THE LAND OF GLADNESS
Light-hearted, happy, basking in the sunshine, her eyes not dreamily
gazing into the past, nor avariciously peering into the future, but
dancing with the joy of today—such is California! It is not only the sun
of heaven shining upon California that makes her the garden-land of the
world, but the sun radiating from the hearts of her people. Golden she
certainly is—land of golden fruit, land of golden plenty, daughter of the
golden sun.
If you have millions and want to learn a million ways to spend them;
if you are a social climber and want to scale the Western Hemisphere’s
most polished pinnacle; if you want to become worldly, cynical, effete,
go to New York. New York is the princess of impersonality, the queen
of indifference. Your riches do not impress her; without any, you do
not exist. You can come or go, sink or swim, be brilliant, beautiful or
charming, she cares not a whit. “What new extravagance do you bring to
amuse me?” she asks, bored even before she has finished asking.
“What are you ambitious to do?” asks Chicago. “What are you trying to be?
Can I help you?”
“Welcome to the land of sunshine!” says smiling California. “If your
heart is young, then stay with me and play!”
There are plenty of reasons why they liken Santa Barbara to Nice, Cannes,
or Monte Carlo. When we arrived in our rooms at the Hotel Potter we could
hardly believe we were not on the Riviera, not merely because of the
white enamel and shadow chintz furnishings of our rooms looking out upon
the palm-bordered esplanade to the ocean just beyond, but because only in
Continental watering places do friends send—or could they possibly find
for you—bouquets of welcome like that. Against the gray wall above the
writing-table a great sheaf bouquet of the big, pale-pink roses that you
associate with France, combined with silver violet thistles, gladiolii
in a chromatic scale of creams and corals, and in such profusion that
they were standing in a tall vase on the floor. The third bouquet was of
apricot-colored roses, heliotrope and white lilies.
As a matter of fact, the Riviera bears the same resemblance to Santa
Barbara that artificial flowers bear to the real. The spirit of one is
essentially artificial, insidiously demoralizing. The spirit of the other
is the essence of naturalness, inevitably rejuvenating.
Instead of spending your every waking moment in electric-lighted
restaurants and gambling rooms, you live in the sunshine, and in the
open. Every house, nearly, has its patio or open court, and no matter
what your occupation may be, you seldom go indoors. Carrying the love
of outdoors even to concerts and theatrical performances, the owner of
a very beautiful garden has built a theater, of which the stage is a
terrace of grass, and the scenery evenly planted trees. In spite of some
of the pretentious villas, the keynote of the Pacific coast is still
naturalness. Affectations have really no place.
One afternoon at a fruit ranch, we found ourselves next to a woman who
for twenty minutes extolled the perfection of her long years of living
in Italy. With her hands affectedly clasped and gazing at the feathery
olive-trees, she exclaimed:
“Ah! that takes me so back to my beloved Sicily, and the mornings when I
used to walk along the olive groves and eat ripe olives before breakfast.”
To offer strangers olives picked from the trees is a pet joke of
Californians no less than the Italians. The uncured fruit is as bitterly
uneatable as quinine.
“Oh, do you like fresh olives?” This gleefully from the host. “Let me
pick you some!” In a few moments he returned with a fruit-laden branch.
With bated breath, everyone watched as she plucked one and—gamely, ate
it!
[Illustration: OSTRICH ROCK, MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA]
To look at the orange, lemon, walnut and olive groves out here you would
think failure in crops an impossibility. Put any kind of a little shoot
in the ground and you can almost stand beside it and wait for it to be
grown. But perhaps the land’s perfection is a proof of skilled industry
after all. At least one of the greatest of the orange-growers in the
State told us: “Come out and run a ranch for fifteen seasons and you will
find fifteen reasons why you can fail.”
Ordinarily, though, in the conversation of people here, the personal
equation is left out. Californians seldom if ever accentuate their own
share in the success of anything.
Everywhere else the enthusiastic inhabitants speak of their state and
of their city as a man speaks of his success in business, or a woman
speaks of her new home—not only with pride in the thing accomplished but
with a satisfaction that comes from their personal effort toward its
accomplishment.
The Chicagoans, I remember, for instance, in their pride in the Wheaton
Country Club, seemed to feel that their planting and building and making
a beauty spot out of a sand heap was the most admirable thing about it.
The only parallel to the attitude of the Californians that I can think of
is that of the Italians. Living in their land is merely a great privilege
that God has given them, and the beauty of it is a thing that has always
been—a thing with which mere man has had little to do.
The picture that the visitor remembers first, last and best in Santa
Barbara is of a succession of low mountain ledges capped with white,
pink, gray or terra-cotta villas, surrounded by tropical gardens and
overlooking a sapphire-colored ocean gleaming in perpetual sunlight.
Nothing in all of Italy, not on the road from Sorrento to Amalfi, not
even at Taormina in Sicily, is there any scene of land and water more
beautiful. Of the villas, most are impressive, a few are admirable,
and one, in particular, is like a fifteenth-century Italian gem of the
first water transplanted by magic, gardens and all, from the heart of
Italy. No other place has quite the atmosphere of this one—that sense of
nobleness that we have been taught to believe is made only by centuries
of mellowing on an already perfect foundation. It is not an imitation.
Everything in it is real and everything is old except the garden, which
looks the oldest of all. Perhaps, though, in a land where green things
crowd an average year’s growth into every week, it is small wonder that
an effect of centuries can be acquired in a decade.
I don’t know whether we missed them, but among all the glorious gardens
of lawns and hedges and trees, we saw scarcely any flower gardens; and
the few we saw screamed in hideous discords of magenta, scarlet and
purple. As in Pasadena, the riot of sun and color seems to make people
blind to color discord. An exception, however—the only one we saw—was
in the gardens of the Mirasol, which reminds me, by the way, that the
Mirasol Hotel is a sort of post-impressionist _ne plus ultra_, in
hotel-keeping.
To begin with, its groups of little white bungalows neatly set within
its white picket-fenced inclosure, is more like a toy village than any
possible suggestion of hotel. Each little bungalow is low and white, with
boxes of flowers under every window and a general smothered-in-vines
appearance. So much for the outside. Inside each holds several bedrooms,
one or two bathrooms, and perhaps a private sitting-room, all of them
super-modern in their furnishings, and each room looking out upon
a vista of garden that matches its own color scheme. A rose-chintz
sitting-room, for instance, looks out on a rose garden; a lavender
bedroom opens on a garden in which there are none but lavender flowers,
and a yellow one looks into a vista of yellow. All of the decoration is
rather over-stenciled and striped, but the bedroom bungalows are really
enchanting. The public rooms, dining-room, public sitting-room and
tearoom, are in a bigger house, the orange and blue interior of which
suggests nothing so much as the setting of a Bakst ballet. The walls,
curtains, table cloths, decorations, chairs, napkins and the waitresses’
aprons are all apricot orange, and the stenciling and stripes and floor
and waitresses’ dresses are blue. There is a tearoom in which gorgeous
cockatoos—live ones!—live in blaze of orange surroundings. The details
are all carefully done, most of them are effective, and certainly
unusual. For our own parts we thought the bedrooms lovely; the highly
polished indigo floor paint an inspiration, and the orange-colored table
linens amusing; but when it came to filigreed silver breast-pins glued
into the drawing-room mantel, it was the one touch too much!