Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/446

68 succeed each other make a deafening racket over my head. Now the streets are lined with popular shops, saloons, oyster houses, and also with boot-blacks. Pedlars of Italian aspect offer me bananas, oranges, apples, and sticks of marshmallow. These are no longer the smells of Paris, but those of Marseilles and Genoa; in fact, they make me remember that I am in a maritime city. Did I say in a maritime city? I should have said in an island, where I ought to have found it quite natural that the manners and institutions should be "floating" (it is the remark of an ancient who had not seen America), and that the very houses should not yet succeed in "fixing themselves." A great maritime city always has a little the air of having been born yesterday; its monuments can be counted; and how often I have been surprised that of all our French cities the most ancient, the one that existed before there was a France, and even before Gaul had a name—I mean Marseilles—should also be one of the most modern, where one finds least of the historical and detects the least of what is past.

There are from sixty to eighty thousand Italians at Marseilles, and formerly there were many Greeks and Levantines; this doubtless gave it the cosmopolitan aspect. Here at New York there are from four hundred to five hundred thousand Germans, and how many Irish? To say nothing of Italians, French, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, etc. I am not surprised that all this makes a mixture, a medley in which one would be troubled to find anything very "American." The business streets, Twenty-third, Fourteenth, Broadway, are filled with a crowd, neither very noisy nor very bustling; numerous loiterers are seated on benches in the squares—a great "cosmopolitan" city; a very large city; a gigantic city; where I seem to recognize some traits of Paris and Marseilles, of Genoa, Antwerp, and Amsterdam; where certain slight differences, suspected rather than felt, fancied rather than experienced, indefinable for the moment, melt and are effaced in the multiplicity of resemblances and analogies: such did New York appear to me at first. And also as an "amusing" city, since I had been walking in it for four hours without either my curiosity or my legs having grown weary of it.

Baltimore, March 24th.—I have "descended," but only to "mount" at once to the sixth or seventh story in a fine hotel, entirely new, and in which there is nothing "American," or at least more "American" than in any other hotel, unless its [sic!] being admirably kept. I cannot refrain from noting that in a city where the negro population is not less than seventy or eighty thousand souls, the hotel service is performed exclusively by whites. Strange fatality! All other travelers have lodged in extraordinary hotels. They were inundated with electric light! They were drenched with ice water! They could not make a step nor even a gesture, without setting in motion all sorts of very complicated machinery or mobilizing a whole army of negroes. Not one of these favors has yet fallen to my lot.

If one excepts five or six large streets, Baltimore does not seem to be very animated, or, above all, very busy—I just now had to consult my guide-book to assure myself that it contains four or five hundred thousand souls. Have the tales of travelers positively misled me concerning the activity of Americans? What sort of epicurean or dilettante existence can they have led in Europe who find that people live so fast here, or even in New York? Or rather—and it is this doubtless which is more probable—are there not two, three, four Americas, of which it would be wrong to be unwilling to see only one? I shall not see Chicago, or St. Louis, or San Francisco, or even New Orleans; but here, in the Eastern States, I do not find myself at all perplexed, and the reason appears to me very simple. The habits of European civilization are daily becoming the foundation of American, and, reciprocally, if America makes an improvement in these habits, we hasten to adopt it in Europe.

For instance, these interminable streets crossing each other at right angles are monotonous; the picturesque, the unexpected, the variety of perspectives is absent. But has not this rectilinear ideal become ours also within the last half century and in the name of science and hygiene? Here, moreover, much more than in New York, where all the houses in a locality resemble each other, the diversity of architecture puts an element of gaiety into the monotony of the street. A touch of every style blends into a disorder which amuses the eyes. The brick is less somber, newer, and of a more vivid red; clambering greenery and the whiteness of marble steps attenuate its crudity. Stone alternates with brick. Here are houses of "colonial"