The Ways of Men Part 2

Many years ago, a gentleman with whom I was driving in a distant quarter of Paris took me to a house on the rue Montparna.s.se, where we remained an hour or more, he chatting with its owner, and I listening to their conversation, and wondering at the confusion of books in the big room.

As we drove away, my companion turned to me and said, "Don't forget this afternoon. You have seen one of the greatest writers our century has produced, although the world does not yet realize it. You will learn to love his works when you are older, and it will be a satisfaction to remember that you saw and spoke with him in the fles.h.!.+ "

When I returned later to Paris the little house had changed hands, and a marble tablet stating that Sainte-Beuve had lived and died there adorned its facade. My student footsteps took me many times through that quiet street, but never without a vision of the poet-critic flas.h.i.+ng back, as I glanced up at the window where he had stood and talked with us; as my friend predicted, Sainte-Beuve's writings had become a precious part of my small library, the memory of his genial face adding a vivid interest to their perusal.

I made a little Pilgrimage recently to the quiet old garden where, after many years' delay, a bust of this writer has been unveiled, with the same companion, now very old, who thirty years ago presented me to the original.

There is, perhaps, in all Paris no more exquisite corner than the Garden of the Luxembourg. At every season it is beautiful. The winter sunlight seems to linger on its stately Italian terraces after it has ceased to s.h.i.+ne elsewhere. The first lilacs bloom here in the spring, and when midsummer has turned all the rest of Paris into a blazing, white wilderness, these gardens remain cool and tranquil in the heart of turbulent "Bohemia," a bit of fragrant nature filled with the song of birds and the voices of children. Surely it was a gracious inspiration that selected this shady park as the "Poets' Corner" of great, new Paris.

Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Theodore de Banville, Paul Verlaine, are here, and now Sainte-Beuve has come back to his favorite haunt. Like Francois Coppee and Victor Hugo, he loved these historic _allees_, and knew the stone in them as he knew the "Latin Quater," for his life was pa.s.sed between the bookstalls of the quays and the outlying street where he lived.

As we sat resting in the shade, my companion, who had been one of Sainte-Beuve's pupils, fell to talking of his master, his memory refreshed by the familiar surroundings. "Can anything be sadder," he said, "than finding a face one has loved turned into stone, or names that were the watchwords of one's youth serving as signs at street corners-la rue Flaubert or Theodore de Banville? How far away they make the past seem! Poor Sainte-Beuve, that bust yonder is but a poor reward for a life of toil, a modest tribute to his encyclopaedic brain! His works, however, are his best monument; he would be the last to repine or cavil.

"The literary world of my day had two poles, between which it vibrated.

The little house in the rue Montparna.s.se was one, the rock of Guernsey the other. We spoke with awe of 'Father Hugo' and mentioned 'Uncle Beuve' with tenderness. The Goncourt brothers accepted Sainte-Beuve's judgment on their work as the verdict of a 'Supreme Court.' Not a poet or author of that day but climbed with a beating heart the narrow staircase that led to the great writer's library. Paul Verlaine regarded as his literary diploma a letter from this 'Balzac de la critique.' "

"At the entrance of the quaint Pa.s.sage du Commerce, under the arch that leads into the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, stands a hotel, where for years Sainte-Beuve came daily to work (away from the importunate who besieged his dwelling) in a room hired under the a.s.sumed name of Delorme. It was there that we sent him a basket of fruit one morning addressed to Mr.

Delorme, _ne_ Sainte-Beuve. It was there that most of his enormous labor was accomplished.

"A curious corner of old Paris that Cour du Commerce! Just opposite his window was the apartment where Danton lived. If one chose to seek for them it would not be hard to discover on the pavement of this same pa.s.sage the marks made by a young doctor in decapitating sheep with his newly invented machine. The doctor's name was Guillotin.

