AT NIGHT ON THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE.
But once within, to pick flaws criticism must take a higher flight than one, frankly astonished at the goodness of it all, is disposed to permit it to. Nothing is perfect in this mundane sphere, but this effort on lines as yet untrodden by these States has such measure of success that one is proud to feel that this has been done in our own time, in one’s own country, by men of one’s own race—the race that peoples our seaboard, fills our manufacturing towns, tills our great farms, and stretching westward extracts precious metals here and cultivates orange-groves and vineyards there; the race which is daily urged, on the “whaleback” steamer from the city to the Fair, to purchase its chewing-gum before the boat starts, as none is sold after leaving the pier; the race that is so cosmopolitan, so made up from strange and opposing elements, and is withal so homogeneous, so American—and proud, above all, to feel that this curious people have had, at the crucial moment, the good sense to be inconsistent, to make haste slowly, to defer to the few, to make their Exposition the most beautiful before setting to work to make it, as things needs must be here, the biggest in all creation.
INDIAN GIRL AND BULL, MODELLED BY FRENCH & POTTER.
To be of this race and a follower of the arts; to have noted for years the growth of public desire for
art and the frequent lapses to indifference on its part; to have seen that our artists as they grow in strength and numbers claimed the right to do something larger and finer and better than the private house, the portrait statue, or the genre picture; and then to come here, where for the first time they have found opportunity, and where the alliance of architecture, sculpture, and painting has produced its first work, to find that first work surprisingly good, is to feel proud not alone for the valiant craftsmen who have produced this result, but for the country at large which has stood behind them, and above all for the solid men of the city of Chicago who have planned the work so bravely and so wisely. So many elements enter into an enterprise of this kind that to a community like ours (unaided by a parental government which, as in France, takes upon itself, as one of its functions, the provision of public pageant and amusement, and keeps as it were all the material in stock) the problem was more than difficult, and the solution, solved as it has been, most surprising. Eighteen months ago in Paris, as I stood with a French friend in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, he said, indicating the colossal construction, “I suppose that at Chicago you will have a tower bigger than that, and that your exposition will be a triumph of that sort of thing.” “I suppose that it may,” was the answer; but the tower which is such a blot on Paris, diminishing in scale her most beautiful monuments, is nowhere to be seen in Chicago, and though the bones and sinews of the Liberal Arts building may be a “triumph of that sort of thing,” its flesh of staff effectively covers and adorns it without concealment of construction or strength, but with due consideration paid to beauty.
To house the exhibits, to provide for instruction, and to make a pleasure-ground for the people (it could be urged from a utilitarian point of view) might indeed have been done more simply, or, as the phrase runs, in a more “business-like” way. One rugged old farmer I overheard, as I stood leaning on the balustrade at the back of the MacMonnies fountain, as he pulled his wife away from the contemplation of the charming group of mermaids and sea-babies who disport themselves in the wake of Columbia’s triumphal galley, “Come along, Maria, I never see no use in them things; women with fishes’ tails.” Maria went along, but I fancied that Maria’s daughter lingered a moment, and she may have found the “use” of the artist in the social system. At any rate, the Chicago business man who individually and collectively represents the controlling power of this vast enterprise knew the use of beauty, and with the sagacity born of commercial success called to his aid the men most eminent in their professions, and then—left them alone.
Arguing without absolute knowledge, is it not easy to imagine that many times during the two years spent in constructing these superb structures, the heart of the business man must have failed him in seeing this child of his creation grow in beauty and strength to be sure, but at a cost of so many millions? No record exists, it is safe to say, of any questioning. The artists had been called in, they were doing their work loyally; and no less loyally, through financial crisis, business depression, and public indifference, the business man performed his part of the contract. He had pledged himself to the whole country to do his best, the pledge had been given and accepted in the hour when he bore the coveted privilege to hold the Exposition away from competing cities, and the Court of Honor shows how well the pledge has been kept. A detail of organization, one of the many which would make the history of the Exposition most interesting if written, was told the other day, and is so characteristic of the spirit in which the Fair has been put through, that it is worth incorporating here. At a time when the Exposition had reached the limits of all possible insurance, when every sound insurance company in the world was carrying all the risks it was able to take, the Exposition concluded to do its own insurance, the details of which procedure need not be gone into here. At this time there were a number of pictures, about nine in all, which had been promised for the Loan Collection of Foreign Masterpieces, and were not forthcoming because of the inability of the Exposition to procure special insurance policies which had been promised when, long before, the owners of the pictures had consented to lend them. There seemed no way out of the difficulty, when the simple question was asked of the head of the Art Department, if it was essential to the completeness of the Loan Collection that these pictures should be in it? To which was answered, that if not essential, it was at least desirable; whereat this business man gave instructions that the owners of the pictures be at once communicated with and informed that he would personally guarantee them against loss if they would allow the pictures to come. As this little show of public spirit involved a personal liability of over two hundred thousand dollars, the figures may be considered eloquent enough to find place in such a paper as this.