Who would not like to have been an Athenian of the time of Pericles?
Yet who would have liked to be one? The Periclesian Athenian whom we
would all like to have been—provided that we could be also Rooseveltian
Americans—took little thought, doubtless, of “the glory that was
Greece.” He considered himself singularly unfortunate to live in so
prosaic an age. Ah, if he could only have been born an Assyrian in
the golden prime of good King Assurbanipal, before the invention of
such hideous commonplaces as mathematics, oratory, navigation (with
its flaring pharos on every headland), its bad poets, its Pan and the
peplum!
A picturesque period is always remote in time; a picturesque land,
in distance. It is of the essence of the picturesque that it be
unfamiliar. Look at the suave Mexican _caballero_ with his
silvered _sombrero_, his silken sash, embroidered jacket fearfully
and wonderfully bebraided, his ornate footgear. How he shines in the
light of his uncommon identity!—how dull we look, how odious in the
comparison! Can it be possible that this glorious creation envies
us the engaging simplicity of our habiliments and the charm of our
unstudied incivility? And does he execute a rapture over the title
“Mister” and the soft, musical vocables of the name “John Henry Smith”?
Who would care to lose his life in ascending White Mountain by a new
trail? But Mont Blanc—that is different.
Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
They crowned him long ago,
but be sure it was no Frenchman that did the crowning—not with such
a name as that! And if the exigencies of the literary situation had
compelled Coleridge to think of him in the vernacular he would never
have stood in the valley of Chamouni asking him who sank his sunless
pillars deep in earth. “White Mountain” is well enough in its way if
one think only of its color; but there is the disquieting possibility
that it was named in honor of its discoverer (Ezekiel White, of
Podunk) like the eminences that “stand dressed in living green” down in
New Hampshire.
Call Capri “Goat Island” and you class it with an abomination of that
name in the harbor of San Francisco. To the Neapolitan looking
Across the charmed bay
Whose blue waves keep, with Capri’s sunny fountains,
Perpetual holiday
it is just Goat Island, and it is nothing more. The sunny fountains and
the famous sea-caverns do not interest him. They are possibly fine, but
indubitably familiar.
All this has perhaps something to do with contentment; it may go a
short way toward making us willing to be alive. We hear much from the
writer-folk about the horrors of this commercial age, the dull monotony
of modern life, the depressing daily contact with the things we loathe,
to wit, railways, steamships, telephones, electric street-cars and
other prosaic things which, when we are not boasting of them, we are
reviling. We shudder to think of the railway from Joppa to Jerusalem
(if there is one) and sigh for the good old days of the camel—even as
we sigh for those of the stage-coach, whereby the traveler met with
many romantic adventures in lonely roads and at wayside inns. Well,
as to all that, it is still possible to renounce one’s purse to a
“road agent” between Squaw Gulch and Ginger Gap if one wish to, and
“hold-ups” are not altogether unknown to those who in default of the
stage-coach are compelled to travel by express trains.
Is any spectacle really more interesting than a railway train in
motion? Why, even the stolidest laborer in the field, or the most
_blasé_ switchman off duty, takes a moment off to stare at it.
By night, with its dazzling headlight, its engine eating fire and
breathing steam and smoke, its flashes of red light upon the trees as
its furnace doors are opened and closed, its long line of gleaming
windows, the roar and clang of its progress—not in the world is
anything more fascinating, more artistic nor, but for its familiarity,
more picturesque.
It is so all round: the Atlantic liner is a nobler sight than the
clipper ship of our fathers, as that was a nobler sight than the carvel
of _their_ fathers, and that than the Roman trireme—each in its
turn lamented by solemn protagonists of “the days that are no more” and
might advantageously never have been. How the intellectual successors
of these lugubrious persons will envy their dead predecessors in the
days that are to come! As they go careering through the sky in their
airships they will blow apart the clouds with sighs of regret for the
golden age of the express train, the trolley car and the automobile.
While penetrating the ocean between the German port of Liverpool and
the Japanese port of New York they will read with avid interest quaint
old chronicles relating to steam-driven vessels that floated on the
surface and had many a merry bout with wind and wave. Immersed in
waters all aglow with artificial light and color, passing in silence
and security above charming landscapes of the sea, and among
The wide-faced, infamous monsters of the deep,
they will deplore their hard lot in living in so prosaic an age, “even
as you and I.”
The truth of it all is that we of to-day are favored beyond the power
of speech to express in having been born in so fascinating and
romantic a period. Not in literature, not in art, but in those things
that touch the interest and hold the attention of all classes alike,
the last century was as superior to all those that went before as
a bird of paradise is superior in beauty and interest to a slug of
the field. Science and invention have made our world a spectacular
extravaganza, a dream of delight to the senses and the mind. Man has
employment for all his eyes and all his ears. Yet always he throws a
longing look backward to the barbarism to which eventually he will
return.
1902.