But these stylish turnouts form only a part of the spectacle in the
Park driveways, though they form, perhaps, the larger part. Bicyclers
weave their dangerous and devious way everywhere through the roads,
and seem to be forbidden the bridle-paths, where from point to point
you catch a glimpse of the riders. There are boys and girls in
village carts, the happiest of all the people you see; and there are
cheap-looking buggies, like those you meet in the country, with each
a young man and young girl in them, as if they had come in from some
remote suburb; turnouts shabbier yet, with poor old horses, poke about
with some elderly pair, like a farmer and his wife. There are family
carryalls, with friendly-looking families, old and young, getting the
good of the Park together in a long, leisurely jog; and open buggies
with yellow wheels and raffish men in them behind their widespread
trotters; or with some sharp-faced young fellow getting all the speed
out of a lively span that the mounted policemen, stationed at intervals
along the driveways, will allow. The finer vehicles are of all types,
patterned like everything else that is fine in America, upon something
fine in Europe; but just now a very high-backed phaeton appears to
be most in favor; and in fact I get a great deal of pleasure out of
these myself, as I do not have to sit stiffly up in them. They make me
think somehow of those eighteenth-century English novels, of the times
when young ladies like Evelina drove out in phaetons, and were the
passionate pursuit of Lord Orvilles and Sir Clement Willoughbys.
How far do the New Yorkers publicly carry their travesty of the
European aristocratic life? I should say, from what I have seen of
the driving in the Park, it does not err on the side of excess. The
equipages, when they are fine, are rather simple; and the liveries
are such as express a proprietary grandeur in coat-buttons, silver or
gilt, and in a darker or lighter drab of the cloth the servants wear;
they are often in brown or dark green. Now and then you see the tightly
cased legs and top-boots and cockaded hat of a groom, but this is
oftenest on a four-in-hand coach, or the rumble of a tandem cart; the
soul of the free-born republican is rarely bowed before it on the box
of a family carriage. I have seen nothing like an attempt at family
colors in the trappings of the coachman and horses.
I should say that the imitation was quite within the bounds of good
taste. The bad taste is in the wish to imitate Europe at all; but with
the abundance of money, the imitation is simply inevitable. There
is no American life for wealth; there is no native formula for the
expression of social superiority; because America means equality if it
means anything, in the last analysis. But in all this show on the Park
driveways, you get no effect so vivid as the effect of sterility in
that liberty without equality which seems to satisfy us Americans. A
man may come into the Park with any sort of vehicle, so that it is not
for the carriage of merchandise, and he is free to spoil what might
be a fine effect with the intrusion of whatever squalor of turnout
he will. He has as much right there as any one, but the right to be
shabby in the presence of people who are fine is not one that I should
envy him. I do not think that he can be comfortable in it, for the
superiority around him puts him to shame, as it puts the poor man to
shame at every turn in life, though some people, with an impudence
that is pitiable, will tell you that it does not put him to shame;
that he feels himself as good as any one. We are always talking about
human nature and what it is, and what it is not; but we try in our
blind worship of inequality to refuse the first and simplest knowledge
of human nature, which testifies of itself in every throb of our own
hearts, as we try even to refuse a knowledge of the Divine nature,
and attribute to the Father of all a design in the injustice we have
ourselves created.
To me the lesson of Central Park is that where it is used in the spirit
of fraternity and equality, the pleasure in it is pure and fine, and
that its frequenters have for the moment a hint of the beauty which
might be perpetually in their lives; but where it is invaded by the
motives of the strife that raves all round it in the city outside, its
joys are fouled with contempt and envy, the worst passions that tear
the human heart. Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred, have never
seen a man in livery; they have never dreamed of such a display as
this in the Park. Yet with our conditions, I fear that at sight of it
ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred would lust for their turn
of the wheel, their throw of the dice, so that they might succeed to a
place in it, and flaunt their luxury in the face of poverty, and abash
humility with their pride.