"The great critic loved these old quarters filled with history. He was fond of explaining that Montparna.s.se had been a hill where the students of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to amuse themselves. In 1761 the slope was levelled and the boulevard laid out, but the name was predestined, he would declare, for the habitation of the 'Parna.s.siens.'

"His enemies pretended that you had but to mention Michelet, Balzac, and Victor Hugo to see Sainte-Beuve in three degrees of rage. He had, it is true, distinct expressions on hearing those authors discussed. The phrase then much used in speaking of an original personality, 'He is like a character out of Balzac,' always threw my master into a temper. I cannot remember, however, having seen him in one of those famous rages which made Barbey d'Aurevilly say that 'Sainte-Beuve was a clever man with the temper of a turkey!' The former was much nearer the truth when he called the author of _Les Lundis_ a French Wordsworth, or compared him to a lay _benedictin_. He had a way of reading a newly acquired volume as he walked through the streets that was typical of his life. My master was always studying and always advancing.

"He never entirely recovered from his mortification at being hissed by the students on the occasion of his first lecture at the College de France. Returning home he loaded two pistols, one for the first student who should again insult him, and the other to blow out his own brains.

It was no idle threat. The man Guizot had nicknamed 'Werther' was capable of executing his plan, for this causeless unpopularity was anguish to him. After his death, I found those two pistols loaded in his bedroom, but justice had been done another way. All opposition had vanished. Every student in the 'Quarter' followed the modest funeral of their Senator, who had become the champion of literary liberty in an epoch when poetry was held in chains.

"The Empire which made him Senator gained, however, but an indocile recruit. On his one visit to Compiegne in 1863, the Emperor, wis.h.i.+ng to be particularly gracious, said to him, 'I always read the _Moniteur_ on Monday, when your article appears.' Unfortunately for this compliment, it was the _Const.i.tutionnel_ that had been publis.h.i.+ng the _Nouveaux Lundis_ for more than four years. In spite of the united efforts of his friends, Sainte-Beuve could not be brought to the point of complimenting Napoleon III. on his _Life of Caesar_.

The author of _Les Consolations_ remained through life the proudest and most independent of men, a bourgeois, enemy of all tyranny, asking protection of no one. And what a worker! Reading, sifting, studying, a.n.a.lyzing his subject before composing one of his famous _Lundis_, a literary portrait which he aimed at making complete and final. One of these articles cost him as much labor as other authors give to the composition of a volume.

"By way of amus.e.m.e.nt on Sunday evenings, when work was temporarily laid aside, he loved the theatre, delighting in every kind of play, from the broad farces of the Palais Royal to the tragedies of Racine, and entertaining comedians in order, as he said, 'to keep young'! One evening Theophile Gautier brought a pretty actress to dinner.

Sainte-Beuve, who was past-master in the difficult art of conversation, and on whom a fair woman acted as an inspiration, surpa.s.sed himself on this occasion, surprising even the Goncourts with his knowledge of the Eighteenth century and the women of that time, Mme. de Boufflers, Mlle.

de Lespina.s.se, la Marechale de Luxembourg. The hours flew by unheeded by all of his guests but one. The _debutante_ was overheard confiding, later in the evening, to a friend at the Gymnase, where she performed in the last act, 'Ouf! I'm glad to get here. I've been dining with a stupid old Senator. They told me he would be amusing, but I've been bored to death.' Which reminded me of my one visit to England, when I heard a young n.o.bleman declare that he had been to 'such a dull dinner to meet a duffer called "Renan!" '

"Sainte-Beuve's _Larmes de Racine_ was given at the Theatre Francais during its author's last illness. His disappointment at not seeing the performance was so keen that M. Thierry, then _administrateur_ of La Comedie, took Mlle. Favart to the rue Montparna.s.se, that she might recite his verses to the dying writer. When the actress, then in the zenith of her fame and beauty, came to the lines-

Jean Racine, le grand poete, Le poete aimant et pieux, Apres que sa lyre muette Se fut voilee a tous les yeux, Renoncant a la gloire humaine, S'il sentait en son ame pleine Le flot contenu murmurer, Ne savait que fondre en priere, Pencher l'urne dans la poussiere Aux pieds du Seigneur, et pleurer!

the tears of Sainte-Beuve accompanied those of Racine!"

