Theodore Dreiser

“ Barfleur in many respects, I wish to repeat here, is one of the most delightful persons in the world. He is a sort of modern Beau Brummel with literary, artistic and gormandizing leanings. He loves order and refinement, of course,—things in their proper ways and places—as he loves life. I suspect him at times of being somewhat of a martinet in home and office matters; but I am by no means sure that I am not doing him a grave injustice. A more even, complaisant, well-mannered and stoical soul, who manages to get his way in some fashion or other, if it takes him years to do it, I never met. ”

“ There is an art atmosphere, strong and clear, compounded of romance, emotion, desire, love of beauty and determination of purpose, which is thrilling to experience—even vicariously.
Paris is as young in its mood as any city in the world. It is as wildly enthusiastic as a child. I noticed here, this morning, the strange fact of old battered-looking fellows singing to themselves, which I never noticed anywhere else in this world. Age sits lightly on the Parisian, I am sure; and youth is a mad fantasy, an exciting realm of romantic dreams. ”

“ A foreigner will not, I am afraid, understand exactly what I mean; but there is something about the American climate, its soil, rain, winds, race spirit, which produces a raw, direct incisiveness of soul in its children. They are strong, erect, elated, enthusiastic. They look you in the eye, cut you with a glance, say what they mean in ten thousand ways without really saying anything at all. They come upon you fresh like cold water and they have the luster of a hard, bright jewel and the fragrance of a rich, red, full-blown rose. Americans are wonderful to me—American men and American women. ”

“ The balance of the trip to Amsterdam was nothing, a matter of two hours, but it visualized all I had fancied concerning Holland. Such a mild little land it is. So level, so smooth, so green. I began to puzzle out the signs along the way; they seemed such a hodge-podge of German and English badly mixed, that I had to laugh. The train passed up the center of a street in one village where cool brick pavements fronted cool brick houses and stores, and on one shop window appeared the legend: “Haar Sniden.” Would not that as a statement of hair-cutting make any German-American laugh? ”

“ I will admit, for argument’s sake, that the Dutch costume with its snowy neck and head-piece and cuffs, the Dutch windmill, with its huge wind-bellied sails, the Dutch landscape so flat and grassy and the Dutch temperament, broad-faced and phlegmatic, have had much to do with my art attraction, but over and beyond those there has always been so much more than this—an indefinable something which, for want of a better phrase, I can only call the wonder of the Dutch soul, the most perfect expression of commonplace beauty that the world has yet seen. ”

“ England was gone. Gone all the solemnity and the politeness of the porters who had brought our luggage aboard, gone the quiet civility of ship officers and train-men, gone the solid doughlike quiescence of the whole English race. It seemed to me on the instant as if the sky had changed and instead of the gray misty pathos of English life—albeit sweet and romantic—had come the lively slap-dash of another world. These men who looked down on us with their snappy birdlike eyes were no more like the English than a sparrow is like a great auk. They were black-haired, black-eyed, lean, brown, active. ”

“ Neither Venice nor Florence have the hard glitter of the South—only a rich brightness. The domes are almost gold in effect. The nine frescoes of the façade, gold, red and blue. The walls, cream and gray. Before it is the oblique quadrangle which necessitates your getting far to one side to see the church squarely—a perfect and magnificently individual jewel. All the great churches are that, I notice. Overhead a sky of blue. Before you a great, smooth pavement, crowded with people, the Campanile (just recompleted) soaring heavenward in perfect lines. What a square! ”

“ I was never tired of looking at the wine barges near Charenton; the little bathing pavilions and passenger boats in the vicinity of the Louvre; the brick-barges, hay-barges, coal-barges and Heaven knows what else plying between the city’s heart and points downstream past Issy. It gave me the impression of being one of the brightest, cleanest rivers in the world—a river on a holiday. I saw it once at Issy at what is known in Paris as the “green hour”—which is five o’clock—when the sun was going down and a deep palpable fragrance wafted from a vast manufactory of perfume filled the air. ”

“ The Parisian—from the keeper of a market-stall to the prince of the money world, or of art—wants to live gaily, briskly, laughingly, and he will not let the necessity of earning his living deny him. I felt it in the churches, the depots,231 the department stores, the theaters, the restaurants, the streets—a wild, keen desire for life with the blood and the body to back it up. It must be in the soil and the air, for Paris sings. It is like poison in the veins, and I felt myself growing positively giddy with enthusiasm. ”

“ All the way over—from the very first day we met in New York, I think—he was either consciously or unconsciously building up for me the glamour of smart and artistic life in Europe. Now these things are absolutely according to your capacity to understand and appreciate them; they are, if you please, a figment of the brain, a frame of mind. If you love art, if you love history, if the romance of sex and beauty enthralls you, Europe in places presents tremendous possibilities. To reach these ethereal paradises of charm, you must skip and blink and dispense with many things. ”

