United States. There is certainly no more cultivated centre in the
country, and yet the letter _r_ is as badly maltreated by the Boston
scholar as by the veriest cockney. To the ear of Boston _centre_ has
precisely the same sound as the name of the heroine of Wagner's
"Flying Dutchman," and its most cultivated graduates speak of Herbert
Spenc_ah_'s Data_r_ of Ethics. The critical programmes of the Symphony
Concerts are prepared by one of the ablest of living musical critics,
and are scholarly almost to excess; yet, as the observant Swiss
critic, M. Wagnière, has pointed out, their refined and subtle text
has to endure the immediate juxtaposition of the advertisements of
tea-rooms and glove-sellers. Boston has the deserved reputation of
being one of the best-governed cities in America, yet some of its
important streets seldom see a municipal watering-cart, dust flies in
clouds both summer and winter, and myriads of life-endangering
bicycles shoot through its thoroughfares at night without lamps. The
Boston matron holds up her hands in sanctified horror at the freedom
of Western manners, and yet it is a local saying, founded on a solid
basis of fact, that Kenney & Clark (a well-known firm of livery-stable
keepers) are the only chaperon that a Boston girl needs in going to or
from a ball. The Bostonians are not the least intelligent of mortals,
and yet I know no other city in America which is content with such an
anomalous system of hack hire, where no reduction in rate is made for
the number of persons. One person may drive in a comfortable two-horse
brougham to any point within Boston proper for 50 cents; two persons
pay $1, three persons $1.50, and so on. My advice to a quartette of
travellers visiting Boston is to hire _four_ carriages at once and _go
in a procession_, until they find a liveryman who sees the point.
One acute observer has pointed out that it is the men of New York who
grow haggard, wrinkled, anxious-looking, and prematurely old in their
desperate efforts to provide diamonds and balls and Worth costumes and
trips to Europe for their debonair, handsome, easy-going, and
well-nourished spouses and daughters; while the men of Boston are
"jolly dogs, who make money by legitimate trade instead of wild
speculation, and show it in their countenances, illumined with the
light of good cigars and champagne and other little luxuries," while
their womankind are constantly worried by the New England conscience,
and constantly creating anxieties for themselves where none exist.
There is indeed a large amount of truth in this description, if
allowance be made for pardonable exaggeration. It is among the women
of Boston that one finds its traditional mantle of intellectuality
worn most universally, and it is among the women of New York that one
finds the most characteristic displays of love of pleasure and social
triumphs. It is, perhaps, not a mere accident that the daughters of
Boston's millionaires seem to marry their fellow-citizens rather than
foreign noblemen. "None of _their_ money goes to gild rococo
coronets."
I have a good deal of sympathy with a Canadian friend who exclaimed:
"Oh, Boston! I don't include _Boston_ when I speak of the United
States." Max O'Rell has similarly noted that if you wish to hear
severe criticism of America you have only to go to Boston. "_Là on
loue Boston et Angleterre, et l'on débine l'Amérique à dire
d'experts._" It would be a mistake, however, to infer that Boston is
not truly American, or that it devotes itself to any voluntary
imitation of England. In a very deep sense Boston is one of the most
intensely American cities in the Union; it represents, perhaps, the
finest development of many of the most characteristic ideals of
Americanism. Its resemblances to England seem to be due to the simple
fact that like causes produce like results. The original English stock
by which Boston was founded has remained less mixed here than,
perhaps, in any other city of America; and the differences between the
descendants of the Puritans who emigrated and the descendants of those
of them who remained at home are not complicated by a material
infusion of alien blood in either case. The independence of the
original settlers, their hatred of coercion and tyranny, have
naturally grown with two centuries and a half of democracy; even the
municipal administration has not been wholly captured by the Irish
voter. The Bostonian has, to a very appreciable extent, solved the
problem of combining the virtues of democracy with the manners of
aristocracy; and I know not where you will find a better type of the
American than the Boston gentleman: patriotic with enlightened
patriotism; finely mannered even to the class immediately below his
own; energetic, but not a slave to the pursuit of wealth; liberal in
his religion, but with something of the Puritan conscience still lying
_perdu_ beneath his universalism; distributing his leisure between
art, literature, and outdoor occupations; a little cool in his initial
manner to strangers, but warmly hospitable when his confidence in your
merit is satisfied. We, in England, may well feel proud that the blood
which flows in the veins of the ideal Bostonian is as distinctly and
as truly English as that of our own Gladstones and Morleys, our
Brownings and our Tennysons.