There were tears also in the eyes my companion turned toward me as he concluded. The sun had set while he had been speaking. The marble of the statues gleamed white against the shadows of the sombre old garden.

The guardians were closing the gates and warning the lingering visitors as we strolled toward the entrance.

It seemed as if we had been for an hour in the presence of the portly critic; and the circle of brilliant men and witty women who surrounded him-Flaubert, Tourgueneff, Theophile Gautier, Renan, George Sand-were realities at that moment, not abstractions with great names. It was like returning from another age, to step out again into the glare and bustle of the Boulevard St. Michel.

CHAPTER 6-Modern Architecture

If a foreign tourist, ignorant of his whereabouts, were to sail about sunset up our s.p.a.cious bay and view for the first time the eccentric sky-line of lower New York, he would rub his eyes and wonder if they were not playing him a trick, for distance and twilight lend the chaotic ma.s.ses around the Battery a certain wild grace suggestive of t.i.tan strongholds or prehistoric abodes of Wotan, rather than the business part of a practical modern city.

"But," as John Drew used to say in _The Masked Ball_, "what a difference in the morning!" when a visit to his banker takes the new arrival down to Wall Street, and our uncompromising American daylight dispels his illusions.

Years ago _spiritual_ Arthur Gilman mourned over the decay of architecture in New York and pointed out that Stewart's shop, at Tenth Street, bore about the same relation to Ictinus' n.o.ble art as an iron cooking stove! It is well death removed the Boston critic before our city entered into its present Brobdingnagian phase. If he considered that Stewart's and the Fifth Avenue Hotel failed in artistic beauty, what would have been his opinion of the graceless piles that crowd our island to-day, beside which those older buildings seem almost cla.s.sical in their simplicity?

One hardly dares to think what impression a student familiar with the symmetry of Old World structures must receive on arriving for the first time, let us say, at the Bowling Green, for the truth would then dawn upon him that what appeared from a distance to be the ground level of the island was in reality the roof line of average four-story buildings, from among which the keeps and campaniles that had so pleased him (when viewed from the Narrows) rise like gigantic weeds gone to seed in a field of gra.s.s.

It is the heterogeneous character of the buildings down town that renders our streets so hideous. Far from seeking harmony, builders seem to be trying to "go" each other "one story better"; if they can belittle a neighbor in the process it is clear gain, and so much advertis.e.m.e.nt.

Certain blocks on lower Broadway are gems in this way! Any one who has glanced at an auctioneer's shelves when a "job lot" of books is being sold, will doubtless have noticed their resemblance to the sidewalks of our down town streets. Dainty little duodecimo buildings are squeezed in between towering in-folios, and richly bound and tooled octavos chum with cheap editions. Our careless City Fathers have not even given themselves the trouble of pus.h.i.+ng their stone and brick volumes into the same line, but allow them to straggle along the shelf-I beg pardon, the sidewalk-according to their own sweet will.

The resemblance of most new business buildings to flashy books increases the more one studies them; they have the proportions of school atlases, and, like them, are adorned only on their backs (read fronts). The modern builder, like the frugal binder, leaves the sides of his creations unadorned, and expends his ingenuity in decorating the narrow strip which he naively imagines will be the only part seen, calmly ignoring the fact that on glancing up or down a street the sides of houses are what we see first. It is almost impossible to get mathematically opposite a building, yet that is the only point from which these new constructions are not grotesque.

