall it, that
long summer is, as it was at the time, a bewildering jumble of first
impressions and revelations--Philadelphia all chaos and confusion,
functions and formalities, spectacles and sensations--buildings
Philadelphia could not have conceived of in its sanity covering acres of
its beautiful Park, a whole shanty town of huge hotels and cheap
restaurants and side-shows sprung up on its outskirts--marvels in the
buildings, amazing, foreign, unbelievable marvels, the Arabian Nights
rolled into one--interminable drives in horribly crowded street-cars to
reach them--lunches of Vienna rolls and Vienna coffee in Vienna cafes,
as unlike Jones's on Eleventh Street or Burns's on Fifteenth as I could
imagine--dinners in French restaurants that, after Belmont and
Strawberry Mansion, struck me as typically Parisian though I do not
suppose they were Parisian in the least--the flaring and glaring of
millions of gas lamps under Philadelphia's tranquil skies--a delightful
feeling of triumph that Philadelphia was the first American town to do
what London had done, what Paris had done, and to do it so
splendidly--burning heat, Philadelphia apparently bent on proving to the
unhappy visitor what the native knew too well, that, when it has a mind
to, it can be the most intolerably hot place in the world--sweltering,
demoralized crowds--unexpected descents upon a household as quiet as
ours of friends not seen for years and relations never heard
of--brilliant autumn days--an atmosphere of activity, excitement and
exultation that made it good to be alive and in the midst of Centennial
celebrations without bothering to seek in them a more serious end than a
season's amusement.
[Illustration: PHILADELPHIA FROM BELMONT]
III
But, without bothering, I could not escape a dim perception that
Philadelphia had not turned itself topsy-turvy to amuse me and the
world. Things were in the air I could not get away from. The very words
Centennial and Colonial were too new in my vocabulary not to start me
thinking, little given as I was to thinking when I could save myself the
trouble. And however lightly I might be inclined to take the whole
affair, the rest of Philadelphia was so far from underestimating it that
probably the younger generation, used to big International Expositions
and having seen the wonders of the Centennial eclipsed in Paris and
Chicago and St. Louis and its pleasures rivalled in an ordinary summer
playground like Coney Island or Willow Grove, must wonder at the
innocence of Philadelphia in making such a fuss over such an everyday
affair. But in the Eighteen-Seventies the big International Exposition
was not an everyday affair. Europe had held only one or two, America had
held none, Philadelphia had to find out the way for itself, with the
whole country watching, ready to jeer at the sleepy old town if it went
wrong. As I look back, though I realize that the Centennial buildings
were not architectural masterpieces--how could I help realising it with
Memorial Hall still out there in the Park as reminder?--though I realise
that Philadelphia prosperity did not date from the Centennial, that
Philadelphians had not lived in a slough of inertia and ignorance until
the Centennial pulled them out of it: all the same, I can see how fine
an achievement it was, and how successful in jerking Philadelphians from
their comfortable rut of indifference to everything going on outside of
Philadelphia, or to whether there was an outside for things to go on in.
I know that I was conscious of the jerk in my little corner of the rut.
The Centennial, for one thing, gave me my first object lesson in
patriotism. There was no special training for the patriot when I was
young--no school drilling, with flags, to national music. An American
was an American, not a Russian Jew, a Slovak, or a Pole, and patriotism
was supposed to follow as a matter of course. It did, but I fancy with
many, as with me, after a passive, unintelligent sort of fashion. I knew
about the Declaration of Independence, but had anybody asked for my
opinion of it, I doubtless should have dismissed it as a dull page in a
dull history book, a difficult passage to get by heart. But I could not
go on thinking of it in that way when so remote an occasion as its
hundredth birthday was sending Philadelphia off its head in this mad
carnival of excitement. In little, as in big, matters I was constantly
brought up against the fact that things did not exist simply because
they were, but because something had been. An old time-worn story that
amused the Philadelphian in its day is of the American from another
town, who, after listening to much Philadelphia talk, interrupted to
ask: "But what is a Biddle?" I am afraid I should have been puzzled to
answer. For a Biddle was a Biddle, just as Spruce Street was Spruce
Street, just as Philadelphia was Philadelphia. That had been enough in
all conscience for the Philadelphian, but the Centennial would not let
it be enough for me any longer.
