He dealt with a life which we in a venerable
and historic society may find it somewhat difficult to realise. It was
the life of an entirely new people, a people who, having no certain
past, could have no certain future. The strangest of all the sardonic
jests that history has ever played may be found in this fact: that
there is a city which is of all cities the most typical of innovation
and dissipation, and a certain almost splendid vulgarity, and that this
city bears the name in a quaint old European language of the most
perfect exponent of the simplicity and holiness of the Christian
tradition; the city is called San Francisco. San Francisco, the capital
of the Bret Harte country, is a city typifying novelty in a manner in
which it is typified by few modern localities. San Francisco has in all
probability its cathedrals, but it may well be that its cathedrals are
less old and less traditional than many of our hotels. If its
inhabitants built a temple to the most primal and forgotten god of whose
worship we can find a trace, that temple would still be a modern thing
compared with many taverns in Suffolk round which there lingers a faint
tradition of Mr. Pickwick. And everything in that new gold country was
new, even to the individual inhabitants. Good, bad, and indifferent,
heroes and dastards, they were all men from nowhere.
Most of us have come across the practical problem of London landladies,
the problem of the doubtful foreign gentleman in a street of respectable
English people.
Pages:
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120