Part 3

An unlooked-for feature of the exhibition is the profusion of newly married couples. Whether all this individual ecstasy adds gayety or mournfulness to the Fair depends, of course, entirely upon the point of view from which the victims are regarded. It is evident that many happy grooms have considered this a chance to kill two birds with one stone, and, as far as one can judge results from outward appearances, there is no question as to the practical working of the scheme. The happy couple find themselves in a sort of fairy land, wandering about among countless strangers, whose very numbers seem to lend security and to harden the over-sensitive soul. The crowd also seems to create a feeling of isolation which the innermost recesses of a virgin forest could never supply. Moreover, there is here so much else to occupy the attention of the usually obnoxious public that the bride and groom can hold hands with absolute security and be as bold or blushing as their temperaments may demand.

The rolling-chairs that run about the grounds and through the buildings are the salvation of many a fainting spirit. To thousands of human beings with nothing but a human back and human legs the fair would be a failure without them. They are support for the weary, strength for the weak, and hope and a new life for the despairing. The guides who navigate them are, as a rule, college students, profiting by this opportunity to see the fair and to secure additional dollars toward completing their studies. The result is, for the occupant of the chair, an intelligent and agreeable companion, who is ready and willing to give any information he may possess. And besides, they are neither sharks nor liars, but fair and honorable respecters of truth. There is sometimes a contrast in manners and education between the occupant of the chair and the man behind that is not in favor of the former. When one sees what is evidently a citizen with far more money than brains, and without the faintest appreciation of the beauties that encompass him, wheeled about at seventy-five cents an hour by a youth so far his superior that any comparison is impossible, it causes one to realize that Fortune is indeed an irresponsible flirt, who is never so happy as when doing the wrong thing.

A not uncommon sight, and one of the countless illustrations of what an excellent husband the American becomes when properly trained, is that of the weary, uninterested man, lingering patiently among laces, china, and views of Switzerland. His heart all the while is off with the machinery, possibly with that more than human little machine that winds the cotton on the spools. Such cases are, of course, offset by the devoted women who wear themselves out in tramping through soulless acres of agricultural products, locomotives, wagons, models of ships, and all the other follies that appeal to man.

The burning question of the hour for the visitor from another city is the question of finance. He who is worth his million and intends spending a fortnight in Chicago, will do well to take his million with him. He may bring some of it away, but that will depend entirely upon his own capacity for economy. Before registering at the hotel let him be sure to secure his return ticket, for it is a long walk from Chicago to New York. These remarks are not intended to discourage all who are not millionaires from visiting the exhibition. It can be done with less money. The writer has himself accomplished it. In fact, it is only fair to say that many of the stories of extortion which have come from the White City are much exaggerated. The most successful brigands are in the city of Chicago, and not at the Fair.

The writer can testify, from his own personal experience, that a very good lunch can be procured in the State of Illinois for less than one hundred dollars. Thirty dollars is more than enough for a sandwich, and a glass of water can be purchased anywhere for less than ninety cents. While to walk by the _cafés_ and restaurants and look upon others who are eating, costs the promenader nothing whatever. But these moderate prices do not obtain at your hotel. The object of keeping a hotel is, like some other occupations, partly to make money. The Chicago hotel-keeper does not ignore this fact. [Illustration: THE QUESTION OF FINANCE.]

His ideas of the relation of profit to expenditure are well calculated to startle the guest of reasonable expectations. If the guest is not overweeningly ambitious and is satisfied to sleep in a closet or hang from the stairs, his expenses need be no greater than if he occupied a handsome suite of rooms at any first-class New York hotel. But if he insists on having a real chamber, larger even than his own bathroom at home, and with a real window in it, then he must pay. And it is then that he begins to discover why his landlord keeps a hotel. Any previous extravagances in the way of horses, real estate, or precious stones are as nothing to the present outlay. He finds that the rate per diem is, as far as he can judge, based upon the supposition that the hotel is to be closed to-morrow and must be paid for to-day. And real estate is high, even in Chicago. In matters of nourishment, the wealth of Ormus is of no avail, unless the waiter receives a tip exceeding in value the handsomest Christmas present ever given to a dearest friend.

