V.
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.