It seems as though the rudiments of common sense would suggest that under existing circ.u.mstances the less decoration put on a facade the greater would be the harmony of the whole. But trifles like harmony and fitness are splendidly ignored by the architects of to-day, who, be it remarked in pa.s.sing, have slipped into another curious habit for which I should greatly like to see an explanation offered. As long as the ground floors and the tops of their creations are elaborate, the designer evidently thinks the intervening twelve or fifteen stories can s.h.i.+ft for themselves. One clumsy ma.s.s on the Bowling Green is an excellent example of this weakness. Its ground floor is a playful reproduction of the tombs of Egypt. About the second story the architect must have become discouraged-or perhaps the owner's funds gave out-for the next dozen floors are treated in the severest "tenement house" manner; then, as his building terminates well up in the sky, a top floor or two are, for no apparent reason, elaborately adorned. Indeed, this desire for a brilliant finish pervades the neighborhood. The Johnson Building on Broad Street (to choose one out of the many) is sober and discreet in design for a dozen stories, but bursts at its top into a Byzantine colonnade. Why? one asks in wonder.

Another new-comer, corner of Wall and Na.s.sau Streets, is a commonplace structure, with a fairly good cornice, on top of which-an afterthought, probably-a miniature State Capitol has been added, with dome and colonnade complete. The result recalls dear, absent-minded Miss Matty (in Mrs. Gaskell's charming story), when she put her best cap on top of an old one and sat smiling at her visitors from under the double headdress!

Nowhere in the world-not even in Moscow, that city of domes-can one see such a collection of paG.o.das, cupolas, kiosks, and turrets as grace the roofs of our office buildings! Architects evidently look upon such adornments as compensations! The more hideous the structure, the finer its dome! Having perpetrated a blot upon the city that cries to heaven in its enormity, the repentant owner adds a paG.o.da or two, much in the same spirit, doubtless, as prompts an Italian peasant to hang a votive heart on some friendly shrine when a crime lies heavy on his conscience.

What would be thought of a book-collector who took to standing inkstands or pepperboxes on the tops of his tallest volumes by way of adornment?

Yet domes on business buildings are every bit as appropriate. A choice collection of those monstrosities graces Park Row, one much-gilded offender varying the monotony by looking like a yellow stopper in a high-shouldered bottle! How modern architects with the exquisite City Hall before them could have wandered so far afield in their search for the original must always remain a mystery.

When a tall, thin building happens to stand on a corner, the likeness to an atlas is replaced by a grotesque resemblance to a waffle iron, of which one structure just finished on Rector Street skilfully reproduces'

the lines. The rows of little windows were evidently arranged to imitate the indentations on that humble utensil, and the elevated road at the back seems in this case to do duty as the handle. Mrs. Van Rensselaer tells us in her delightful _Goede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ta_ that waffle irons used to be a favorite wedding present among the Dutch settlers of this island, and were adorned with monograms and other devices, so perhaps it is atavism that makes us so fond of this form in building! As, however, no careful _Hausfrau_ would have stood her iron on its edge, architects should hesitate before placing their buildings in that position, as the impression of instability is the same in each case.

After leaving the vicinity of the City Hall, the tall slabs that like magnified milestones mark the progress of Architecture up Broadway become a shade less objectionable, although one meets some strange freaks in so-called decoration by the way. Why, for instance, were those t.i.tan columns grouped around the entrance to the American Surety Company's building? They do not support anything (the "business" of columns in architecture) except some rather feeble statuary, and do seriously block the entrance. Were they added with the idea of fitness? That can hardly be, for a portico is as inappropriate to such a building as it would be to a parlor car, and almost as inconvenient.

Farther up town our attention is arrested by another misplaced adornment.

What purpose can that tomb with a railing round it serve on top of the New York Life Insurance building? It looks like a monument in Greenwood, surmounted by a rat-trap, but no one is interred there, and vermin can hardly be troublesome at that alt.i.tude.

How did this craze for decoration originate? The inhabitants of Florence and Athens did not consider it necessary. There must, I feel sure, be a reason for its use in this city; American land-lords rarely spend money without a purpose; perhaps they find that rococo detail draws business and inspires confidence!