Within the grounds there is little extortion, thanks to the firmness of the ruling powers.

But let not the Chicagoan whose eye may fall upon these lines suppose for an instant that they are intended as reflections on his character. The city that secured the prize is simply fulfilling its inevitable destiny. Had New York drawn the plum we should have witnessed a worse extortion, with the added mortification of a much inferior exhibition. Moreover, there is no public spirit in New York, and there is a great deal of it in Chicago. This sentiment alone is more than enough to make the difference between success and failure. The woods are full of citizens willing to begin at sunrise and discourse to you until midnight of the wonders of Chicago. In ordinary times this burning desire to impart just that kind of information is not always appreciated by the outside world; but in times of fairs the spirit that prompts it becomes a mighty engine. It was soon demonstrated that these citizens could work as well as talk, and as a result the White City has risen as from a fairy’s wand.

The important question for the individual citizen is whether it is worth his while to go to this fair. And this, of course, depends altogether upon his purse, his stomach, his back, his legs, nerves, wife, children, and business. He may never have another such opportunity for mental expansion and physical discomfort. It is a marvel of architectural beauty. It is days of instruction, of art and science, of surprise and exasperation, of mental development, fatigue, and financial ruin. In the end his personal preferences, however, will probably have little to do with it. All the world are going, and he must go too.

THE ART OF THE WHITE CITY

_By Will H. Low_

On the way west to the White City, to “the stately pleasure-dome decreed,” where the arts of civilization by the unwritten law of International Expositions hold their court, the observant traveller finds abundant food for thought. Beyond Niagara, assuming his point of departure to be New York, he sees in the landscape through which he is whirled a continuous sweep of flat farming land, but little water; fences everywhere, trees sparsely scattered, and plain box-like houses telling only of shelter; abundant barns differing little from the dwellings, and from time to time towns of varied nomenclature ranging from Delhi to Kalamazoo. Through the horizontal blur caused by the speed of the train through which all this is seen, there appear, principally about the stations, figures which lend a languid interest to the dead level of monotony.

The human interest of the picture, however, tells the same story as the landscape--a story of hard work, of material reward, an acquiescence in the law by which labor gains bread and shelter, and little else. Occasionally, in the immediate vicinity of the stations, there is some attempt at adornment, generally confined to “tidying up” the surroundings; but around the farm-houses few or no flowers, little or no attempt to beautify the home, nothing of the almost frantic suburban effort of the East which has made the country kaleidoscopically varied with color, for the most part bad, yet giving hope that the next generation will do better, and pointing at least to a desire for beauty. Individual effort, unseen along the route, may be slandered by the preceding, but such for many monotonous miles seemed the foreground of the picture we were journeying to see.

At last a plain, varied by marshes, through which boarded walks running at right angles, with an occasional house here and there, testified to the various suburban excrescences of a great city; then a dome or two, towers, flags fluttering in the sun, innumerable trains, clangor of bells and shrieking of whistles; and with Chicago seven miles away, hidden in a pall of smoke, the White City was at hand.

There are certain mastering impressions in one’s life, certain scenes which stamp the memory, and, like the priceless _kakemono_ which the reverent Japanese withdraws from hiding when in the mood to

enjoy it, rise obedient to one’s thought in aftertime. Such a memory is that of a first sunny morning in Paris: a ride from the Madeleine across the Place de la Concorde, along the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre, across the Seine with the island and Notre Dame in the distance, and then through older Paris to the gardens of the Luxembourg. Or again, a certain early moonlit evening in Florence, with the Duomo looming at the end of the street, Giotto’s Campanile standing sentinel at its side, the narrow street to the Piazza della Signoria with its Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi, thence by the side of the Uffizi to the Arno and across the Ponte Vecchio up to the Pitti Palace. These memories, common to so many, are often gained on ground made familiar through study of guide-books and photographs which, instead of dulling realization, add to it the zest of more thorough appreciation. In like manner, study, discussion, photographs, and engravings prepare one for the Columbian Exposition; but the first few hours of living in its architectural dreamland gives reality to the shadowy preconception, and adds the priceless gift of another masterpiece to memory’s picture-gallery.