Prof. Hugo Münsterberg, of Berlin, writes thus of Boston and Chicago:
"_Ja, Boston ist die Hauptstadt jenes jungen, liebenswerthen,
idealistischen Amerikas und wird es bleiben; Chicago dagegen ist die
Hochburg der alten protzigen amerikanischen Dollarsucht, und die
Weltausstellung schliesslich ist überhaupt nicht Amerika, sondern
chicagosirtes Europa._" Whatever may be thought of the first part of
this judgment, the second member of it seems to me rather unfair to
Chicago and emphatically so as regards the Chicago exhibition.
Since 1893 Chicago ought never to be mentioned as Porkopolis without a
simultaneous reference to the fact that it was also the creator of the
White City, with its Court of Honour, perhaps the most flawless and
fairy-like creation, on a large scale, of man's invention. We expected
that America would produce the largest, most costly, and most gorgeous
of all international exhibitions; but who expected that she would
produce anything so inexpressibly poetic, chaste, and restrained, such
an absolutely refined and soul-satisfying picture, as the Court of
Honour, with its lagoon and gondolas, its white marble steps and
balustrades, its varied yet harmonious buildings, its colonnaded vista
of the great lake, its impressive fountain, its fairy-like outlining
after dark by the gems of electricity, its spacious and well-modulated
proportions which made the largest crowd in it but an unobtrusive
detail, its air of spontaneity and inevitableness which suggested
nature itself, rather than art? No other scene of man's creation
seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honour. Venice, Naples, Rome,
Florence, Edinburgh, Athens, Constantinople, each in its way is lovely
indeed; but in each view of each of these there is some jarring
feature, something that we have to _ignore_ in order to thoroughly
lose ourselves in the beauty of the scene. The Court of Honour was
practically blameless; the æsthetic sense of the beholder was as fully
and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting
or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense
of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.
The glamour of old association that illumines Athens or Venice was in
a way compensated by our deep impression of the pathetic
transitoriness of the dream of beauty before us, and by the revelation
it afforded of the soul of a great nation. For it will to all time
remain impossibly ridiculous to speak of a country or a city as wholly
given over to the worship of Mammon which almost involuntarily gave
birth to this ethereal emanation of pure and uneconomic beauty.
Undoubtedly there are few things more dismal than the sunless cañons
which in Chicago are called streets; and the luckless being who is
concerned there with retail trade is condemned to pass the greater
part of his life in unrelieved ugliness. Things, however, are rather
better in the "office" quarter; and he who is ready to admit that
exigency of site gives some excuse for "elevator architecture" will
find a good deal to interest him in its practice at Chicago. Indeed,
no one can fail to wonder at the marvellous skill of architectural
engineering which can run up a building of twenty stories, the walls
of which are merely a veneer or curtain. Few will cavil at the
handsome and comfortable equipment of the best interiors; but, given
the necessity of their existence, the wide-minded lover of art will
find something to reward his attention even in their exteriors. In
many instances their architects have succeeded admirably in steering a
middle course between the ornate style of a palace on the one hand
and the packing case with windows on the other; and the observer might
unreservedly admire the general effect were it not for the crick in
his neck that reminds him most forcibly that he cannot get far enough
away for a proper estimate of the proportions. Any city might feel
proud to count amid its commercial architecture such features as the
entrance of the Phenix Building, the office of the American Express
Company, and the monumental Field Building, by Richardson, with what
Mr. Schuyler calls its grim utilitarianism of expression; and the same
praise might, perhaps, be extended to the Auditorium, the Owings
Building, the Rookery, and some others. In non-commercial architecture
Chicago may point with some pride to its City Hall, its University,
its libraries, the admirable Chicago Club (the old Art Institute), and
the new Art Institute on the verge of Lake Michigan. Of its churches
the less said the better; their architecture, regarded as a studied
insult to religion, would go far to justify the highly uncomplimentary
epithet Mr. Stead applied to Chicago.