“ LUCERNE I entered Switzerland at Chiasso, a little way from Lake Como in Italy, and left it at Basle near the German frontier, and all I saw was mountains—mountains—mountains—some capped with snow and some without, tall, sharp, craggy peaks, and rough, sharp declivities, with here and there a patch of grass, here and there a deep valley, here and there a lonely, wide-roofed, slab-built house with those immense projecting eaves first made familiar to me by the shabby adaptations which constitute our “L” stations in New York. The landscape hardens perceptibly a little way out of Milan. ”

“ For suggestions of character, individuality, innate Teutonic charm or the reverse—as these things strike one—growth, prosperity, promise, and the like, Berlin cannot be equaled in Europe. Quite readily I can see how it might irritate and repel the less aggressive denizens of less hopeful and determined realms. The German, when he is oppressed is terribly depressed; when he is in the saddle, nothing can equal his bump of I-am-ity. It becomes so balloon-like and astounding that the world may only gaze in astonishment or retreat in anger, dismay, or uproarious amusement. ”

“ We wandered through high-walled, cobble-paved streets until suddenly we came on the cathedral, soaring upward out of a welter of the dreary and commonplace. I had thought Canterbury was wonderful—but now I knew that I had never seen anything in my life before so imposing as Amiens. Pure Gothic, like Canterbury, it was so much larger; a perfect maze of pinnacles, towers, arches, buttresses and flying buttresses; it soared into the sky—carven saint above carven saint, and gargoyles leering from every cranny. I could scarcely believe that the faith of man had ever reared so lovely a thing. ”

“ Time is running away; life is running away, and here in Venice, at every angle (under your window) is its symbol. I know of no city which at once suggests the lapse of time hourly, momentarily, and yet soothes the heart because of it. For all its movement or because of it, it is gay, light-hearted, without being enthusiastic. The peace that passes all understanding is here, soft, rhythmic, artistic. Venice is as gay as a song, as lovely as a jewel (an opal or an emerald) , as rich as marble and as great as verse. There can only be one Venice in all the world! ”

“ About half way up we came to a little inn called the Corniche, which really hangs on the cornice of this great range, commanding the wide, blue sweep of the Mediterranean below; and here, under the shade of umbrella trees and cypresses and with the mimosa in full bloom and with some blossom which Barfleur called “cherry-pie” blowing everywhere, we took seats at a little green table to have a pot of tea. It is an American inn—this Corniche—with an American flag fluttering high on a white pole, and an American atmosphere not unlike that of a country farmhouse in Indiana. ”

“ To me Botticelli is the nearest return to the Greek spirit of beauty, grace and lightness of soul, combined with later delicacy and romance that the modern world has known. It is so beautiful that for me it is sad—full of the sadness that only perfect beauty can inspire.
I sated myself on the house fronts or backs below the Ponte Vecchio
I think now, of all the places I saw in Italy, perhaps Florence really preserves in spite of its changes most of the atmosphere of the past, but that is surely not for long, either; for it is growing and the Germans are arriving. ”

“ The leaves of the trees between Dover and London were just budding, that diaphanous tracery which resembles green lace. The endless red chimneys and sagging green roofs and eaves of English cottages peeping out from this vesture of spring were as romantic and poetic as an old English ballad. No doubt at all that England—the south of it, anyhow—is in a rut; sixty years behind the times,—but what a rut! Must all be new and polished and shiny? As the towers and spires of Canterbury sped past to the right, gray and crumbling in a wine-like air, something rose in my throat. ”

“ Is there no one who wants really to do the very exceptional thing? No German city I saw had a central heart worthy of the name—no Piazza del Campidoglio such as Rome has; no Piazza della Signoria such as Florence has; no Piazza San Marco such as Venice has; not even a cathedral center, lovely thing that it is, such as Milan has. Paris with its Gardens of the Tuileries, its Champs-de-Mars, its Esplanades des Invalides, and its Arc de Triomphe and Place de l’Opéra, does so much better in this matter than any German city has dreamed of doing. ”

“ That is what life does to some of us. It drains us as dry as the sickled wheat stalks and leaves us to blow in wintry winds. Or it poisons us and allows us to fester and decay within our own skins.
But mostly I have separate, vivid pictures of London—individual things that I saw, idle, pointless things that I did, which cheer and amuse and please me even now whenever I think of them. Thus I recall venturing one noon into one of the Lyons restaurants just above Regent Street in Piccadilly and being struck with the size and importance of it even though it was intensely middle class. ”