My first hint that Philadelphia and Spruce Street and a Biddle needed a
past to justify the esteem in which we held them, came from the
spectacle of Mrs. Gillespie towering supreme above Philadelphians with
far more familiar names than hers at every Centennial ball and in every
Centennial Society, the central figure in the Centennial preparations
and in the Centennial itself. I did not know her personally, but that
made no difference. There was no blotting out her powerful presence, she
pervaded the Centennial atmosphere. She remains in the foreground of my
Centennial memories, a tall, gaunt woman, not especially gracious,
apparently without a doubt of her right to her conspicuous position,
ready to resent the effrontery of the sceptic who challenged it had
there been a sceptic so daring, anything but popular, and yet her rule
accepted unquestioningly for no better reason than because she was the
descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and I could not help knowing that she
was his descendant, for nobody could mention her without dragging in his
name. It revolutionized my ideas of school and school books, no less
than of Philadelphia. I had learned the story of Benjamin Franklin and
the kite, just as I had learned the story of George Washington and the
cherry tree, and of General Marion and the sweet potatoes, and other
anecdotes of heroes invented to torment the young. And now here was
Franklin turning out to be not merely the hero of an anecdote that bored
every right-minded school-girl to death, but a person of such
consequence that his descendant in the third or fourth generation had
the right to lord it over Philadelphia. There was no getting away from
that any more than there was from Mrs. Gillespie herself and,
incidentally, it suggested a new reason for Biddles and Cadwalladers and
Whartons and Morrises and Norrises and Logans and Philadelphia families
with their names on the Assembly list. That they were the resplendent
creatures Philadelphia thought them was not so elementary a fact as the
shining of the sun in the heavens; they owed it to their ancestors just
as Mrs. Gillespie owed her splendour to Franklin; and an ancestor
immediately became the first necessity in Philadelphia.
[Illustration: THE DINING ROOM, STENTON]
The man who is preoccupied with his ancestors has a terrible faculty of
becoming a snob, and Philadelphians for a while concerned themselves
with little else. They devoted every hour of leisure to the study of
genealogy, they besieged the Historical Society in search of
inconsiderate ancestors who had neglected to make conspicuous figures of
themselves and so had to be hunted up, they left no stone unturned to
prove their Colonial descent. It must have been this period that my
Brother, Grant Robins, irritated with our forefathers for their mistake
in settling in Virginia half a century before there was a Philadelphia
to settle in and then making a half-way halt in Maryland, hurried down
to the Eastern Shore to get together what material he could to keep us
in countenance in the town of my Grandfather's adoption. It was soothing
to find more than one Robins among the earliest settlers of Virginia and
mixed up with Virginia affairs at an agreeably early date. But what
wouldn't I have given to see our name in a little square on one of the
early maps of the City of Philadelphia as I have since seen J.'s? And
the interest in ancestors spread, and no Englishman could ever have been
so eager to prove that he came over with the Conqueror as every American
was to show that he dated back to William Penn, or the first Virginia
Company, or the Dutch, or the Mayflower; no Order of Merit or Legion of
Honour could have conferred more glory on an American than a Colonial
Governor in the family; no aristocracy was more exclusive than the
American founded on the new societies of Colonial Dames and Sons and
Daughters of Pennsylvania and of every other State.
It was preposterous, I grant, in a country whose first article of faith
is that all men are born equal, but Americans could have stood a more
severe attack of snobbishness in those days, the prevailing attitude of
Americans at home being not much less irreverent than that of the
Innocents Abroad. In Philadelphia it was not so much irreverence as
indifference. The habit of Philadelphians to depreciate their town and
themselves, inordinate as, actually, was their pride in both, had not
been thrown off. Why they ever got into the habit remains to me and to
every Philadelphian a problem. Some think it was because the rest of the
country depreciated them; some attribute it to Quaker influence, though
how and why they cannot say; and some see in it the result of the
Philadelphia exclusiveness that reduces the social life of Philadelphia
to one small group in one small section of the town so that it is as
small as village life, and has the village love of scandal, the village
preoccupation with petty gossip, the little things at the front door
blotting out the big things beyond. A more plausible reason is that
Philadelphians were so innately sure of themselves--so sure that
Philadelphia was _the_ town and Philadelphians _the_ aristocracy of the
world--that they could afford to be indifferent. But whatever the cause,
this indifference, this depreciation, was worse than a blunder, it was a
loss in a town with a past so well worth looking into and being proud of
and taking care of.
A few Philadelphians had interested themselves in their past, otherwise
the Historical Society would not have existed, but they were
distressingly few. I can honestly say that up to the time of the
Centennial it had never entered into my mind that the past in
Philadelphia had a value for every Philadelphian and that it was every
Philadelphian's duty to help preserve any record that might survive of
it--that the State House, the old churches, the old streets where I took
my daily walks were a possession Philadelphia should do its best not to
part with--and I was such a mere re-echo of Philadelphia ideas and
prejudices that I know most Philadelphians were as ignorant and as
heedless. But almost the first effort of the new Dames and Sons and
Daughters was to protect the old architecture, the outward sign and
symbol of age and the aristocracy of age, and they made so much noise in
doing so that even I heard it, even I became conscious of a research as
keen for a past, or a genealogy in the familiar streets and the familiar
buildings as in the archives of Historical Societies.
