[Ill.u.s.tration: THE STATE HOUSE FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE]
Another distinguished visitor who lectured about this period came off more gaily:--Oscar Wilde, to whose lecture I had looked forward with no particular excitement, for I was young enough to feel only impatience with his pose. After listening to him, I had to admit that he was amusing. His affected dress, his deliberate posturings, his flamboyant phrases and slow lingering over them as if loth to let them go, made him an exhilarating contrast to Matthew Arnold, shocked as I was by a writer to whom literature was not always in dead earnest, nor to teach its goal, even though it was part of his pose to ape the teacher, the voice in the wilderness. And he was so refreshingly enthusiastic when off the platform, as I saw him afterwards in my Uncle"s rooms. He let himself go without reserve as he recalled the impressions of his visit to Walt Whitman in Camden and his meeting with the cowboy in the West. To him, the cowboy was the most picturesque product of America from whom he borrowed hat and cloak and appeared in them, an amazing spectacle. And I find in some prim, priggish, distressingly useless little notes I made at the time, that it was a perfect, a supreme moment when he talked to Walt Whitman who had been to him the master, at whose feet he had sat since he was a young lad, and who was as pure and earnest and n.o.ble and grand as he had hoped. That to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde seemed "a great big splendid boy" is now matter of history.
I know that Philadelphia entertained Wilde, and so I fancy him staying with George W. Childs, dining with Tony Drexel, and being talked to after dinner by Wayne MacVeagh, though I cannot be sure, as Philadelphia, with singular lack of appreciation, included me in none of the entertaining. I saw him only in Horticultural Hall, where he lectured, and at my Uncle"s. This was seeing him often enough to be confirmed in my conviction that literature might be a stimulating and emotional adventure.
Many interesting people of many varieties were to be met in my Uncle"s rooms. I remember the George Lathrops who, like Lowell and Poe of old, had come to Philadelphia for work: Lathrop rather embittered and disappointed, I thought; Mrs. Lathrop--Rose Hawthorne--a marvellous woman in my estimation, not because of her beautiful gold-red hair, nor her work, which I do not believe was of special importance, but as the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and therefore a link between me in my insignificance and the great of Brook Farm and Concord. I remember editors from New York, impressive creatures; and Members of Parliament, hangers-on of the literary world of London; and actresses, its lions, when in England:--Janauschek, heavily tragic off as on the stage, for whom my Uncle"s admiration was less limited than mine; and Miss Genevieve Ward, playing in _Forget-Me-Not_, her one big success, for she failed in the popularity to repeat it that comes so easily to many less accomplished. How timidly I sat and listened, marvelling to find myself there, feeling like the humble who shall be exalted in the Bible, looking upon my Uncle"s rooms as the literary threshold from which I was graciously permitted to watch the glorious company within.
III
I had gone no further than this first, tremulous ardent stage in my career when my Uncle deserted his memorable rooms never to return, and J. and I started on the journey that we thought might last a year--as long as the money held out, we had said, to the discomfort of the family who no doubt saw me promptly on their hands again--and that did not bring me back to Philadelphia for over a quarter of a century. Of literary events during my absence, somebody else must make the record.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE LITTLE STREET OF CLUBS," CAMAC STREET ABOVE SPRUCE STREET]
When I did go back after all those years, I was conscious that there must have been events for a record to be made of, or I could not have accounted for the change. Literature was now in the air. Local prophets were acknowledged, if not by all Philadelphia, by little groups of satellites revolving round them. Literary lights had come from under the bushel and were shining in high places. Societies had been industriously multiplying for the encouragement of literature. All such encouragement in my time had devolved upon the Penn Club that patronized literature, among its other interests, and wrote about books in its monthly journal and invited their authors to its meetings. During my absence, not only had the Penn Club continued to flourish--to such good purpose that J.
