She is the only city whose lovers live always in a mood of wonder and
expectancy. There are others where one may sink peacefully, contentedly
into the life of the town, affectionate and understanding of its ways.
But she, the woman city, who is bold enough to say he understands her?
The secret of her thrilling and inscrutable appeal has never been told.
How could it be? She has always been so much greater than any one who
has lived with her. (Shall we mention Walt Whitman as the only possible
exception? O. Henry came very near to her, but did he not melodramatize
her a little, sometimes cheapen her by his epigrammatic appraisal, fit
her too neatly into his plot? Kipling seemed to see her only as the
brutal, heedless wanton.) Truly the magic of her spell can never be
exacted. She changes too rapidly, day by day. Realism, as they call it,
can never catch the boundaries of her pearly beauty. She needs a mystic.
No city so challenges and debilitates the imagination. Here, where
wonder is a daily companion, desire to tell her our ecstasy becomes at
last only a faint pain in the mind. If you would mute a poet's lyre,
put him on a ferry from Jersey City some silver April morning; or send
him aboard at Liberty Street in an October dusk. Poor soul, his mind
will buzz (for years to come) after adequate speech to tell those cliffs
and scarps, amethyst and lilac in the mingled light; the clear topaz
chequer of window panes; the dull bluish olive of the river, streaked
and crinkled with the churn of the screw! Many a poet has come to her in
the wooing passion. Give him six months, he is merely her Platonist. He
lives content with placid companionship. Where are his adjectives, his
verbs? That inward knot of amazement, what speech can unravel it?
Her air, when it is typical, is light, dry, cool. It is pale, it is
faintly tinctured with pearl and opal. Heaven is unbelievably remote;
the city itself daring so high, heaven lifts in a cautious remove. Light
and shadow are fantastically banded, striped, and patchworked among her
cavern streets; a cool, deep gloom is cut across with fierce jags and
blinks of brightness. She smiles upon man who takes his ease in her
colossal companionship. Her clean soaring perpendiculars call the eye
upward. One wanders as a botanist in a tropical forest. That great
smooth groinery of the Pennsylvania Station train shed: is it not the
arching fronds of iron palm trees? Oh, to be a botanist of this vivid
jungle, spread all about one, anatomist of the ribs and veins that run
from the great backbone of Broadway!
To love her, one thinks, is to love one's fellows; each of them having
some unknown share in her loveliness. Any one of her streets would be
the study and delight of a lifetime. To speak at random, we think of
that little world of brightness and sound bourgeois cheer that spreads
around the homely Verdi statue at Seventy-third Street. We have a
faithful affection for that neighbourhood, for reasons of our own.
Within a radius, thereabouts, of a quarter-mile each way, we could live
a year and learn new matters every day. They call us a hustling folk.
Observe the tranquil afternoon light in those brownstone byways. Pass
along leisurely Amsterdam Avenue, the region of small and genial shops,
Amsterdam Avenue of the many laundries. See the children trooping
upstairs to their own room at the St. Agnes branch of the Public
Library. See the taxi drivers, sitting in their cars alongside the Verdi
grass plot (a rural breath of new-mown turf sweetening the warm, crisp
air) and smoking pipes. Every one of them is to us as fascinating as a
detective story. What a hand they have had in ten thousand romances. At
this very moment, what quaint and many-stranded destinies may hail them
and drive off? But there they sit, placid enough, with a pipe and the
afternoon paper. The light, fluttering dresses of enigmatic fair ones
pass gayly on the pavement. Traffic flows, divides, and flows on, a
sparkling river. Here is that mystery, a human being, buying a cigar.
Here is another mystery asking for a glass of frosted chocolate. Why is
it that we cannot accost that tempting riddle and ask him to give us an
accurate precis of his life to date? And that red-haired burly sage, he
who used to bake the bran muffins in the little lunchroom near by, and
who lent us his Robby Burns one night--what has become of him?
So she teases us, so she allures. Sometimes, on the L, as one passes
along that winding channel where the walls and windows come so close,
there is a felicitous sense of being immersed, surrounded, drowned in a
great, generous ocean of humanity. It is a fine feeling. All life
presses around one, the throb and the problem are close, are close. Who
could be weary, who could be at odds with life, in such an embrace of
destiny? The great tall sides of buildings fly open, the human hive is
there, beautiful and arduous beyond belief. Here is our worship and here
our lasting joy, here is our immortality of encouragement. Yes, perhaps
O. Henry did say the secret after all: "He saw no longer a rabble, but
his brothers seeking the ideal."