It is probably impracticable in any case, and when we think of the transformation that this prairie has witnessed in two short years, quite impossible, in the case of the Exposition, to keep the approaches of a great popular resort in any degree beautiful. Here we have on the land side of the Fair the usual assemblage of cheap shows, lemonade venders, and the like, which line the unsightly fence and make up what a friend has dubbed the Sideway Unpleasant. The fence is hard to pardon in a land where energy is predominant, desire to do the best not wanting, and _staff_ abundant. A high white wall enclosing the substantial fabric of their dream would have done much to give the western approach something of the festal magnificence which the architects have given to the entrance by the Peristyle at the lake side.

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.

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.

The wisdom of a large policy is to be found on every hand. The Exposition has been called a dream, and as it is so soon to vanish may well be one; but if the intent had been to deceive, it could hardly have been made more deceptive. To one in the gondolas or the launches speeding between these walls, they stand as though for all time; and for one walking in the long arcades, detail and veracity of construction force themselves on the attention most plausibly. It has been too often described how the architects, adopting certain dimensions, have obtained a conformity of effect; but that once obtained, they have shown the greatest freedom, and though all of them are men of many works, they have never perhaps been more happily inspired. The Administration building is the appropriate crown to the buildings leading up to it, and Mr. McKim’s Agricultural building is characterized by great charm of proportion, and though heavily charged with sculptured decoration is in nowise overloaded. In addition to the very decorative sculptures due to Mr. Martiny, there is on this building some of the most satisfactory ornament in purely classical vein that I can remember on any modern structure. In fact, though the treatment of this group of buildings is thoroughly classic, it is pleasant to record the belief that in no other country would the traditions have been so well observed and at the same time so revivified as in ours. Our men owe their education to the Old World, chiefly to France; but it seems as though a certain separation from the influences of their schools had given them an independence which their foreign schoolmates lack. It is probable that had Paris in 1889 adopted the programme followed here the result would have been as correct, as thorough, as noble as this; but the result as a whole would have been colder, and lacking in the individual character observable here, where every man seems to continue the tradition rather than follow it. Mr. Post had long accustomed us to his capacity to build big and well; but never to build so big and so well as in the Liberal Arts building. When sailing along the lake-front one appreciates the immensity of the structure, which seems to equal that of all the other buildings combined; but near at hand one feels its beauty more than its bigness, and the simplicity by which this result is arrived at. The portals, taking almost all the decorative features, are admirable. Mr. Atwood’s Fine Arts building is perhaps the best where all is so good, owing almost nothing to its decorative features--which, as the building is to be permanent, one may hope to see changed. The frieze of the Parthenon should hardly be borrowed to grace so fine a modern building. At night Mr. Atwood’s building is seen in all its beauty of proportion, and the nights when it is illuminated best of all. The torches running along the top of the building burn great flames of natural gas, and the illumination is at once simple and effective. On the roof of the Administration building something of the same effect is obtained in conjunction with the electric light outlining the dome; but as the torches on the Fine Arts building are seen against the sky, the effect is finer.

Night and electric light play a great part in the spectacular side of the Fair. Solomon in all his glory never saw such a sight as the plain people of this continent have had on illumination nights this summer. Innumerable incandescent lights sparkle along the cornices and pediments; the top of the wall inclosing the grand basin is outlined in fire; search-lights from the top of the Liberal Arts building cut their wide swaths of light in gigantic circles, resting for a moment here and there to bring out now this detail or to throw into dazzling relief a