If the Centennial had done no more for Philadelphia than to put
Philadelphians to this work, it would have done enough. But it did do
more. The pride of family, dismissed by many as pure snobbishness, awoke
the sort of patriotism that Philadelphia, with all America, was most in
need of if the real American was not to be swept away before the hordes
of aliens beginning then to invade his country. In my opinion, the
Colonial Dames, for all their follies, are doing far more to keep up the
right American spirit than the flaunting of the stars and stripes in the
alien's face and the lavishing upon him of the Government's paternal
attention. The question is how long they can avoid the pitfall of
exaggeration.
IV
If there was one thing in those days I knew less of than the past in
Philadelphia, it was the present outside of it. Of my own country my
knowledge was limited to an occasional trip to New York, an occasional
visit to Richmond and Annapolis, an occasional summer month in Cape May
and Atlantic City. Travelling is not for the poor. Rich Philadelphians
travelled more, but from no keen desire to see their native land. The
end of the journey was usually a social function in Washington or
Baltimore, in New York or Boston, upon which their presence conferred
distinction, though they would rather have dispensed with it than let it
interfere with the always more important social functions at home. Or
else the heat of summer drove them to those seashore and mountain
resorts where they could count upon being with other Philadelphians, and
the winter cold sent them in Lent to Florida, when it began to be
possible to carry all Philadelphia there with them.
[Illustration: DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH]
My knowledge of the rest of the world was more limited. I had been in
France, but when I was such a child that I remembered little of it
except the nuns in the Convent at Paris where I went to school, and the
Garden of the Tuileries I looked across to from the Hotel Meurice. Nor
had going abroad as yet been made a habit in Philadelphia. There was
nothing against the Philadelphian going who chose to and who had the
money. It defied no social law. On the contrary, it was to his social
credit, though not indispensable as the Grand Tour was to the Englishman
in the Eighteenth Century. I remember when my Grandfather followed the
correct tourist route through England, France, and Switzerland, his
children considered it an event of sufficient importance to be
commemorated by printing, for family circulation, an elaborately got up
volume of the eminently commonplace letters he had written home--a
tribute, it is due to him to add, that met with his great astonishment
and complete disapproval. I can recall my admiration for those of my
friends who made the journey and my regret that I had made it when I was
too young to get any glory out of it; also, my delight in the trumpery
little alabaster figures from Naples and carved wood from Geneva and
filigree jewellery from the Rue de Rivoli they brought me back from
their journey: the wholesale distribution of presents on his return
being the heavy tax the traveller abroad paid for the distinction of
having crossed the Atlantic--a tax, I believe, that has sensibly been
done away with since the Philadelphian's discovery of the German Bath,
the London season, and the economy of Europe as reasons for going abroad
every summer.
I was scarcely more familiar with the foreigner than with his country.
Philadelphia had Irish in plenty, as many Germans as beer saloons, or so
I gathered from the names over the saloon doors, and enough Italians to
sell it fruit and black its boots at street corners. But otherwise,
beyond a rare Chinaman with a pigtail and a rarer Englishman on tour,
the foreigner was seldom seen in Philadelphia streets or in Philadelphia
parlours. In early days Philadelphia had been the first place the
distinguished foreigner in the country made for. It was the most
important town and, for a time, the capital. But after Washington
claimed the diplomat and New York strode ahead in commerce and size and
shipping, Philadelphia was too near each for the traveller to stop on
his way between them, unless he was an actor, a lecturer, or somebody
who could make money out of Philadelphia.
I feel sorry for the sophisticated young Philadelphian of to-day who
cannot know the emotion that was mine when, of a sudden, the Centennial
dumped down "abroad" right into Philadelphia, and the foreigner was
rampant. The modern youth saunters into a World's Fair as casually as
into a Market Street or Sixth Avenue Department Store, but never had the
monotony of my life been broken by an experience so extraordinary as
when the easy-going street-car carried me out of my world of red brick
into the heart of England, and France, and Germany, and Italy, and
Spain, and China, and Japan, where I rubbed elbows with yellow Orientals
in brilliant silks, and with soldiers in amazing uniforms--I who had
seen our sober United States soldiers only on parade--and with people
who, if they wore ordinary clothes, spoke all the languages under the
sun. It was extraordinary even to meet so many Americans who were not
Philadelphians, all talking American with to me a foreign accent,
extraordinary to see such familiar things as china, glass, silks,
stuffs, furniture, carpets, transformed into the unfamiliar, unlike
anything I had ever seen in Chestnut Street windows or on Chestnut
Street counters, so extraordinary that the most insignificant details
magnified themselves into miracles, to the mere froth on top of the cup
of Vienna coffee, to the fatuous song of a little Frenchman in a
side-show, so that to this day, if I could turn a tune, I could still
sing the "Ah! Ah! Nicolas!" of its foolish refrain.