I should like to ask the architects of New York one question: Have they not been taught that in their art, as in every other, pretences are vulgar, that things should be what they seem? Then why do they continue to hide steel and fire-brick cages under a veneer of granite six inches thick, causing them to pose as solid stone buildings? If there is a demand for tall, light structures, why not build them simply (as bridges are constructed), and not add a poultice of bogus columns and zinc cornices that serve no purpose and deceive no one?

Union Square possesses blocks out of which the Jackson and Decker buildings spring with a n.o.ble disregard of all rules and a delicious incongruity that reminds one of Falstaff's corps of ill-drilled soldiers.

Madison Square, however, is _facile princeps_, with its annex to the Hoffman House, a building which would make the fortune of any dime museum that could fence it in and show it for a fee! Long contemplation of this structure from my study window has printed every comic detail on my brain. It starts off at the ground level to be an imitation of the Doge's Palace (a neat and appropriate idea in itself for a Broadway shop). At the second story, following the usual New York method, it reverts to a design suggestive of a county jail (the Palace and the Prison), with here and there a balcony hung out, emblematical, doubtless, of the inmates' wash and bedding. At the ninth floor the repentant architect adds two more stories in memory of the Doge's residence. Have you ever seen an accordion (concertina, I believe, is the correct name) hanging in a shop window? The Twenty-fifth Street Doge's Palace reminds me of that humble instrument. The wooden part, where the keys and round holes are, stands on the sidewalk. Then come an indefinite number of pleats, and finally the other wooden end well up among the clouds. So striking is this resemblance that at times one expects to hear the long-drawn moans peculiar to the concertina issuing from those portals.

Alas! even the most original designs have their drawbacks! After the proprietor of the Venetian accordion had got his instrument well drawn out and balanced on its end, he perceived that it dwarfed the adjacent buildings, so cast about in his mind for a scheme to add height and dignity to the rest of the block. One day the astonished neighborhood saw what appeared to be a "roomy suburban villa" of iron rising on the roof of the old Hoffman House. The results suggests a small man who, being obliged to walk with a giant, had put on a hat several times too large in order to equalize their heights!

How astonished Pericles and his circle of architects and sculptors would be could they stand on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street and see the miniature Parthenon that graces the roof of a pile innocent of other Greek ornament? They would also recognize their old friends, the ladies of the Erechtheum, doing duty on the Reveillon Building across the way, pretending to hold up a cornice, which, being in proportion to the building, is several hundred times too big for them to carry. They can't be seen from the sidewalk,-the street is too narrow for that,-but such trifles don't deter builders from decorating when the fit is on them. Perhaps this one got his caryatides at a bargain, and had to work them in somewhere; so it is not fair to be hard on him.

If ever we take to ballooning, all these elaborate tops may add materially to our pleasure. At the present moment the birds, and angels, it is to be hoped, appreciate the effort. I, perhaps, of all the inhabitants of the city, have seen those ladies face to face, when I have gone on a semi-monthly visit to my roof to look for leaks!

"It's all very well to carp and cavil," many readers will say, "but 'Idler' forgets that our modern architects have had to contend with difficulties that the designers of other ages never faced, demands for s.p.a.ce and light forcing the nineteenth-century builders to produce structures which they know are neither graceful nor in proportion!"

If my readers will give themselves the trouble to glance at several office buildings in the city, they will realize that the problem is not without a solution. In almost every case where the architect has refrained from useless decoration and stuck to simple lines, the result, if not beautiful, has at least been inoffensive. It is where inappropriate elaboration is added that taste is offended. Such structures as the Singer building, corner of Liberty Street and Broadway, and the home of _Life_, in Thirty-first Street, prove that beauty and grace of facade can be adapted to modern business wants.

Feeling as many New Yorkers do about this defacing of what might have been the most beautiful of modern cities, it is galling to be called upon to admire where it is already an effort to tolerate.