When I was in America twenty-two years ago, Chicago was the city that
interested me least. Coming straight from San Francisco--which, in the
eyes of a youthful student of Bret Harte, seemed the fitting metropolis
of one of the great realms of romance--I saw in Chicago the negation of
all that had charmed me on the Pacific slope. It was a flat and grimy
abode of mere commerce, a rectilinear Glasgow; and to an Edinburgh man,
or rather boy, no comparison could appear more damaging. How different
is the impression produced by the Chicago of to-day! In 1877 the city
was extensive enough, indeed, and handsome to boot, in a commonplace,
cast-iron fashion. It was a chequer-board of Queen-Victoria-streets.
To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the
young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the
threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude
every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or
Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and
fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman and apparently sinister
powers. Cycling round the boulevards of a sunny morning, you rejoice in
the airy and spacious greenery of the Garden City. Driving along the
Lake Shore to Lincoln Park in the flush of sunset, you wonder that the
dwellers in this street of palaces should trouble their heads about
Naples or Venice, when they have before their very windows the
innumerable laughter, the ever-shifting opalescence, of their
fascinating inland sea. Plunging in the electric cars through the river
subway, and emerging in the West Side, you realise that the slums of
Chicago, if not quite so tightly packed as those of New York or London,
are no whit behind them in the other essentials of civilised barbarism.
Chicago, more than any other city of my acquaintance, suggests that
antique conception of the underworld which placed Elysium and Tartarus
not only on the same plane, but, so to speak, round the corner from each