The Hawaiian gazette., 1893-10-10
THE GREAT WRITE CITY.
The Wonder of the roth Century.
BY Walter Besant.

! hIOlHCu luNO NllC SuhlCCl vi lnS
Worlds Fair. When it came to the
last of them-a modest Englishman-
all that he had proposed to say, had
been said already, and all his adjec-
tives used up. Therefore, he had to
content himself with few common
place phrases. Something of the same
difficulty is met with again, when,
after ali the special correspondents
and all preceding visitors have been
at work upon the Fair for three
months, describing, and exhausting
the adjectives, one sits down to write
ON first impressions. What-whose-
impressions, first or last, have not
been already offered to the public?
Yet after all, man is individual. Each
of US see with his own eyes, and no
two pair of eyes are alike.
To begin with, the Worlds Fair
may be regarded a. another edition,
the latest and most complete, and by
far the best illustrated, of an ecumeni-
cal encyclopedia, published in one
enormous volume. No ordinary visi-
tor, no single writer, can hope to pro-
duce any paper, appreciate, critical or
adequate, of this encyclopedia as a
! whole. The wise man will not at
tempt it.
When the visitor happens TO be a
| literary man, one who is in the habit
/ of writing and speaking of things of
fered to the public, he wanders about
! the courts and galleries of the exhibit
ton, oppressed far more than the
| inaTticulate person by the vastness of
| the subject. To such a man the great
truth that he cannot say anything
| adequate and that he need not try it,
falls upon his spirit when it is once
| grasped, like a cool shower upon a
hot afternoon. Into every art-gal-
lery, every kind of show, he carries
his measuring-r and his canons of
art These, in the worlds fair, he
can leave behind him, unless he
wants to consecrate a considerable
part of his natutal span to the con-
tents of the buildings.
am sorry to have no adjectives
left. They have all been used al
ready by descriptive and critical
writers. Yet these are to be my
first Impressions Let US fall back
on the old adjectives.
1t is so big to begin with! The
guide books spare no figures, yet fig
ures by themselves convey no idea of
vastness. The human mind cannot
grasp the meaning of figures when
they get beyond a certain number.
The native Australian, for example,
who can only understand the number
of his ten fingers uses for all num-
bers beyond ten the single expression
lightweight" To me as to the Aus
tralian child, all these figures of tons,
acres, etc, are exactly represented by
the term lightweight" 1t is big
oh so big! How big? lightweight"
What on earth does one want more?
Apart from their curious tendency
to become "eighty-eight," figures,
when they are very large-indeed, and
things in general when they are very
large-haYe a way of saddening him
who contemplates them. Vastness of
all kinds Expresses the soul with sad
ness. i once observed during jour
ney over the Alps girl who turned
from the contemplation of the mighty
mass of mountain with eyes overflow
ing. She quickly put up her hand
kerchief and blushed for shame that
she should be thus moved. / longed
to say to her, but could not, for the
ordinary reasons, "My child, you cry
because the thing is so great; for the
same reason, too, could cry. How
this effect is produced know not. II
YOU please, we will look out once more
and weep together"
The bigness of the Worlds Fair
first strikes and bewilders one; then !
saddens. / observe that most people |
set down their tears to the evanes-
cence of the show. "Three months |
more,u they say, land then it will be |
gone like dream" We weep. The |
pity of it! Nay, dear friends, but the
vastness of it.
Then the uneXpectedness of it |
Never was any place so unexpected.
The special correspondents and the |
papers have done their
best to bring the place home to us;
but you see description never de-
scribes. Oh you may point at once,
to the woman's building, or to the
building; you recog-
nize them; you recognize them be-
cause you saw the pictures in the
illustrated London News. Quite
faithful pictures they were, yet-yet-
did you expect at all what you see
before YOU? What did the descrip-
tive writer and the artist between
them teach you? The form of the
thing, not its surroundings and its
setting; not its atmosphere; not its
color; not its individuality. These
things cannot be put into words or
into drawings, and they make up the
Then again, the poetry of the thing!
Did the conception spring from one
brain like the Had? Were these build
ngs-every one to the unprofessional
I'VE miracle of beauty--thus arranged
% as to produce this marvellous
Effect of beauty by one master-brain,
)r by many? For never before in any
lge, in any country, has there been so
wonderful an arrangement of lovely
buildings as at Chicago the present
Tear Of grace. The hanging gardens
If Babylon-whlch some of US may
'emember as belonging to previous
.xistence-were fine. There were some
1ery fine things in Rome, especially
when Nero was emperor and archi-
ect, but the common people saw little
If his palace. There was rather nice
title show in London forty years ago, y
md another, not without its points, in
Philadelphia, seventeen years ago.
But nowhere at any time has there
,een nresented tn the world any prOup