In some respects Chicago deserves the name City of Contrasts, just as
the United States is the Land of Contrasts; and in no way is this more
marked than in the difference between its business and its residential
quarters. In the one--height, narrowness, noise, monotony, dirt,
sordid squalor, pretentiousness; in the other--light, space,
moderation, homelikeness. The houses in the Lake Shore Drive, the
Michigan Boulevard, or the Drexel Boulevard are as varied in style as
the brown-stone mansions of New York are monotonous; they face on
parks or are surrounded with gardens of their own; they are seldom
ostentatiously large; they suggest comfort, but not offensive
affluence; they make credible the possession of some individuality of
taste on the part of their owners. The number of massive round
openings, the strong rusticated masonry, the open loggie, the absence
of mouldings, and the red-tiled roofs suggest to the cognoscenti that
Mr. H.H. Richardson's spirit was the one which brooded most
efficaciously over the domestic architecture of Chicago. The two
houses I saw that were designed by Mr. Richardson himself are
undoubtedly not so satisfactory as some of his public buildings, but
they had at least the merit of interest and originality; some of the
numerous imitations were by no means successful.
The parks of Chicago are both large and beautiful. They contain not a
few very creditable pieces of sculpture, among which Mr. St. Gaudens'
statue of Lincoln is conspicuous as a wonderful triumph of artistic
genius over unpromising material. The show of flowers in the parks is
not easily paralleled in public domains elsewhere. Of these, rather
than of its stockyards and its lightning rapidity in pig-sticking,
will the visitor who wishes to think well of Chicago carry off a
mental picture.
The man who has stood on Inspiration Point above Oakland and has
watched the lights of San Francisco gleaming across its noble bay, or
who has gazed down on the Golden Gate from the heights of the
Presidio, must have an exceptionally rich gallery of memory if he does
not feel that he has added to its treasures one of the most entrancing
city views he has ever witnessed. The situation of San Francisco is
indeed that of an empress among cities. Piled tier above tier on the
hilly knob at the north end of a long peninsula, it looks down on the
one side over the roomy waters of San Francisco Bay (fifty miles long
and ten miles wide), backed by the ridge of the Coast Range, while in
the other direction it is reaching out across the peninsula, here six
miles wide, to the placid expanse of the Pacific Ocean. On the north
the peninsula ends abruptly in precipitous cliffs some hundreds of
feet high, while a similar peninsula, stretching southwards, faces it
in a similar massive promontory, separated by a scant mile of water.
This is the famous Golden Gate, the superb gateway leading from the
ocean to the shelters of the bay. To the south the eye loses itself
among the fertile valleys of corn and fruit stretching away toward the
Mexican frontier.
When we have once sated ourselves with the general effect, there still
remains a number of details, picturesque, interesting, or quaint.
