I have been told of a lady who remarked that Charleston was "the biggest little place" she ever saw. I say the same. The littleness of the place, it is sometimes pointed out, is expressed by the "vast cousinship" which constitutes Charleston society, but it is to my mind expressed much better in the way bicyclists leave their machines leaning against the curb at the busiest parts of main shopping streets. Its bigness, upon the other hand, is expressed by the homes from which some of those bicyclists come, by the cultivation which exists in those homes, and has existed there for generations, by the amenities of life as they are comprehended and observed, by the wealth of the city's tradition and the richness of its background. Nor is that background a mere arras of recollection. It exists everywhere in the wood and brick and stone of ancient and beautiful buildings, in iron grilles and balconies absolutely unrivaled in any other American city, and equaled only in European cities most famous for their artistry in wrought iron. It exists also in venerable institutions—the first orphanage established in the United States; the William Enston Home; the Public Library, one of the first and now one of the best libraries in the country; the art museum, the St. Cecilia Society, and various old clubs. More intimately it exists within innumerable old homes, which are treasure-houses of fine old English and early American furniture and of portraits—portraits by Sir Joshua, by Stuart, Copley, Trumbull, and most of the other portrait painters who painted from the time the Colonies began to become civilized to the time of the Civil War—among them S. F. B. Morse, who, I believe it is not generally known, made a considerable reputation as a portrait painter, in Charleston, before he made himself a world figure by inventing the telegraph.
Nor is the Charleston background a mere arras of recollection. It exists everywhere in the wood and brick and stone of ancient and beautiful buildings, in iron grilles and balconies unrivalled in any other American city....
Even without seeing these private treasures the visitor to Charleston will see enough to convince him that Charleston is indeed "unique"—though not in the sense implied in the story—that it is the most intimately beautiful city upon the American continent.
In the doorway and gates of the Smyth house, in Legaré Street, I was struck with a Venetian suggestion
To call Charleston "unique," and immediately thereafter to liken it to other places may seem paradoxical. These likenesses are, however, evanescent. It is not that Charleston is actually like other places, but that here in a church building, there in an old tile roof, wrought iron gate, or narrow cobbled street, the visitor will find himself delicately reminded of Old World towns and cities. Mr. Howells, for example, found on the East Battery a faint suggestion of Venetian palaces, and in the doorway and gates of the Smyth house, in Legaré Street, I was struck, also, with a Venetian suggestion so strange and subtle that I could not quite account for it. At night some of the old narrow streets, between Meeting Street and Bay, made me think of streets in the old part of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine; or again I would stop before an ancient brick house which was Flemish, or which—in the case of houses diagonally opposite St. Philip's Church—exampled the rude architecture of an old French village, stucco walls colored and chipped, red tile roof and all. The busy part of King Street, on a Saturday night when the fleet was in, made me think of Havana, and the bluejackets seemed to me, for the moment, to be American sailors in a foreign port; and once, on the same evening's walk, when I chanced to look to the westward across Marion Square, I found myself transported to the central place of a Belgian city, with a slope-shouldered church across the way masquerading as a hôtel de ville, and the sidewalk lights at either side figuring in my imagination as those of pleasant terrace cafés. So it was always. The very hotel in which we stayed—the Charleston—is like no other hotel in the United States, though it has about it something which caused me to think of the old Southern, in St. Louis. Still, it is not like the Southern. It is more like some old hotel in a provincial city of France—large and white, with a pleasing unevenness of floor, and, best of all, a great inner court which, in provincial France, might be a remise, but is here a garden. If I mistake not, carriages and coaches did in earlier times drive through the arched entrance, now the main doorway, and into this courtyard, where passengers alighted and baggage was taken down. The Planter's Hotel, now a ruin, opposite the Huguenot Church, antedates all others in the city, and used to be the fashionable gathering place for wealthy Carolinians and their families who came to Charleston annually for the racing season.