At least I am not afraid to say that, on my return, I fancied I found this side of Philadelphia life less a side apart, less isolated, more identified with the social side, and the social side, for its part, accepting the identification. The University and Bryn Mawr could not have played the same social part in the Philadelphia I remember. Perhaps I shall express what I mean more exactly if I say that, returning with fresh eyes, I saw Philadelphia ready and pleased, as I had not remembered it, to acknowledge openly talents and activities it once made believe to ignore or despise—to go further really and, having for the first time squarely faced its accomplishments, for the first time to blow its own trumpet. The new spirit is one I approve. I would not call all the work that comes out of Philadelphia monumental, as some Philadelphians do, or Philadelphia itself a modern Athens, or the hub of the literary universe, or any other absurd name. But I do think that in literature and learning it is now contributing, as it always has contributed, its fair share to the country, and that if Philadelphia does not say so, the rest of the country will not, for the rest of the country is still under the delusion that Philadelphia knows how to do nothing but sleep.
CHAPTER XIV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART
I
Ignorance of art and all relating to it could not have been greater than mine when I paid that first eventful visit to J.'s studio on Chestnut Street.
I lay the blame only partly on my natural capacity for ignorance. It was a good deal the fault of the sort of education I received and the influences among which I lived—the fault of the place and the period in which I grew up. Nominally, art was not neglected at the Convent. A drawing-class was conducted by an old bear of a German, who also gave music lessons, and who prospered so on his monopoly of the arts with us that he was able to live in a delightful cottage down near the river. Drawing was an "extra" of which I was never thought worthy, but I used to see the class at the tables set out for the purpose in the long low hall leading to the Chapel, the master grumbling and growling and scolding, the pupils laboriously copying with crayon or chalk little cubes and geometrical figures or, at a more advanced stage, the old-fashioned copy-book landscape and building, rubbing in and rubbing out, wrestling with the composition as if it were a problem in algebra. The Convent could take neither credit, nor discredit, for the system; it was the one then in vogue in every school, fashionable or otherwise, and not so far removed, after all, from systems followed to this day in certain Academies of Art.
INDEPENDENCE HALL—LENGTHWISE VIEW
Another class was devoted to an art then considered very beautiful, called Grecian Painting. It was not my privilege to study this either, but I gathered from friends who did that it was of the simplest: on the back of an engraving, preferably of a religious subject and prepared by an ingenious process that made it transparent, the artist dabbed his colours according to written instructions. The result, glazed and framed, was supposed to resemble, beyond the detection of any save an expert, a real oil painting and was held in high esteem.