There is the Golden Gate Park, the cypresses and eucalypti at one end
of which testify to the balminess of the climate, while the sand-dunes
at its other end show the original condition of the whole surface of
the peninsula, and add to our admiration of nature a sense of
respectful awe for the transforming energy of man. Beyond Golden Gate
Park we reach Sutro Heights, another desert that has been made to
blossom like the rose. Here we look out over the Pacific to the
musically named Farralone Islands, thirty miles to the west. Then we
descend for luncheon to the Cliff House below, and watch the uncouth
gambols of hundreds of fat sea-lions (Spanish _lobos marinos_), which,
strictly protected from the rifle or harpoon, swim, and plunge, and
bark unconcernedly within a stone's throw of the observer. The largest
of these animals are fifteen feet long and weigh about a ton; and it
is said that certain individuals, recognisable by some peculiarity,
are known to have frequented the rocks for many years. On our way back
to the lower part of the city we use one of the cable-cars crawling up
and down the steep inclines like flies on a window-pane; and we find,
if the long polished seat of the car be otherwise unoccupied, that we
have positive difficulty in preventing ourselves slipping down from
one end of the car to the other. By this time the strong afternoon
wind[29] has set in from the sea, and we notice with surprise that the
seasoned Friscans, still clad in the muslins and linens that seemed
suitable enough at high noon, seek by preference the open seats of the
locomotive car, while we, puny visitors, turn up our coat-collars and
flee to the shelter of the "trailer" or covered car. As we come over
"Nob Hill" we take in the size of the houses of the Californian
millionaires, note that they are of wood (on account of the
earthquakes?), and bemoan the misdirected efforts of their architects,
who, instead of availing themselves of the unique chance of producing
monuments of characteristically developed timber architecture, have
known no better than to slavishly imitate the incongruous features of
stone houses in the style of the Renaissance. Indeed, we shall feel
that San Francisco is badly off for fine buildings of all and every
kind. If daylight still allows we may visit the Mission Dolores, one
of the interesting old Spanish foundations that form the origin of so
many places in California, and if we are historically inclined we may
inspect the old Spanish grants in the Surveyor-General's office. Those
of us whose tastes are modern and literary may find our account in
identifying some of the places in R.L. Stevenson's "Ebb Tide," and it
will go hard with us if we do not also meet a few of his characters
amid the cosmopolitan crowd in the streets or on the wharves. At night
we may visit China without the trouble of a voyage, and perambulate a
city of 25,000 Celestials under the safe guidance of an Irish-accented
detective. So often have the features of Chinatown been described--its
incense-scented joss-houses, its interminable stage-plays, its
opium-joints, its drug-stores with their extraordinary remedies, its
curiosity shops, and its restaurants--that no repetition need be
attempted here. We leave it with a sense of the curious incongruity
which allows this colony of Orientals to live in the most wide-awake
of western countries with an apparently almost total neglect of such
sanitary observances as are held indispensable in all other modern
municipalities. It is certain that no more horrible sight could be
seen in the extreme East than the so-called "Hermit of Chinatown," an
insane devotee who has lived for years crouched in a miserable little
outhouse, subsisting on the offerings of the charitable, and degraded
almost beyond the pale of humanity by his unbroken silence, his blank
immobility, and his neglect of all the decencies of life. And this is
an American resident, if not an American citizen! If the reader is as
lucky as the writer, he may wind up the day with a smart shock of
earthquake; and if he is equally sleepy and unintelligent (which
Heaven forefend!), he may miss its keen relish by drowsily wondering
what on earth they mean by moving that _very_ heavy grand piano
overhead at that time of night.
"Two-thirds of them come here to die, and they can't do it." This was
said by the famous Mr. Barnum about Colorado Springs; and the active
life and cheerful manners of the condemned invalids who flourish in
this charming little city go far to confirm the truth concealed
beneath the jest. The land has insensibly sloped upwards since the
traveller left the Mississippi behind him, and he now finds himself in
a flowery prairie 6,000 feet above the sea level, while close by one
of the finest sections of the Rocky Mountains rears its snowy peaks to
a height of 6,000 to 8,000 feet more. The climate resembles that of
Davos, and like it is preëminently suited for all predisposed to or
already affected with consumption; but Colorado enjoys more sunshine
than its Swiss rival, and has no disagreeable period of melting snow.