and I were honoured by one of these invitations and felt that never again could Fame and Fate bring us such a triumphant moment, except when the Academy of Fine Arts paid us the same honour and so upset our old belief that no Philadelphian could ever be a prophet in Philadelphia!--but Philadelphia had broken out into a mult.i.tude of Clubs and Societies, beginning with the Franklin Inn, for Franklin is not to be got away from even in Clubland, and his Inn, I am a.s.sured, is the most comprehensive literary centre to which every author, every artist, every editor, every publisher who thinks himself something belongs to the number of one hundred--that there should be the chance of one hundred with the right to think themselves something in Philadelphia is the wonder!--and in the house in Camac Street, which one Philadelphian I know calls "The Little Street of Clubs," the members meet for light lunch and much talk and, it may be, other rites of which I could speak only from hearsay, my s.e.x disqualifying me from getting my knowledge of them at first hand. And there is a Business and Professional Club and a Poor Richard, bringing one back to Franklin again, in the same Little Street. And there are Browning Societies, and Shakespeare Societies, and Drama-Reforming Societies, and Pegasus Societies, and Societies for members to read their own works to each other; and more Societies than the parent Society discoursing in the woods along the Schuylkill could have dreamed of: with the Contemporary Club to a.s.semble their variously divided ends and objects under one head, and to entertain literature as George W. Childs had entertained it, and, going further, to pay literature for being entertained, if literature expresses itself in the form of readings and lectures by those who practise it professionally.
The change disconcerted me more than ever when I, Philadelphia born, was a.s.sured of a profitable welcome if I would speak to the Club on anything. The invitation was tentative and unofficial, but the Contemporary Club need be in no fear. It may make the invitation official if it will, and never a penny the poorer will it be for my presence: I am that now rare creature, a shy woman subject to stage fright. And I cannot help thinking that, despite the amiability to the native, the stranger, simply because he is a stranger, continues to have the preference, so many are the Englishmen and Englishwomen invited to deliver themselves before the Club who never could gather an audience at home.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DOWN SANSOM STREET FROM EIGHTH STREET. THE LOW HOUSES AT SEVENTH STREET HAVE SINCE BEEN TORN DOWN AND THE WESTERN END OF THE CURTIS BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES THEIR PLACE]
And Philadelphia has recaptured the lead in the periodical publication that pays, and I found the Curtis Building the biggest sky-sc.r.a.per in Philadelphia, towering above the quiet of Independence Square, a brick and marble and pseudo-cla.s.sical monument to the _Ladies" Home Journal_ and the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_, and if in the race literature lags behind, what matter when merit is vouched for in solid dollars and cents? What matter, when the winds of heaven conspire with bricks and mortar to make the pa.s.ser-by respect it? I am told that on a windy day no man can pa.s.s the building without a fight for it, and no woman without the help of stalwart policemen. In her own organ of fashion and feminine sentiment, she has raised up a power against which, even with the vote to back her, she could not prevail.
And Philadelphia is not content to have produced the first daily newspaper but is bent on making it as big as it can be made anywhere. If I preserved my morning paper for two or three days in my hotel bedroom, I fairly waded in newspapers. On Sundays if I carried upstairs only the _Ledger_ and the _North American_, I was deep in a flood of Comic Supplements, and Photograph Supplements, and Sport Supplements, and every possible sort of Supplement that any other American newspaper in any other American town can boast of--all the sad stuff that n.o.body has time to look at but is what the newspaper editor is under the delusion that the public wants--in Philadelphia, one genuine Philadelphia touch added in the letters and gossip of "Peggy Shippen" and "Sally Wister,"
names with the double recommendation to Philadelphia of venerable age and unquestionable Philadelphia respectability.
And I found that the Philadelphia writer has increased in numbers and in popularity, whether for better or worse I will not say. I have not the courage for the role of critic on my own hearth, knowing the penalty for too much honesty at home. Nor is there any reason why I should hesitate and bungle and make myself unpleasant enemies in doing indifferently what Philadelphia, in its new incarnation, does with so much grace. 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 a.s.sured 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. I can state the facts that strike me, without prejudice, as the lawyers say.
