Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The banker and I sat long over our supper, in the graveled court of Old Vienna, talking of these things, and enjoying a bottle of delicate Rhenish wine under the mild September moon, not quite put out of countenance by the electric lamps. The gay parties about us broke up one after another, till we were left almost alone, and the watchman in his mediaeval dress, with a halberd in one hand, and a lantern in the other, came round to call the hour for the last time. Then my friend beckoned to the waiter for the account, and while the man stood figuring it up, the banker said to me: “Well, you must come to Boston a hundred years hence, to the next Columbian Fair, and we will show you every body trundled about and fed at the public expense. I suppose that’s what you would like to see?”

  “It is what we always see in Altruria,” I answered. “I haven’t the least doubt it will be so with you in much less than a hundred years.”

  The banker was looking at the account the waiter handed him. He broke into an absent laugh, and then said to me, “I beg your pardon! You were saying?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I answered, and then, as he took out his pocket-book to pay, he laid the bill on the table, and I could not help seeing what our little supper had cost him. It was twelve dollars; and I was breathless; it seemed to me that two would have been richly enough.

  “They give you a good meal here, don’t you think?” he said. “But the worst of having dined or supped well is reflecting that if you hadn’t you could have given ten or twelve fellows, who will have to go to bed supperless, a handsome surfeit; that you could have bought twenty-five hungry men a full meal each; that you could have supplied forty-eight with plenty; that you could have relieved the famine of a hundred and twenty-four. But what is the use? If you think of these things you have no peace of your life!”

  I could not help answering, “We don’t have to think of them in Altruria.”

  “Ah, I dare say,” answered the banker, as he tossed the waiter a dollar, and we rose and strolled out into the Plaisance. “If all men were unselfish, I should agree with you that Altrurianism was best.”

  “You can’t have unselfishness till you have Altrurianism,” I returned. “You can’t put the cart before the horse.”

  “Oh, yes, we can,” he returned in his tone of banter. “We always put the cart before the horse in America, so that the horse can see where the cart is going.”

  We strolled up and down the Plaisance, where the crowd had thinned to a few stragglers like ourselves. Most of the show villages were silenced for the night. The sob of the Javanese water-wheel was hushed; even the hubbub of the Chinese theater had ceased. The Samoans slept in their stucco huts; the Bedouins were folded to slumber in their black tents. The great Ferris wheel hung motionless with its lamps like a planetary circle of fire in the sky. It was a moment that invited to musing, that made a tacit companionship precious. By an impulse to which my own feeling instantly responded, my friend passed his arm through mine.

  “Don’t let us go home at all! Let us go over and sleep in the peristyle. I have never slept in a peristyle, and I have a fancy for trying it. Now, don’t tell me you always sleep in peristyles in Altruria!”

  I answered that we did not habitually, at least, and he professed that this was some comfort to him; and then he went on to talk more seriously about the Fair, and the effect that it must have upon American civilization. He said that he hoped for an aesthetic effect from it, rather than any fresh impulse in material enterprise, which he thought the country did not need. It had inventions enough, millionaires enough, prosperity enough; the great mass of the people lived as well and travelled as swiftly as they could desire. Now what they needed was some standard of taste, and this was what the Fair City would give them. He thought that it would at once have a great influence upon architecture, and sober and refine the artists who were to house the people; and that one might expect to see everywhere a return to the simplicity and beauty of the classic forms, after so much mere wandering and maundering in design, without authority or authenticity.

  I heartily agreed with him in condemning the most that had yet been done in architecture in America, but I tried to make him observe that the simplicity of Greek architecture came out of the simplicity of Greek life, and the preference given in the Greek state to the intellectual over the industrial, to art over business. I pointed out that until there was some enlightened municipal or national control of the matter, no excellence of example could avail, but that the classicism of the Fair City would become, among a wilful and undisciplined people, a fad with the rich and a folly with the poor, and not a real taste with either class. I explained how with us the state absolutely forbade any man to aggrieve or insult the rest by the exhibition of his ignorance in the exterior of his dwelling, and how finally architecture had become a government function, and fit dwellings were provided for all by artists who approved themselves to the public criticism. I ventured so far as to say that the whole competitive world, with the exception of a few artists, had indeed lost the sense of beauty, and I even added that the Americans as a people seemed never to have had it at all.

  He was not offended, as I had feared he might be, but asked me with perfect good nature what I meant.

  “Why, I mean that the Americans came into the world too late to have inherited that influence from the antique world which was lost even in Europe, when in mediaeval times the picturesque barbarously substituted itself for the beautiful, and a feeling for the quaint grew up in place of love for the perfect.”

  “I don’t understand, quite,” he said, but I’m interested. Go on!”

  “Why,” I went on, “I have heard people rave over the beauty of the Fair City, and then go and rave over the beauty of the German village, or of Old Vienna, in the Plaisance. They were cultivated people, too; but they did not seem to know that the reproduction of a feudal castle or of a street in the taste of the middle ages, could not be beautiful, and could at the best be only picturesque. Old Vienna is no more beautiful than the Javanese village, and the German village outrivals the Samoan village only in its greater adaptability to the purposes of the painter. There is in your modern competitive world very little beauty anywhere, but there is an abundance of picturesqueness, of forms that may be reflected upon canvas, and impart the charm of their wild irregularity to all who look at the picture, though many who enjoy it there would fail of it in a study of the original. I will go so far as to say that there are points in New York, intrinsically so hideous that it makes me shudder to recall them—”

  “Don’t recall them!” he pleaded.

