Philadelphia

“ We entered Philadelphia just at sunset, and rattled through Chestnut Street just as it was looking its brightest and best with its well-stocked shops, its belles and its beaux, and its bran-new Continental, where we longed to stop, had we not given our word to reach New York that night. I liked Philadelphia from the first moment I put my foot there, some years ago.
It always seemed so cosy, home-like,—and comfortable; one might, one thinks, be so domestic and sensible there, while in New York it is next to impossible to be sensible, with the very best intentions. ”

“ Still, though Philadelphians in summer fly to little European towns to escape the streets they deplore as arid in Philadelphia, I know of no other town as large that is as green. The notes I made in Philadelphia are full of my surprise that I should have forgotten how green and shady are its streets, how tender is this green in its first spring growth under the high luminous sky, how lovely the wistaria-draped walls in town and the dogwood in the suburbs. ”

“ Why isn't Philadelphia a greater city in its greater wealth? Why does New York excel Philadelphia? People say, "Because of her harbor." Why do many other cities of the United States get ahead of Philadelphia now? There is only one answer, and that is because our own people talk down their own city. If there ever was a community on earth that has to be forced ahead, it is the city of Philadelphia. ”

“ If you do not understand the Philadelphia way, as I did not then, you take the Philadelphian's talk literally and believe the beautiful Philadelphia calm to be more than surface deep, as I did who had not the sense as yet to see that, even if this inertia was real, it was my business to get the better of it and to develop for myself the energy I imagined my town and its people to be without. I have often thought that the Philadelphia calm is a little like the London climate that either conquers you or leaves you the stronger for having conquered it. ”

“ Philadelphia's famous calm was but skin deep over its seething mass of workers, its energy, its toiling, its triumph. When I reflected on what was going on at night in every newspaper office in town, it seemed to me as unbelievable that, on the verge of this volcano of work, Philadelphians could keep on dancing at parties, at the Dancing Class, at the Assembly, as that men and women should have danced at Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have now but to name the Philadelphian's book in Philadelphia to be informed that it is monumental—but to mention the Philadelphia writer of verse to hear that he is a marvel—but to enquire for the Philadelphia writer of prose to be assured that he is a genius. There is not the weeest, most modest little Philadelphia goose that does not sail along valiantly in the Philadelphia procession of swans. The new pose is prettier than the old if scarcely more successful in preserving a sense of proportion, and it saves me from committing myself. ”

“ It may be said that these are harmless innovations, part of the change in town life as lived in any other town as big. But the marvel to me was their conquest of Philadelphia, the town that used to pride itself on not being like other towns, and there they exaggerated themselves in my eyes into nothing short of revolution. The craving for novelty—that was at the root of it all: of the restlessness, the willingness to do what the old-fashioned Philadelphian would rather have been seen dead than caught doing, of the deliberate break with tradition. Nothing now can be left peacefully as it was. ”

“ Philadelphia, with its usual reticence and conscientiousness in preventing any Philadelphian from becoming a prophet in Philadelphia, had hidden its literary, with its innumerable other, lights under a bushel, content itself to know they were there, if nobody else did. As towns, like men, are apt to be accepted at their own valuation, most Americans would then have thought it about as useful to look for snakes in Ireland as for literature in Philadelphia. ”

“ The result was that, at the moment, I saw in the Centennial chiefly a violent upheaval shaking the universe to the foundations, with Philadelphia emerging, changed, transformed, unrecognizable, plunging head-foremost into new-fangled amusements, adding new duties to the Philadelphian's once all-sufficing duty of being a Philadelphian, inventing new attractions to draw to its drowsy streets people from the four quarters of the globe, and, more astounding, giving itself up to these innovations with zest. ”

“ You know already from description that Philadelphia is remarkable for its regularity and order. It has in this respect the character of the Quakers, and is a quiet city in comparison with New York, has no palaces or remarkable buildings, but is everywhere well built, has beautiful broad streets planted with trees, and behind these, broad causeways and many magnificent private houses, with marble steps and doorways, and particularly so in the fashionable streets. In each of the great quarters there is a large, green market, planted with trees like a park, where it is delightful to walk or sit. ”

“ Philadelphia is, in truth, such a beautiful town that I am surprised the world should be so slow in finding it out. The danger to it now is the Philadelphian's determination to thrust beauty upon it at any cost, not knowing that it is beautiful already. There is too much talk everywhere about town-planning as a reform, as a part of the whole tiresome business of elevating the masses. As I have said, Penn talked no nonsense of that kind, nor did Sir Christopher Wren when he made the fine design that London had not the sense to stick to, nor L'Enfant when he laid out Washington. ”

“ When I last saw him, it seemed to me that no Philadelphian was more alive, more in love with life, better equipped to enjoy life in the way Philadelphia has fashioned it—the Philadelphia life in which his passing away must leave no less a gap than the disappearance of the State House or the Pennsylvania Hospital would leave in the Philadelphia streets. ”

“ A more plausible reason is that Philadelphians were so innately sure of themselves—so sure that Philadelphia was the town and Philadelphians the aristocracy of the world—that they could afford to be indifferent. But whatever the cause, this indifference, this depreciation, was worse than a blunder, it was a loss in a town with a past so well worth looking into and being proud of and taking care of. ”