IV
One is that the last quarter of a century has interested the Philadelphia writer in Philadelphia as he had not been since the days of John Watson. Most Philadelphians owned a copy of Watson"s _Annals_. I have one on my desk before me that belonged to J."s Father, one must have been in my Grandfather"s highly correct Philadelphia house, though I cannot recall it there, for a Philadelphian"s duty was to buy Watson just as it was to take in _Lippincott"s_, and Philadelphians never shirked their obligations. They probably would not have been able to say what was in Watson, or, if they could, would have shrugged their shoulders and dismissed him for a crank. But they would have owned the _Annals_, all the same. Then the Centennial shook them up and insisted on the value of Philadelphia"s history, and Philadelphians were no longer in fashion if they did not feel, or affect, an interest in Philadelphia and its past. After the Centennial the few who began to write about it could rely upon the many to read about it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DOUBLE STAIRWAY IN THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL]
Once, the Philadelphian who was not ashamed to write stories made them out of the fashionable life of Philadelphia. Dr. Weir Mitch.e.l.l inaugurated the new era, or the revolt, or the secession, or whatever name may be given it with the first historical novel of Philadelphia. It is fortunate, when I come to _Hugh Wynne_, that I have renounced criticism and all its pretences. As a Friend by marriage, if such a thing is possible, I cannot underestimate the danger. Only a Friend born a Friend is qualified to write the true Quaker novel, and I am told by this kind of Friend that _Hugh Wynne_ is not free from misrepresentations, misconceptions and misunderstandings. This may be true--I breathe more freely for not being able to affirm or to deny it--but, as Henley used to say, there it is--the first romantic gold out of the mine Philadelphia history is for all who work it. Since these lines were written the news has reached me that never again will Dr.
Mitch.e.l.l work this or any other mine. I cannot imagine Philadelphia without him. 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 pa.s.sing away must leave no less a gap than the disappearance of the State House or the Pennsylvania Hospital would leave in the Philadelphia streets. If Dr. Mitch.e.l.l"s digging brought up the romance of Philadelphia, Mr. Sydney George Fisher"s has unearthed the facts, for Philadelphia was the root of the great growth of Pennsylvania which is the avowed subject of his history. And the men who helped to make this history have now their biographers at home, though hitherto the task of their biography had been left chiefly to anybody anywhere else who would accept the responsibility, and my Brother, Edward Robins, Secretary of the University of Pennsylvania, has written the life of Benjamin Franklin, without whom the University would not have been, at least would not have been what it is. And in so many different directions has the interest spread that my friend since _Our Convent Days_, Miss Agnes Repplier, has taken time from her studies in literature and from building a monument to her beloved Agrippina to write its story. When she sent me her book, I opened it with grave apprehensions. In the volumes she had published, humour was the chief charm, and how would humour help her to see Philadelphia? I need not have been uneasy. There is no true humour without tenderness. If she had her smile for the town we all love, as we all have, it was a tender smile, and I think no reader can close her book without wanting to know still more of Philadelphia than it was her special business in that place to tell them. And that no vein of the Philadelphia mine might be left unworked.
Miss Anne Hollingsworth Wharton has busied herself to gather up old traditions and old reminiscences, dipping into old letters and diaries, opening wide Colonial doorways, resurrecting Colonial Dames, reshaping the old social and domestic life disdained by historians. The numerous editions into which her books have gone explain that she has not worked for her own edification alone, that Philadelphia, once it was willing to hear any talk about itself, could not hear too much. And after Miss Wharton have come Mr. Mather Lippincott and Mr. Eberlein to collect the old Colonial houses and their memories, followed by Mr. Herbert C. Wise and Mr. Beidleman to study their architecture: just in time if Philadelphia perseveres in its crime of moving out of the houses for the benefit of the Russian Jew and of mixing their memories with squalor. Of all the ways in which Philadelphia has changed, none is to me more remarkable than in this rekindling of interest out of which has sprung the new group of writers in its praise.
Nor were the Philadelphia poets idle during my absence. Dr. Mitch.e.l.l had not before sung so freely in public, nor had he ranked, as I am told he did at the end, his verse higher than his medicine. Mrs. Coates" voice had not carried so far. Dr. Francis Howard Williams had not rhymed for Pageants in praise of Philadelphia. Mr. Harrison Morris had not joined the Philadelphia choir. Mr. Harvey M. Watts had not been heard in the land. I have it on good authority that yearly the Philadelphia poets meet and read their verses to each other, a custom of which I cannot speak from personal knowledge as I have no pa.s.sport into the magic circle, and perhaps it is just as well for my peace of mind that I have not. Rumour declares that, on certain summer evenings, a suburban porch here or there is made as sweet with their singing as with the perfume of the roses and syringa in the garden, and I am content with the rumour for there is always the chance the music might not be so sweet if I heard it. I like to remember that the poets on their porch, whether their voices be sweet or harsh, descend in a direct line from the young men who wandered, discoursing of literature, along the Schuylkill. And Philadelphia"s love of poetry is to be a.s.sured not only by its own singers but by its care, now as in the past, for the song of others.
