I may be mistaken. His thoughts may never take this turn at all.
The poor are slaves of habit, they bear what they have borne, they
suffer on from generation to generation, and seem to look for nothing
different. But this is what I think for poor people in the Park, not
alone for the workman recently out of work, but for the workman so long
out of it that he has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet
now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in the light of
the autumnal leaves. That is the great trouble in New York; you cannot
anywhere get away from the misery of life. You would think that the
rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions bettered, so that
they might not be confronted at every turn by the mere loathliness of
poverty. But they likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the
rich have gone since the beginning of time. Sometimes I think that as
Shakespeare says of the living and the dead, the rich and the poor are
“but as pictures” to one another, without vital reality.
Sometimes I am glad to lose the sense of their reality, and this is why
I would rather walk in the pathways of the Park than in the streets
of the city, for the contrasts there are not so frequent, if they are
glaring still. I do get away from them now and then, for a moment or
two, and give myself wholly up to the delight of the place. It has been
treated with the artistic sense which always finds its best expression
in the service of the community, but I do not think we generally
understand this, the civic spirit is so weak in us yet; and I doubt if
the artists themselves are conscious of it, they are so rarely given
the chance to serve the community. When this chance offers, however,
it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the system of parks at
Chicago, the gardened spaces at Washington, and the Central Park in
New York. Some of the decorative features here are bad, the sculpture
is often foolish or worse, and the architecture is the outgrowth of a
mood, where it is not merely puerile. The footways have been asphalted,
and this is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place,
but the whole design, and much of the detail in the treatment of the
landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly and poetic genius. The Park is
in no wise taken away from nature, but is rendered back to her, when
all has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, breaking into
meadows, here and there, and brightened with pools and ponds lurking
among rude masses of rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy
levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, in the heart
of the city, a memory of the land as it was before the havoc of the
city began, and giving to the city-prisoned poor an image of what the
free country still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well-kept
drives and paths; and it is in these paths that I find my pleasure.
They are very simple woodland paths, but for the asphalt; though here
and there an effect of art is studied with charming felicity; and I
like to mount some steps graded in the rock at one place and come upon
a plinth supporting the bust of a poet, as I might in an old Italian
garden. But there is otherwise very little effect of gardening except
near the large fountain by the principal lake where there is some flare
of flowers on the sloping lawns. There is an excess in the viaduct,
with its sweeping stairways, and carven freestone massiveness; but it
is charming in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of
lotuses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much notice the bronze
angel atop, who seems to be holding her skirt to one side and picking
her steps, and to be rather afraid of falling into the water. There is,
in fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in the Park, which
I am glad to find in sympathy with the primeval suggestiveness of the
landscape gardening: an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the
Indians must have hunted through the wilds here before the white men
came.