The town is sheltered by the foothills, except to the southeast, where
it lies open to the great plains; and, being situated where they meet
the mountains, it enjoys the openness and free supply of fresh air of
the seashore, without its dampness. The name is somewhat of a
misnomer, as the nearest springs are those of Manitou, about five
miles to the north.
Colorado Springs may be summed up as an oasis of Eastern civilisation
and finish in an environment of Western rawness and enterprise. It has
been described as "a charming big village, like the well-laid-out
suburb of some large Eastern city." Its wide, tree-shaded streets are
kept in excellent order. There is a refreshing absence of those "loose
ends" of a new civilisation which even the largest of the Western
cities are too apt to show. No manufactures are carried on, and no
"saloons" are permitted. The inhabitants consist very largely of
educated and refined people from the Eastern States and England, whose
health does not allow them to live in their damper native climes. The
tone of the place is a refreshing blend of the civilisation of the
East and the unconventionalism of the West. Perhaps there is no
pleasanter example of extreme social democracy. The young man of the
East, unprovided with a private income, finds no scope here for his
specially trained capacities, and is glad to turn an honest penny and
occupy his time with anything he can get. Thus there are gentlemen in
the conventional sense of the word among many of the so-called humbler
callings, and one may rub shoulders at the charming little clubs with
an Oxford-bred livery-stable keeper or a Harvard graduate who has
turned his energies toward the selling of milk. Few visitors to
Colorado Springs will fail to carry away a grateful and pleasant
impression of the English doctor who has found vigorous life and a
prosperous career in the place of exile to which his health condemned
him in early manhood, and who has repaid the place for its gift of
vitality by the most intelligent and effective championship of its
advantages. These latter include an excellent hotel and a flourishing
college for delicate girls and boys.
Denver, a near neighbour of Colorado Springs (if we speak _more
Americano_), is an excellent example, both in theory and practice, of
the confident expectation of growth with which new American cities are
founded. The necessary public buildings are not huddled together as a
nucleus from which the municipal infant may grow outwards; but a large
and generous view is taken of the possibilities of expansion. Events
do not always justify this sanguine spirit of forethought. The capitol
at Washington still turns its back on the city of which it was to be
the centre as well as the crown. In a great number of cases, however,
hope and fact eventually meet together. The capitol of Bismarck, chief
town of North Dakota, was founded in 1883, nearly a mile from the
city, on a rising site in the midst of the prairie. It has already
been reached by the advancing tide of houses, and will doubtless, in
no long time, occupy a conveniently central situation. Denver is an
equally conspicuous instance of the same tendency. The changes that
took place in that city between the date of my visit to it and the
reading of the proof-sheets of "Baedeker's United States" a year or so
later demanded an almost entire rewriting of the description.
Doubtless it has altered at least as much since then, and very likely
the one or two slightly critical remarks of the handbook of 1893 are
already grossly libellous. Denver quadrupled its population between
1880 and 1890. The value of its manufactures and of the precious ores
smelted here reaches a fabulous amount of millions of dollars. The
usual proportion of "million" and "two million dollar buildings" have
been erected. Many of the principal streets are (most wonderful of
all!) excellently paved and kept reasonably clean. But the crowning
glory of Denver for every intelligent traveller is its magnificent
view of the Rocky Mountains, which are seen to the West in an unbroken
line of at least one hundred and fifty miles. Though forty miles
distant, they look, owing to the purity of the atmosphere, as if they
were within a walk of two or three hours. Denver is fond of calling
herself the "Queen City of the Plains," and few will grudge the
epithet queenly if it is applied to the possession of this matchless
outlook on the grandest manifestations of nature. If the Denver
citizen brags more of his State Capitol, his Metropole Hotel (no
accent, please!), and his smelting works than of his snow-piled
mountains and abysmal cañons, he only follows a natural human instinct
in estimating most highly that which has cost him most trouble.