Continued from Part 2

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THE FAIR AS A SPECTACLE.

How it seemed to a visitor—Strolling and dreaming by day and by night.

By Charles Mulford Robinson

Part 3: An Enormous Whirligig of Pleasure

The entrance to the Plaisance was directly beyond this building. Serious purposed womanhood, as personified by the structure, stood before the Plaisance, blocking the way like a guardian angel, with back turned haughtily to all the Midway’s follies, and skirts well shaken of its dust. Nevertheless, the great thoroughfare proved to be thronged with women as well as men; and if there were persons of either sex with soul so holy and spirit so stern that they avoided it, they lost a rare opportunity, a chance for mental broadening that they must have needed, and that can hardly return in a lifetime.

The prevailing expression among the visitors on the Midway Plaisance was a smile. Everybody was entertained, and there was not a dull moment. The concourse itself was such a spectacle that you felt as though you were in the greenroom of a circus, and then on either side of you was a mile of rings, with continuous performances in every one! You were an actor yourself, and among your many amusing sensations was a half-humorous glimmering recognition of that fact, which only caused you to throw yourself into the part with the more abandon and play the clown on camel or donkey, the fool in the palanquin, or the child on the Ferris Wheel, with a carelessness that in sober moments would have seemed impossible. If one walked instead of dancing down the long way, it was only because his mind was dancing at such a rate that it never occurred to him to notice how his feet were sober still. The carnival spirit permeated everything; and there was never a lack of music, never a lack of gaudy costume and of strange sight, and never a waning of enthusiasm. Laughter bubbled over, shouts in many tongues were tossed over the crowd’s heads, and these bandied words made the gayest of confetti. The Midway spirit fell upon each visitor. In the quiet of your room you could reason over its folly, but Reason deserted you when you entered the Plaisance. She and Mrs. Grundy must have stopped in the building of women, for they were evidently too commonplace to walk in the Midway, too self-conscious for the sport of a carnival. The Plaisance was a medley, a Vanity Fair; it was an “Ethnological Exhibit,” according to the catalogue, run riot; it was geography’s nightmare; but over and above everything else one found it a playground, a frolic of nationalities, an enormous whirligig of pleasure. There was anything in it except conventionality, and such was the abundance of life that it is difficult now to conceive of it as past. For the street was as a caldron into which a giant hand had tossed ingredients of every conceivable kind, sprinkling it all with “the salt of the earth” and a lot of peppery savages. And so it was a bubbling, seething, foaming mass, stirring around faster and faster, boiling, spilling over, sizzling, on, on, ever noisier, swifter, hotter, until it exploded on the last night with a terrible bang of steam and floated away a vapory memory that we try in vain to seize! You recall only a confused mass of sensations; a passage of amusing and interesting events swifter than you could grasp; a series of scenes that made you laugh because of the comical hopelessness of the effort to comprehend them; a confusion of noise nay, of hubbub and roar—and a kaleidoscope of color and motion that would have driven one distracted had it not sent his blood leaping in harmony to the uncanny time of its own weird pulse.

The street, a mile long and three hundred feet broad, was thronged with people on a frolic. Mingling with these were foreigners, “barbarians” in more than the old Greek sense sometimes, the exhibitors, concessionaires, and human exhibits in every conceivable style of costume—or lack of it! You rubbed elbows with Laplanders and Arabs, with Dahomeyans and Japanese, with New Englanders and Turks, until you felt that you yourself were an unusual exhibit. Beyond the crowd, inclosing it at either side, was the strange line of buildings, streets, gardens, and villages. This was a heterogeneous mass, with its sky line broken by peaks and domes and pinnacles to the despair of architecture. Here was the tall, wide tower of Blarney Castle, there Venetian arches; beyond were Dutch peaks, then Turkish domes, and next a Moorish minaret; then a German village, an ostrich farm, Java near to Lapland, and across the way the Street of Cairo and Chinese pagodas. Over all, unescapable hub of the whirligig, center of the life and endless motion, loomed the wonderful monstrosity of the Ferris Wheel. It, too, was going round; and about it the tide of people ceaselessly ebbed and flowed, and the queer flags of many nations flapped from many roofs; and the shouts of “pullers in,” the cries of venders, the roar of a multitude’s talk and laughter, the playing of bands, the music of bells and cymbals, the clang of gongs, and the unintelligible jargon of Babel confused the ear as the colors and ceaseless motion had already confused the eye. Then suddenly, over the heads of the people, thoughtless now if ever of God, rang a muezzin’s call to prayer. The contrast was amazing.