  “Which would be much more capable of pictorial treatment than the Fair City, here,” I continued. We had in fact got back to the Court of Honor, in the course of our talk, which I have only sketched here in the meagerest abstract. The incandescent lamps had been quenched, and the arc-lights below and the moon above flooded the place with one silver, and the absence of the crowds that had earlier thronged it, left it to a solitude indescribably solemn and sweet. In that light, it was like a ghost of the antique world witnessing a loveliness lost to modern times everywhere but in our own happy country.

  I felt that silence would have been a fitter tribute to it than any words of mine, but my companion prompted me with an eager, “Well!” and I went on.

  “This beauty that we see here is not at all picturesque. If a painter were to attempt to treat it picturesquely, he must abandon it in despair, because the charm of the picturesque is in irregularity, and the charm of the beautiful is in symmetry, in just proportion, in equality. You Americans do not see that the work of man, who is the crown of animate life, can only be beautiful as it approaches the regularity expressive of beauty in that life. Any breathing thing that wants perfect balance of form or feature is in so far ugly; it is offensive and ridiculous, just as a perfectly balanced tree or hill would be. Nature is picturesque, but what man creates should be beautiful, or else it is inferior. Since the Greeks, no people have divined this but the Altrurians, until now; and I do
not believe that you would have begun to guess at it as you certainly have here, but for the spread of our ideas among you, and I do not believe this example will have any lasting effect with you unless you become Altrurianized. The highest quality of beauty is a spiritual quality.”

  “I don’t know precisely how far I have followed you,” said my companion, who seemed struck by a novelty in truisms which are so trite with us, “but I certainly feel that there is something in what you say. You are probably right in your notion that the highest quality of beauty is a spiritual quality, and I should like very much to know what you think that spiritual quality is here.”

  “The quality of self-sacrifice in the capitalists who gave their money, and in the artists who gave their talent without hope of material return, but only for the pleasure of authorizing and creating beauty that shall last forever in the memory of those it has delighted.”

  The banker smiled compassionately.

  “Ah, my dear fellow, you must realize that this was only a spurt. It could be done once, but it couldn’t be kept up.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because people have got to live, even capitalists and artists have got to live, and they couldn’t live by giving away wealth and giving away work, in our conditions.”

  “But you will change the conditions!”

  “I doubt it,” said the banker with another laugh. One of the Columbian guards passed near us, and faltered a little in his walk. “Do you want us to go out?” asked my friend.

  “No,” the young fellow hesitated. “Oh no!” and he continued his round.

  “He hadn’t the heart to turn us out.” said the banker, “he would hate so to be turned out himself. I wonder what will become of all the poor fellows who are concerned in the government of the Fair City when they have to return to earth! It will be rough on them.” He lifted his head, and cast one long look upon the miracle about us. “Good heavens!” he broke out, “And when they shut up shop, here, will all this beauty have to be destroyed, this fabric of a vision demolished? It would be infamous, it would be sacrilegious! I have heard some talk of their burning it, as the easiest way, the only way of getting rid of it. But it musn’t be, it can’t be.”

  “No, it can’t be,” I responded fervently. “It may be rapt from sight in the flames like the prophet in his chariot of fire; but it will remain still in the hearts of your great people. An immortal principle, higher than use, higher even than beauty, is expressed in it, and the time will come when they will look back upon it, and recognize in it the first embodiment of the Altrurian idea among them, and will cherish it forever in their history, as the earliest achievement of a real civic life.”

  I believe this, my dear Cyril, and I leave it with you as my final word concerning the great Columbian Fair.

  Yours in all brotherly affection, A. HOMOS.

  III.

  New York, October 24, 1893.

  WELL, my dear Cyril, I have returned to this Babylon, you see, from my fortnight’s stay in that vision of Altruria at the great Fair in Chicago. I can, perhaps, give you some notion of the effect with me by saying that it is as if I were newly exiled and were exposing myself a second time to the shock of American conditions, stripped of the false hopes and romantic expectations which, in some sort, softened the impression at first. I knew what I had to look forward to when my eyes lost the last glimpse of the Fair City, and I confess that I had not much heart for it. If it had only been to arrive here, and at once take ship for home, I could have borne it; but I had denied myself this, in the interest of the studies of plutocratic civilization which I wish to make, and this purpose could not support me under the burden that weighed my spirits down. I had seen what might be, in the Fair City, and now I was to see again what the Americans say must be, in New York, and I shrank not only from the moral, but the physical ugliness of the thing.