Horace Howard Furness, Jr., has taken over his father"s task and, in so doing, will see that Philadelphia continues to be famous for the most complete edition of Shakespeare.
There had been equal activity during my absence among the story-tellers.
Since Brockden Brown, not one had written so ambitious a tale as _Hugh Wynne_, not one had ever laughed so good-humouredly at Philadelphia as Thomas A. Janvier in his short stories of the Hutchinson Ports and Rittenhouse Smiths--what gaiety has gone out with his death! Not one had ever seen character with such truth as Owen Wister,--if only he could understand that as good material awaits him in Philadelphia as in Virginia and Wyoming. And John Luther Long is another of the story-tellers Philadelphia can claim though, like Mr. Wister, he shows a greater fancy for far-away lands or to wander among strange people at home.
There is no branch of literature that Philadelphia has not taken under its active protection. Who has contributed more learnedly to the records of the Inquisition than Henry Charles Lea, or to the chronicles of the law in the United States than Mr. Hampton L. Carson and Mr. Charles Burr, duly conscious as Philadelphia lawyers should be of the Philadelphian"s legal responsibility? Who can compete in knowledge of the evolution of the playing card with Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer or rival her collection? Who ever thought of writing the history of autobiography before Mrs. Anna Robeson Burr? The time had but to come for an admirer to play the Boswell to Walt Whitman, and Mr. Traubel appeared. When Columbia wanted a Professor of Journalism, Philadelphia sent it Dr. Talcott Williams. When England seemed a comfortable shelter for research there was no need to be in a hurry about, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith showed what could be done with an exhaustive study of Dr.
Donne, though why he was not showing instead what could be done with the Loganian Library, where the chance to show it was his for the claiming, he alone can say. When such recondite subjects as Egyptian and a.s.syrian called for interpreters, Philadelphia was again on the spot with Mrs.
Cornelius Stevenson and Dr. Morris Jastrow. And for authorities on the drama and history, it gives us Mr. Felix Sch.e.l.ling and Dr.
McMaster,--but perhaps for me to attempt to complete the list would only be to make it incomplete. Here, too, I tread on dangerous ground. It may be cowardly, but it is safe to give the tribute of my recognition to all that is being accomplished by the University of Pennsylvania and its scholars--by Bryn Mawr College and its students--by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania--by other Colleges and learned bodies--by innumerable individuals--and not invite exposure by venturing into detail and upon comment. It is in these emergencies that the sense of my limitations comes to my help.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CARPENTER"S HALL, BUILT 1771]
At least I am not afraid to say that, on my return, I fancied I found this side of Philadelphia life less a side apart, less isolated, more identified with the social side, and the social side, for its part, accepting the identification. 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. 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.
CHAPTER XIV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART
I
Ignorance of art and all relating to it could not have been greater than mine when I paid that first eventful visit to J."s studio on Chestnut Street.
I lay the blame only partly on my natural capacity for ignorance. It was a good deal the fault of the sort of education I received and the influences among which I lived--the fault of the place and the period in which I grew up. Nominally, art was not neglected at the Convent. A drawing-cla.s.s was conducted by an old bear of a German, who also gave music lessons, and who prospered so on his monopoly of the arts with us that he was able to live in a delightful cottage down near the river.
Drawing was an "extra" of which I was never thought worthy, but I used to see the cla.s.s at the tables set out for the purpose in the long low hall leading to the Chapel, the master grumbling and growling and scolding, the pupils laboriously copying with crayon or chalk little cubes and geometrical figures or, at a more advanced stage, the old-fashioned copy-book landscape and building, rubbing in and rubbing out, wrestling with the composition as if it were a problem in algebra.
The Convent could take neither credit, nor discredit, for the system; it was the one then in vogue in every school, fashionable or otherwise, and not so far removed, after all, from systems followed to this day in certain Academies of Art.
[Ill.u.s.tration: INDEPENDENCE HALL--LENGTHWISE VIEW]
Another cla.s.s was devoted to an art then considered very beautiful, called Grecian Painting. It was not my privilege to study this either, but I gathered from friends who did that it was of the simplest: on the back of an engraving, preferably of a religious subject and prepared by an ingenious process that made it transparent, the artist dabbed his colours according to written instructions. The result, glazed and framed, was supposed to resemble, beyond the detection of any save an expert, a real oil painting and was held in high esteem.