From the balcony of a snow-white, graceful minaret an earnest-faced man was calling upon the faithful in the North and the East and the South and the West to remember the greatness of Allah; and in acknowledgment they bowed their heads or fell on their knees wherever they were! Three times in the journey of each day’s sun this thoughtful hush fell over a careless multitude. It was significant of the Midway conglomeration’s genuineness, of the reality back of the theatrical scene, that the muezzin was a religious necessity, not an exhibit. The sweet, strange cry inevitably struck a chord in each hearer’s heart, thrilled him, and for an instant unveiled again those silent depths of feeling where lurked the memory of the dreamy buildings on the still lagoons. But as quickly as the hush fell it passed, and Vanity Fair was again at flood tide.

Half way down the Plaisance was a concession that hardly any one missed. That was the Street in Cairo. This was completely satisfying, for, as so rarely happens, the very intensity of its realism gave it poetry and picturesqueness. One imbibed strangeness and truth at a single draught; one reveled there in color and contrast, for the scene was not Egyptian in the cold, stern, sculptural sense; it gave the city of the Nile in all the warmth of color, the life and gayety and contrast that make it fascinating. Architecturally, the street, long and winding, was perfectly reproduced; the shops were real shops, not mere exhibits, and it required only American money and a kind of polyglot French to strike a bargain. The attendants were Egyptians; and real citizens of Cairo lived in the upper stories of the houses, and loitered or hurried through the street, touching, jostling the cosmopolitan sightseers, who alone seemed foreign here. Donkeys and camels were steeds and vehicles; “Far-away Moses” was a living character; and the oft-repeated deep and sinister cry of the baggy-trousered pilot—“Loog out for McGinty!”—cleared the street for a “ship of the desert” laden with children of the West. “Misse Cleveland “ and “Yankee Doodle” were spry donkeys whose unrestrained gallop caused stampedes in the crowd. From an open door came the music of an Oriental theater, and from a balcony hung a girl of sunny Egypt, whose black hair and gay costume gave a welcome dash of color to the gray facade, while her eyes flashed brightly to the cavalier below. From quaint windows that once looked upon the Nile peered half-naked children, with skin the swarthier for the short white tunics that were worn; and all this one knew to be bits of real life in Cairo. Brilliant awnings that emphasized the tropical sunniness overhung the street; barefoot babies played around the doorsteps or joined the motley throng that watched an Egyptian juggler on the corner; with a clanking of gilded chains and trappings a band of pilgrims, camel-mounted, returned from Mecca; or, preceded by a waving sword and escorted by many guests, a bride rode camelback to the temple; and up and down the thoroughfare and in and out of mysterious dark passages moved, most interesting of all, the normal life of the Egyptian settlement—the true business of the Street of Cairo—carried on seriously and without self-consciousness, the prosy life that to foreign eyes seems so romantic. Every sense swore falsely that this was Egypt, just as it had sworn falsely already a score of times along the Plaisance; and in the dark, earnest faces that betokened active interest one read the old truism that where the heart is there surely is home. Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt was the reflection.

On the other side of the Plaisance was Old Vienna, more ancient than the German Village, and almost as German, for all the latter’s moat-surrounded castle, beer, and music, and houses put together in Frankfurt that they might be perfect in detail. Old Vienna showed the Altmarkt, with antique structures all about it. In the center was the band stand with the tables of a beer garden close below it, and at one side a big café, in which dinner might be taken while the band played Vienna waltzes and strange flags flapped above. As the eye became accustomed to the curious environment, to the juxtaposition of incongruous spectators and spectacle, to modern food in antique dishes, and a general mingling very like the putting of new wine into old bottles, a tranquility stole over the wearied brain, wonder changed to expectancy, and laughing praise to a cynicism that was not less merry. It was an excellent frame of mind in which to murmur aufwiedersehen to the giddy Plaisance, and in the long walk back to Jackson Park the roar of the cosmopolitan throng was muffled because it was partly understood, just as the gilt unknown glitters alone like gold, and childhood’s only satisfactory giants are those of legend. There was the same wealth of color and noise as before, the same all-pervading motion and brilliant contrast, with the consciousness that it was all real, wonderful, instructive, amusing; but the first amazement could not return, just because it had been so vivid. And so one walked back in a very superior mood, impressed unduly, perhaps, by the Midway’s artificiality of contrast, and prepared to leave the vanitas vanitatum without a sigh; yet not quite ready once more to reverence in humility the beauty of the Court of Honor.

Continued in Part 4