  But, in fact, do not the two kinds of ugliness go together f I asked myself the question as I looked about me in the ridiculous sleeping-car I had taken passage in from Chicago. Money had been lavished upon its appointments, as if it had been designed for the state progress of some barbarous prince through his dominions, instead of the conveyance of simple republican citizens from one place to another, on business. It was as expensively upholstered as the bad taste of its designer could contrive, and a rich carpet under foot caught and kept whatever disease-germs were thrown off by the slumbering occupant in their long journey; on the floor, at every seat, a silver-plated spittoon ministered to the filthy national habit. The interior was of costly foreign wood, which was every where covered with a foolish and meaningless carving; mirrors framed into the panels reflected the spendthrift absurdity through the whole length of the saloon. Of course, this waste in the equipment and decoration of the car meant the exclusion of the poorer sort of travellers, who were obliged to sit up all night in the day-cars, when they might have been lodged, for a fifth of what I paid, in a sleeping-car much more tasteful, wholesome and secure than mine, which was destined, sooner or later, in the furious risks of American travel, to be whirled over the side of an embankment, or plunged through a broken bridge, or telescoped in a collision, or piled in a heap of shattered and ruined splendors like its own, and consumed in a holocaust to the American god Hustle.

  For not only are the comforts of travel here made so costly that none but the very well-to-do can afford them, but the service of the insufficiently manned trains and lines is overworked and underpaid. Even the poor negroes who make up the beds in the sleepers are scrimped of half a living by the companies which declare handsome dividends, and leave them to the charity of the fleeced and imperilled passengers. The Americans are peculiarly proud of their sleeping-car system, though I can hardly believe that when he is pinned into a broken seat, the most infatuated American can get much pleasure, while the flames advance swiftly upon him, out of the carving of the woodwork, or even the brass capitals of the onyx columns supporting nothing at either end of the car-roof. But until he is placed in some such predicament, the American hears with acquiescence, if not complacence, of the railroad slaughters which have brought the mortality of travel to and from the Fair during the past month up to a frightful sum. Naturally, if he does not mind the reports of these disasters, where his own name may any day appear in the list of killed or wounded, he is not vividly concerned in the fate of the thirty thousand trainmen who are annually mangled or massacred. He regards these dire statistics, apparently, as another proof of the immense activity of his country, and he does not stop, as he is hurled precariously over its continental spaces, and shot out of his train at his journey’s end, from two to six hours late, to consider whether a public management of public affairs is not as well in economics as in politics.

  I was fortunate in my journey to New York; I arrived only two hours behind time, and I arrived safe and sound. The Americans are quite satisfied with the large average of people who arrive safe and sound, in spite of the large numbers who do neither; and from time to time their newspapers print exultant articles to show how many get home in the full enjoyment of life and limb. I do not see that they celebrate so often the seasonable arrival of the surviving travellers, and, in fact, my experience of railroads in America is that the trains seldom bring me to my journey’s end at the appointed hour.

  On each great through - road there is one very rapid train, which has precedence of all other travel and traffic, and which does arrive at the hour fixed; but the other trains, swift or slow, seem to come lagging in at all sorts of intervals after their schedule-time. If I instance my experience and observation of this fact, my friends are inclined to doubt it; and if I insist upon matching it with their own, they allege the irregularity of the government trains in Germany, without seeming to know more about them than they know of their own trains. They at once begin to talk largely of the celerity and frequency of these, and to express their wonder that the companies should come so near keeping their word to the public as they sometimes do.

&
nbsp; However, I was thankful for my safety and my soundness, when I found myself again in New York, though I felt so loth to be here. If I could fitly have done so I would very willingly have turned and taken the next train back to Chicago, since I must not take the next steamer on to Altruria. But if I had gone back, it could only have been for a fortnight more, since at the end of the month now so far spent, they must begin to destroy the beauty they have created in the Fair City there. I tried to console myself with this fact, but the sense of an irreparable loss, of banishment, of bereavement, remained with me for days, and is only now beginning to wear itself away into a kind of impersonal sorrow, and to blend with the bruise of my encounter with the brute ugliness of this place, which is none the less brute, because it is so often kindly. It is like the ugliness of some great unwieldy monster, which looks so helpless and so appealing, that you cannot quite abhor it, but experience a sort of compassion for its unloveliness. I had thought of it in that way at a distance, but when I came to see it again, I found that, even in this aspect it was hard to bear. So I came up from the station to this hotel where I am now lodged, and where my windows overlook the long reaches of the beautiful Central Park at such a height that unless I drop my glance, none of the shapeless bulks of the city intrude themselves between me and the effect of a vast forest. My hotel is itself one of the most preposterous of the structures which disfigure the city, if a city without a sky-line can be said to be disfigured by any particular structure. With several others as vast or as high, it forms a sort of gateway to the Park, from whose leafy depths, these edifices swaggering upward unnumbered stories, look like detached cliffs in some broken and jagged mountain range. They are built with savage disregard to one another, or to the other buildings about them, and with no purpose, apparently, but to get the most money out of the narrowest space of ground. Any objective sense of them is to the last degree painful, as any objective sense of the American life is, in its inequality and disproportion; but subjectively they are not so bad as that is, not so bad from the inside. At great cost they offer you an incomparable animal comfort, and they realize for the average American an ideal of princely magnificence, such as he has been instructed by all his traditions to regard as the chief good of success.