“ Often I turned homeward with that cruel aching of the heart the young know so well, longing for something, anything, to happen on the way to interrupt, to disorganize, to shatter to pieces the daily routine of life. I still shrink from the sharp pain of those cool, splendid October days when Philadelphia was aglow and quiveringly alive, and with every breath of the brisk air came the desire to be up and away and doing—but away where in Philadelphia?—doing what in Philadelphia? ”

“ IN the story of my life in Philadelphia, and my love for the town which grew with my knowledge of it, my beginning to work was more than an awakening: it was an important crisis. For work first made me know Philadelphia as it is under the surface of calm and the beauty of age, first made me realize how much it offers besides the social adventure. ”

“ And I remember our wandering farther, north and south, east and west—interest, beauty, picturesqueness never failing us—in the end Philadelphia transformed into a vast Wonderland, where in one little section people might spend their lives dancing, paying calls at noon, eating chicken salad and croquettes from Augustine's, but where in every other they were striving, struggling, toiling, to carry on Penn's traditions and to give to his town the greatness, power and beauty he planned for it. ”

“ The old exclusiveness, with its follies, was better, more amusing, than the new tendency to do away with everything that gave Philadelphia society its character. It was the charm and the strength of Philadelphia society that it had a character of its own and was not just like Boston or New York or Baltimore society. ”

“ Since it has been the fashion to revive everything old in Philadelphia, most Philadelphians are not happy until they have their garden, as their forefathers had, and very charming they often make it in the suburbs. But in town my admiration has been asked for gardens that would have been lost in my Grandfather's back-yard, and for a few meagre plants springing up about a cold paved square that would have been condemned as weeds in his luxuriant flower beds. ”

“ It enkindles the desire in us to stand as high as the highest among our sister States, in the councils of our country, in the pursuit of agriculture and manufactures and every useful art. This honorable feeling of State pride, particularly when the Pennsylvanian is abroad, out of his native land, will make his heart swell with exultation, if he finds that Philadelphia has become a great commercial city, her flag waving over every sea, her steamers to be seen in every port—an elevated position in which Philadelphia, if she but wills it, can undoubtedly be placed. ”

“ Dishes we prize as the most essentially Philadelphian have sometimes the shortest pedigree. Why, the Ice-cream that is now one of Philadelphia's most respected institutions, came so recently that people we, of my generation, knew could remember its coming. On my return to Philadelphia, with the advantage the perspective absence gives, I could appreciate more clearly than if I had stayed at home how well Philadelphia eats and how nobly it has maintained its old ideals, how nobly accepted new ones. ”

“ I may be, certain effects of brilliant sunshine filtering through the pale green of early spring foliage will send me straight back to the Wissahickon and to the days when I could not walk in Philadelphia or its suburbs and not strike gold at every step. And the Wissahickon was but one small section of the Park, of which the corrupt government Philadelphia loves to rail at made the largest and fairest, at once the wildest and most wisely laid-out playground, in America. Will a reform Government, with all its boasting, do as much for Philadelphia? ”

“ On the other side of the Schuylkill, in any of the suburbs, every street became a leafy avenue. There were evenings in that last June I spent in Philadelphia, when, the ugly houses bathed in golden light and the trees one long golden-green screen in front of them, I would not have exchanged Walnut or Spruce Street in West Philadelphia or many a Lane in Germantown, for any famous road or boulevard the world over. ”

“ Parallel with Randolph street run Fairhill and Reese—tiny little byways, but a kind of miniature picture of the older Philadelphia. Snowy clothes were fluttering from the lines and pumps gushing a silver stream into washtubs. Strong white arms were sluicing and lathering the clothes, sousing them in the bluing-tinted water. Everywhere children were playing merrily in the overflow. ”

“ The citizens of Philadelphia (such is the strange infatuation of self-love) believe that ten years is eternity to them with respect to the residence, and that Congress will in that time be so enamored of them as never to leave them; and all this with the recent example of New York before their eyes, whose allurements are more than ten to two compared with Philadelphia. To tell the truth, I know no such unsocial city as Philadelphia. The gloomy severity of the Quakers has proscribed all fashionable dress and amusement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ SUNSET. PHILADELPHIA FROM ACROSS THE DELAWARE
us for our far straying from righteousness; breaks that courted and won the admiration of Philadelphia for imitations of any and every style that wasn't American, especially if it was English, Philadelphia tremendously pleased with itself for the bits borrowed from the English Universities and dumped down in its own University and out at Bryn Mawr, there as unmistakable aliens as our own Rhodes Scholars are at Oxford. ”

“ Nothing now can be left peacefully as it was. I felt the foundations of the world crumble when I heard that the Dancing Class has taken new quarters over in Horticultural Hall and the Assembly in the Bellevue, that Philadelphia consents to go up Broad Street for its opera, quieting its conscience by the compromise of going in carriages and motors and never on foot. There surely was the end of the old Philadelphia, the real Philadelphia. ”

“ The old-fashioned Philadelphia business, going on at a pace that only New York and Chicago could beat, was still accomplished with so little fuss that the rest of America laughed at Philadelphia for its slowness and sleepiness, and told those old time-worn stories that have passed into folk-lore. ”