Our Philadelphia

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH

My knowledge of the rest of the world was more limited. I had been in France, but when I was such a child that I remembered little of it except the nuns in the Convent at Paris where I went to school, and the Garden of the Tuileries I looked across to from the Hotel Meurice. Nor had going abroad as yet been made a habit in Philadelphia. There was nothing against the Philadelphian going who chose to and who had the money. It defied no social law. On the contrary, it was to his social credit, though not indispensable as the Grand Tour was to the Englishman in the Eighteenth Century. I remember when my Grandfather followed the correct tourist route through England, France, and Switzerland, his children considered it an event of sufficient importance to be commemorated by printing, for family circulation, an elaborately got up volume of the eminently commonplace letters he had written home—a tribute, it is due to him to add, that met with his great astonishment and complete disapproval. I can recall my admiration for those of my friends who made the journey and my regret that I had made it when I was too young to get any glory out of it; also, my delight in the trumpery little alabaster figures from Naples and carved wood from Geneva and filigree jewellery from the Rue de Rivoli they brought me back from their journey: the wholesale distribution of presents on his return being the heavy tax the traveller abroad paid for the distinction of having crossed the Atlantic—a tax, I believe, that has sensibly been done away with since the Philadelphian's discovery of the German Bath, the London season, and the economy of Europe as reasons for going abroad every summer.

I was scarcely more familiar with the foreigner than with his country. Philadelphia had Irish in plenty, as many Germans as beer saloons, or so I gathered from the names over the saloon doors, and enough Italians to sell it fruit and black its boots at street corners. But otherwise, beyond a rare Chinaman with a pigtail and a rarer Englishman on tour, the foreigner was seldom seen in Philadelphia streets or in Philadelphia parlours. In early days Philadelphia had been the first place the distinguished foreigner in the country made for. It was the most important town and, for a time, the capital. But after Washington claimed the diplomat and New York strode ahead in commerce and size and shipping, Philadelphia was too near each for the traveller to stop on his way between them, unless he was an actor, a lecturer, or somebody who could make money out of Philadelphia.

I feel sorry for the sophisticated young Philadelphian of to-day who cannot know the emotion that was mine when, of a sudden, the Centennial dumped down "abroad" right into Philadelphia, and the foreigner was rampant. The modern youth saunters into a World's Fair as casually as into a Market Street or Sixth Avenue Department Store, but never had the monotony of my life been broken by an experience so extraordinary as when the easy-going street-car carried me out of my world of red brick into the heart of England, and France, and Germany, and Italy, and Spain, and China, and Japan, where I rubbed elbows with yellow Orientals in brilliant silks, and with soldiers in amazing uniforms—I who had seen our sober United States soldiers only on parade—and with people who, if they wore ordinary clothes, spoke all the languages under the sun. It was extraordinary even to meet so many Americans who were not Philadelphians, all talking American with to me a foreign accent, extraordinary to see such familiar things as china, glass, silks, stuffs, furniture, carpets, transformed into the unfamiliar, unlike anything I had ever seen in Chestnut Street windows or on Chestnut Street counters, so extraordinary that the most insignificant details magnified themselves into miracles, to the mere froth on top of the cup of Vienna coffee, to the fatuous song of a little Frenchman in a side-show, so that to this day, if I could turn a tune, I could still sing the "Ah! Ah! Nicolas!" of its foolish refrain.

V

Travelling, I should have seen all the Centennial had to show and a thousand times more, but slowly and by degrees, losing the sense of the miraculous with each new marvel. The Centennial came as one comprehensive revelation—overwhelming evidence that the Philadelphia way was not the only way. And this I think was a good thing for me, just as for Philadelphia it was a healthy stimulus. But the Centennial did not give me a new belief in exchange for the old; it did nothing to alter my life, nothing to turn my sluggish ambition into active channels. And big as it was, it was not as big as Philadelphia thought. I do believe that Philadelphians who had helped to make it the splendid success it proved, looked upon it as no less epoch-making than the Declaration of Independence which it commemorated. But epoch-making as it unquestionably was, it was not so epoch-making as all that. For some years Philadelphians had a way of saying "before" and "after" the Centennial, much as Southerners used to talk of "before" and "after" the War: with the difference that for Philadelphians all the good dated from "after." But manufacturing and commerce had been heard of "before." Cramp's shipyard did not wait for its first commission until the Centennial, neither did Baldwin's Locomotive Works, nor the factories in Kensington; Philadelphia was not so dead commercially that it was out of mere compliment important railroads made it the chief centre on their route. All large International Expositions are bound to do good by the increased knowledge that comes with them of what the world is producing and by the incentive this knowledge is to competition, and as the Centennial was the first held in America it probably accomplished more for the country than those that followed. But I do not have to be an authority on manufacture and commerce to see that they flourished before the Centennial; I have learned enough about art since to know that its existence was not first revealed to Philadelphia by the Centennial. The Exhibition had an influence on art which I am far from undervaluing. Its galleries of paintings and prints, drawings and sculptures, were an aid in innumerable ways to artists and students who previously had had no facilities for seeing a representative collection. It threw light on the arts of design for the manufacturer. But we knew a thing or two about beauty down in Philadelphia before 1876, though beauty was a subject to which we had ceased to pay much attention, and from the Centennial we borrowed too many tastes and standards that did not belong to us. It set Philadelphia talking an appalling lot of rubbish about art, and the new affectation of interest was more deplorable than the old frank indifference.

THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET STATION

I was as ignorant of art as the child unborn, but not more ignorant than the average Philadelphian. The old obligatory visits to the Academy had made but a fleeting impression and I never repeated them when the obligation rested solely with me. I had never met an artist, never been in a studio. The result was that the Art Galleries at the Centennial left me as blank and bewildered as the Hall of Machinery. Of all the paintings, the one I remembered was Luke Fildes's picture of a milkmaid which I could not forget because, in a glaring, plush-framed chromo-lithograph, it reappeared promptly in Philadelphia dining-and bedrooms, the most popular picture of the Centennial—a popularity in which I can discern no signs of grace. Nor can I discern them in the Eastlake craze, in the sacrifice of reps and rosewood to Morris and of Berlin work to crewels, in the outbreak of spinning-wheels and milking-stools and cat's tails and Japanese fans in the old simple, dignified Philadelphia parlour; in the nightmare of wall-papers with dadoes going half-way up the wall and friezes coming halfway down, and every square inch crammed full of pattern; in the pretence and excess of decoration that made the early Victorian ornament, we had all begun to abuse, a delight to the eye in its innocent unpretentiousness. And if to the Centennial we owe the multiplication of our art schools, how many more artists have come out of them, how much more work that counts?

However, the good done by the Centennial is not to be sought in the solid profits and losses that can be weighed in a practical balance. It went deeper. Philadelphia was the better for being impressed with the reason of its own importance which it had taken on faith, and for being reminded that the world outside of Philadelphia was not a howling wilderness. I, individually, gained by the widening of my horizon and the stirring of my interest. But the Centennial did not teach me how to think about, or use, what I had learned from it. When it was at an end, I returned placidly to my occupation of doing nothing.