A third cla.s.s was in the elegant art of making wax flowers and, goodness knows why, my Father squandered an appreciable sum of his declining fortunes on having me taught it. I am the more puzzled by his desire to bestow upon me this accomplishment because none of the other girls"
fathers shared his ambition for their daughters and I was the only member of the cla.s.s. Alone, in a room at the top of the house--chosen no doubt for the light, as if the deeds there done ought not to have been shrouded in darkness--I worked many hours under the tuition of Mother Alicia, cutting up little sheets of wax into leaves and petals, colouring them, sticking them together, and producing in the end two horrible masterpieces--one a water-lily placed on a mirror under a gla.s.s shade, the other a basket of carnations and roses and camelias--both of which masterpieces my poor family, to avoid hurting my feelings, had to place in the parlour and keep there I blush to remember how long. It must be admitted that this was scarcely an achievement to encourage an interest in art. For the appreciation of art, as for its practice, it is important to have nothing to unlearn from the beginning; mine was the sort of training to reduce me to the necessity of unlearning everything; and most of my contemporaries, on leaving school, were in the same plight.
My eyes were no better trained than my hands. Works of art at the Convent consisted of the usual holy statues designed for our spiritual, not aesthetic edification; the Stations of the Cross whose merit was no less spiritual; two copies of Murillo and Rafael which my Father, in the fervour of conversion, presented to the Mother Superior; and a picture of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that adorned the Convent parlour, where we all felt it belonged, such a marvel to us was its combination of brilliantly-coloured needle-and-brush work.
Ill.u.s.trated books there must have been in the ill-a.s.sorted hodge-podge of a collection in the Library from which we obtained our reading for Thursday afternoons and Sundays. But though I doubt if there was a book I had not sampled, even if I had not been able to read it straight through, I can recall no ill.u.s.trations except the designs by Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, made for Moxon"s Tennyson and reproduced by the Harpers for a cheap American edition of the Poems, a copy of which was given to me one year as a prize. Little barbarian as I was, I disliked the drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites because they mystified me--the Lady of Shalott, entangled in her wide floating web, the finest drawing Holman Hunt ever made; the company of weeping queens in the Vale of Avalon, in Rossetti"s harmoniously crowded design--when I flattered myself I understood everything that was to be understood, more especially Tennyson"s Poems, many of which I could recite glibly from beginning to end--and did recite diligently to myself at hours when I ought to have been busy with the facts and figures in the cla.s.s books before me. Most people, young or old, dislike anything which shows them how much less they understand than they think they do.
Of the history of art I was left in ignorance as abject, the next to nothing I knew gleaned from a _Lives of the Artists_ adapted to children, a favourite book in the Library, one providing me with the theme for my sole serious effort in drama--a three-act play, Michael Angelo its hero, which, with a success many dramatists might envy. I wrote, produced, acted in, and found an audience of good-natured nuns for, all at the ripe age of eleven.
II
When I left the Convent for the holidays and eventually "for good,"
little in my new surroundings was calculated to increase my knowledge of art or to teach me the first important fact, as a step to knowledge, that I knew absolutely nothing on the subject. In my Grandfather"s house, art was represented by the family portraits, the engraving after Gilbert Stuart"s Washington, the ill.u.s.trated lamp shade, and the Rogers Group. My Father, re-established in a house of his own, displayed an unaccountably liberal taste, straying from the Philadelphia standard to the extent of decorating his parlour walls with engravings of Napoleon he had picked up in Paris--to one, printed in colour, attaching a value which I doubt if the facts would justify, though, as I have never come across it in any collection, Museum, or Gallery, it may be rarer and, therefore, more valuable, than I think. Other fruits of his old journeys to Paris were two engravings, perhaps after Guys, of two famous ladies of that town, whose presence in our prim and proper and highly domestic dining-room seems to me the most incongruous accident in an otherwise correctly-appointed Philadelphia household. When I think of Napoleon replacing Washington on our walls, I suspect my Father of having broken loose from the Philadelphia traces in his youth, though by the time I knew him the prints were the only signs of a momentary dash for freedom on the part of so scrupulous a Philadelphian.
