We have normally nothing
in England to compare with it. Nor can we have even our Earl's Court
exhibition imitations of it so long as coal is so rare and costly. But
though we had the driving power for the electricity we could never get
such brilliance, for the clear American atmosphere is an essential ally.
In our humid airs all the diamond glints would be blurred.
For the purest beauty of traceries of light against a blue background
one must go, however, not to Broadway, which is too bizarre, but to Luna
Park on Coney Island. Odd that it should be there, in that bewildering
medley of sound and restlessness, that an extreme of loveliness should
be found; but I maintain that it is so, that nothing more strangely and
voluptuously beautiful could be seen than all those minarets and domes,
with their lines and curves formed by myriad lamps, turning by contrast
the heavens into an ocean of velvet blue, mysterious and soft and
profound.
Only periodically--when we have exhibitions at Earl's Court or at
Olympia--is there in England anything like Coney Island. At Blackpool in
August, and on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holidays, a corresponding spirit
of revelry is attempted, but it is not so natural, and is vitiated by a
self-conscious determination to be gay and by not a little vulgarity.
The revellers of Steeplechase Park seemed to me to be more genuine even
than the crowds that throng the Fete de Neuilly; and a vast deal
happier.
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