Our Philadelphia

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

III

It was without the slightest intention on my part that the vista-converging lines of the streets led me direct to William Penn. But I defy anybody to do a little thinking while walking through the streets of Philadelphia and not be led to him, so for eternity has he stamped them with his vivid personality—not William Penn, the shadowy prig of the school history, but William Penn, the man with a level head, big ideas, and the will to carry them out—three things that make for genius. To the weakling of to-day the fight for liberty of conscience would loom up so gigantic a task as to fill to overflowing his little span here below. But in the fight as Penn fought it, the material details could be overlooked as little as the spiritual, the comfort of the bodies of his people no more neglected than the freedom of their souls. He did not stop to preach about town-planning and garden cities, and improved housing for the workman, like the would-be reformer of to-day. With no sentimental pose as saviour of the people, no drivel about reforming and elevating and sweetening the lives of humanity, no aspiration towards "world-betterment," Penn made sure that Philadelphia should be the green town he thought it ought to be and that men and women, whatever their appointed task, should have decent houses to live in. He had the common-sense to understand that his colonists would be the sturdier and the better equipped for the work they had to do if they lived like men and not like beasts, and that a town as far south as Philadelphia called for many gardens and much green shade. The most beautiful architecture is that which grows logically out of the needs of the people. That is why Penn's city as he designed it was and is a beautiful city, to which English and German town reformers should come for the hints Philadelphians are so misguided as to seek from them.

I could not meet Penn in his pleasant streets and miss the succession of Friends who took over the responsibility of ensuring life and reality to his design, not allowing it, like Wren's in London, to lapse into a half-forgotten archaeological curiosity. Personally. I knew nothing of the Friends and envied J. who did because he was one of them, as I never could be, as nobody, not born to it, can. I had seen them, as alas! they are seen no longer: quiet, dignified men in broad-brimmed hats, sweet-faced women in delicate greys and browns, filling our streets in the spring at the time of Yearly Meeting. Once or twice I had seen them at home, the women in white caps and fichus, quiet and composed, sitting peacefully in their old-time parlours simple and bare but filled with priceless Sheraton or Chippendale. They looked, both in the open streets and at their own firesides, so placid, so detached from the world's cares, it had not occurred to me that they could be the makers of the town's beauty and the sinews of its strength. But in my new mood I could nowhere get far from them.

Ghosts of the early Friends haunted the old streets and the old houses and, mingling with them, were ghosts of the World's People who had lost no time in coming to share their town and ungraciously abuse the privilege. The air was thick with association. J. and I walked in an atmosphere of the past, delightfully conscious of it but never troubling to reduce it to dry facts. We could not have been as young as we were and not scorn any approach to pedantry, not as lief do without ghosts as to grub them up out of the Philadelphia Library or the Historical Society. We left it to the antiquary to say just where the first Friends landed and the corner-stone of their first building was laid, just in which Third Street house Washington once danced, in which Front Street house Bishop White once lived. It was for the belated Boswell, not for us, to follow step by step the walks abroad of Penn, or Franklin, or any of our town's great men. It was no more necessary to be historians in order to feel the charm of the past than to be architects in order to feel the charm of the houses, and for no amount of exact knowledge would we have exchanged the romance which enveloped us.

ARCH STREET MEETING

Could I have put into words some of the emotion I felt in gathering together my material, what an article I would have made! But my words came with difficulty, and indeed I have never had the "ready pen" of the journalist, always I have been shy in expressing emotion of any kind. No reader could have guessed from my article my enthusiasm as I wrote it. But at least it did get written and my pleasure in it was not disturbed by doubt. I was too enthralled by what I had to say to realize that I had not managed to say it at all.

IV

With the publication of the article our task was at an end, but not our walks together. J. and I had got into the habit of them, it was a pleasant habit, we saw no reason to give it up.

Sometimes we walked with new work as an object. There were articles about Philadelphia for Our Continent. We called it work—learning Romany—when we both walked with my Uncle up Broad Street to Oakdale Park, and through Camden and beyond to the Reservoir, where the Gypsies camped, and made Camden in my eyes, not the refuge of all in doubt, debt, or despair as its traditions have described it, but a rival in romance of Bagdad or Samarcand. When we walked still further, taking the train to help us out, to near country towns for the autumn fairs, never missing a side show, we called this the search for local colour, and I filled note-books with notes. Sometimes we walked for no more practical purpose than pleasure in Philadelphia. And we could walk for days, we could walk for miles, and exhaust neither the pleasure nor the town that I once fancied I knew by heart if I walked from Market to Pine and from the Delaware to the Schuylkill.