The Californiacs | Page 3

The Netherlands are dismissed with one adjective - flat. For a country to be flat is, in the opinion of the Californiac, to relinquish its final claim to beauty. A Californiac once made the statement to me that Californians considered themselves a little better than the rest of the country. I considered that the prize Californiacism until I heard the following from a woman-Californiac in Europe: "I saw nothing in all Italy," she said, "to compare with the Italian quarter of San Francisco."
Now I am by no means a rabid New Englander. I love the New England scene and I have the feeling for it that we all have for the place in which we played as children. Most New Englanders have a kind of temperamental shyness. They are still like the English from whom they are descended. It is difficult for them to talk about the things on which they feel most deeply. The typical New Englander would discuss his native place with no more ease than he would discuss his father and mother. In California I often had the impulse to break through that inhibiting silence - to talk about Massachusetts; the lovely, tender, tamed, domesticated country; its rolling, softly-contoured, maternal-looking hills; its forests like great green cathedral chapels; its broad, placid rivers, its little turbulent ones; its springs and runnels and waterfalls and rivulets all silver-shining and silver-sounding; the myriads of lakes and countless ponds that make the world look as though the blue sky had broken and fallen in pieces over the landscape; the spring when first the arbutus comes up pink and delicate through the snow and later the fields begin to glimmer with the white of white violets, to flash with the purple of purple ones, and the children hang May baskets at your door; the summer when the fields are buried knee-deep under a white drift of daisies or sealed by the gold planes of buttercups, and the old lichened stone walls are smothered in blackberry vines; the autumn with the goldenrod and blue asters; the woods like conflagrations burning gold and orange, flaming crimson and scarlet; and especially that fifth season, the Indian summer, when the vistas are tunnels of blue haze and the air tastes of honey and wine; then winter and the first snow (does anybody, brought up in snow country, ever outgrow the thrill of the first fluttering flakes?) the marvel of the fairy frost world into which the whole country turns.
Do you suppose I ever talked about Massachusetts? Not once. And so I have one criticism to bring against the Californiac. He is a person to whom you cannot talk about home. He grows restive the instant you get off the subject of California. Praise of any other place to his mind implies a criticism of California.
On the other hand, that frenzied patriotism has its wonderful and its beautiful side. It is a result partly of the startling beauty and fecundity of California and partly of a geographical remoteness and sequestration which turned the Californians in on themselves for everything. To it is due much of the extraordinary development of California. For to the average Californian, the best is not only none too good for California, but she can have nothing else. Californians even those not suffering from an offensive case of Californoia - speak of their State in reverential terms. To hear Maud Younger - known everywhere as the "millionaire waitress" and the most devoted labor-fan in the country - pronounce the word California, should be a lesson to any actor in emotional sound values. The thing that struck me most on my first visit to California was that boosting instinct. In store windows everywhere, I saw signs begging the passer-by to root for this development project or that. Several years ago, passing down Market street, I ran into a huge crowd gathered at the Lotta Fountain. I stopped to investigate. Moving steadily from a top to a lower window of one of the newspaper offices, as though unwound from a reel, ran a long strip of paper covered with a list of figures. To this list, new figures were constantly added. They were the sums of money being subscribed at that very moment for the Exposition. Applause and cheers greeted each additional sum. That was the financial germ from which grew the wonderful Arabian Nights city by the bay. It was typically Californian - that scene - and typically Californian the spirit back of it. And four years later, when the outbreak of the war brought temporary panic, there was no diminution in that spirit. Whether it was a "Buying-Day," a "Beach Day," an "Automomobile Parade," a "Prosperity Dinner," San Francisco was always ready to insist that everything was going well. It was the same spirit