It is curious that ill.u.s.trations should have as small a place in my memory of home life as of the Convent. The men of the Golden Age of the Sixties had published their best work long before I had got through school, and in my childhood books gave me my chief amus.e.m.e.nt. But I remember nothing of their fine designs. The earlier Cruikshank drawings for d.i.c.kens I knew well in the American edition which my Father owned, and never so long as I live can I see the d.i.c.kens world except as it is shown in the much over-rated Cruikshank interpretations. Other memories are of the highly-finished, sentimental steel-engravings of Scott"s heroines, including Meg Merrilies, whom I still so absurdly a.s.sociate with Crazy Norah. Another series of portraits, steel-engravings, as highly-finished and but slightly less insipid, ill.u.s.trated my Father"s edition of Thiers" _French Revolution_ through which, one conscientious winter, I considered it my duty to wade. And I recall also the large volumes of photographs after Rafael and other masters that, in the Eighteen-Seventies, came into fashion for Christmas presents and parlour-table books, and that I think must have heralded the new departure the Centennial is supposed to have inaugurated.
If I try to picture to myself the interior of the houses where I used to visit, art in them too seems best represented by family portraits no more remarkable than my Grandfather"s, by the engraving of Stuart"s Washington, or of Penn signing the Treaty with the Indians, or of the American Army crossing the Delaware, all three part of the traditional decoration of the Philadelphia hall and dining-room, and by a Rogers Group and an ill.u.s.trated lamp shade. The library in which a friend first showed me a volume of Hogarth"s engravings I remember as exceptional.
But I have an idea that had I possessed greater powers of appreciation then, I should have a keener memory now of other houses full of interesting pictures and prints and ill.u.s.trated books, which I did not see simply because my eyes had not been trained to see them.
Certainly, there were Philadelphia collections of these things then, as there always have been--only they were not heard of and talked about as they are now, or, if they were, it was to dismiss their collecting as an amiable fad. Mr. John S. Phillips had got together the engravings which the Pennsylvania Academy is to-day happy to possess. People who were interested did not have to be told that Mr. Claghorn"s collection was perhaps the finest in the country; J. was one of the wise minority, and often on Sundays took advantage of Mr. Claghorn"s generosity in letting anybody with the intelligence to realize the privilege come to look at his prints and study them; but I, who had not learned to be interested, knew nothing of the collection until I knew J. Gebbie and Barrie"s store flourished in Walnut Street as it hardly could had there not been people in Philadelphia, as Gebbie once wrote to Frederick Keppel, who collected "these smoky, poky old prints." Gebbie and Barrie have gone, but Barrie remains, a publisher of art books, and there are other dealers no less important and perhaps more enterprising, who prosper, as one of them has recently a.s.sured me they could not, if they depended for their chief support upon Philadelphia. But Philadelphia gives, as it gave, solid foundations of support, with the difference that to-day it takes good care the world should know it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GIRARD COLLEGE]
A few Philadelphians collected pictures. One of the show places, more select and exclusive than the Mint and Girard College, for the rare visitor to the town with a soul above dancing and dining, was Mr.
Gibson"s gallery in Walnut Street, open on stated days to anybody properly introduced, or it may be that only a visiting card with a proper address was necessary for admission. The less I say about the Gallery the better, for I never went to Mr. Gibson"s myself, though I knew the house as I pa.s.sed it for one apart in Philadelphia--one where so un-Philadelphia-like a possession as a picture gallery was allowed to disturb the Philadelphian"s first-story arrangement of front and back parlours. The collection can now be visited, without any preliminary formalities, at the Academy of Fine Arts. Mrs. Bloomfield Moore was still living in Philadelphia and she must have begun collecting though, well as I knew the inside of her house in my young days, I hesitate to a.s.sert it as a fact--which shows my unpardonable blindness to most things in life worth while. I never, as far as I remember, went anywhere for the express purpose of looking at paintings. I had not even the curiosity which is the next best thing to knowledge and understanding. I have said how meagre are my impressions of the old Academy on Chestnut Street. It is a question to me whether I had ever seen more than the outside of the new Academy at Broad and Cherry Streets before I met J.
To go to the exhibitions there had not as yet come within the list of things Philadelphians who were not artists made a point of doing.