V
Travelling, I should have seen all the Centennial had to show and a
thousand times more, but slowly and by degrees, losing the sense of the
miraculous with each new marvel. The Centennial came as one
comprehensive revelation--overwhelming evidence that the Philadelphia
way was not the only way. And this I think was a good thing for me, just
as for Philadelphia it was a healthy stimulus. But the Centennial did
not give me a new belief in exchange for the old; it did nothing to
alter my life, nothing to turn my sluggish ambition into active
channels. And big as it was, it was not as big as Philadelphia thought.
I do believe that Philadelphians who had helped to make it the splendid
success it proved, looked upon it as no less epoch-making than the
Declaration of Independence which it commemorated. But epoch-making as
it unquestionably was, it was not so epoch-making as all that. For some
years Philadelphians had a way of saying "before" and "after" the
Centennial, much as Southerners used to talk of "before" and "after" the
War: with the difference that for Philadelphians all the good dated
from "after." But manufacturing and commerce had been heard of "before."
Cramp's shipyard did not wait for its first commission until the
Centennial, neither did Baldwin's Locomotive Works, nor the factories in
Kensington; Philadelphia was not so dead commercially that it was out of
mere compliment important railroads made it the chief centre on their
route. All large International Expositions are bound to do good by the
increased knowledge that comes with them of what the world is producing
and by the incentive this knowledge is to competition, and as the
Centennial was the first held in America it probably accomplished more
for the country than those that followed. But I do not have to be an
authority on manufacture and commerce to see that they flourished before
the Centennial; I have learned enough about art since to know that its
existence was not first revealed to Philadelphia by the Centennial. The
Exhibition had an influence on art which I am far from undervaluing. Its
galleries of paintings and prints, drawings and sculptures, were an aid
in innumerable ways to artists and students who previously had had no
facilities for seeing a representative collection. It threw light on the
arts of design for the manufacturer. But we knew a thing or two about
beauty down in Philadelphia before 1876, though beauty was a subject to
which we had ceased to pay much attention, and from the Centennial we
borrowed too many tastes and standards that did not belong to us. It
set Philadelphia talking an appalling lot of rubbish about art, and the
new affectation of interest was more deplorable than the old frank
indifference.
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET
STATION]
I was as ignorant of art as the child unborn, but not more ignorant than
the average Philadelphian. The old obligatory visits to the Academy had
made but a fleeting impression and I never repeated them when the
obligation rested solely with me. I had never met an artist, never been
in a studio. The result was that the Art Galleries at the Centennial
left me as blank and bewildered as the Hall of Machinery. Of all the
paintings, the one I remembered was Luke Fildes's picture of a milkmaid
which I could not forget because, in a glaring, plush-framed
chromo-lithograph, it reappeared promptly in Philadelphia dining-and
bedrooms, the most popular picture of the Centennial--a popularity in
which I can discern no signs of grace. Nor can I discern them in the
Eastlake craze, in the sacrifice of reps and rosewood to Morris and of
Berlin work to crewels, in the outbreak of spinning-wheels and
milking-stools and cat's tails and Japanese fans in the old simple,
dignified Philadelphia parlour; in the nightmare of wall-papers with
dadoes going half-way up the wall and friezes coming halfway down, and
every square inch crammed full of pattern; in the pretence and excess of
decoration that made the early Victorian ornament, we had all begun to
abuse, a delight to the eye in its innocent unpretentiousness. And if to
the Centennial we owe the multiplication of our art schools, how many
more artists have come out of them, how much more work that counts?
However, the good done by the Centennial is not to be sought in the
solid profits and losses that can be weighed in a practical balance. It
went deeper. Philadelphia was the better for being impressed with the
reason of its own importance which it had taken on faith, and for being
reminded that the world outside of Philadelphia was not a howling
wilderness. I, individually, gained by the widening of my horizon and
the stirring of my interest. But the Centennial did not teach me how to
think about, or use, what I had learned from it. When it was at an end,
I returned placidly to my occupation of doing nothing.