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It infuses you with its working spirit. It inspires you with its fighting spirit. It asks you to work and fight with it. Massachusetts never permitted me to work or fight for it. Woman is as yet, in no real sense, a citizen there. And the result is that I love California as I love no other State, and San Francisco as I love no other city. I have no real criticism to bring against the Californiac.
If you mention the eastern winter to a Californiac, he tells you with great particularity of the dreadful storms he encountered there. Nothing whatever about the beauty of the snow. To a Californiac, snow and ice are more to be dreaded than hell-fire and brimstone. If you mention the eastern summer, he refers in scathing terms to the puny trees we produce, the inadequate fruits and vegetables.
He can reel off statistics which flatter California, not by the yard, but by the mile. And although he is proud enough of the ease and abundance with which things grow in California, he is even more proud of the size to which they attain. Gibes do not stop the Californiac, nor jeers give him pause. He believes that he was appointed to talk about California. And Heaven knows, he does.
You must not tell a Californiac that you love any place but California or that you have found beauty elsewhere. It's like breaking an engagement of marriage with a girl. It's like telling a child that there's no such person as Santa Claus. There's no tactful way of wording it. It simply can't be done.
Of course Paris has her network of Grand Boulevards but So the Californiac patronizingly discovers that New York has no Market Street, no Golden Gate Park, no Twin Peaks, no Mt. Tamalpais, no seals. Above all and this is the final thrust New York is flat. Somebody ought to invent a serum that renders the victim immune.
"I suppose you have them bigger in California," a young woman observed slyly to the Californiac. He did not smile; he only looked serious. Again, a Californiac mentioned to me that he had married an eastern woman. "Any eastern woman who marries a Californian," I observed in the spirit of badinage, "really takes a very great risk.
Her husband must always be comparing her with the beautiful women of his native state." "Yes," he answered, "I've often said to my wife, 'Lucy, you're a very pretty woman, but you ought to see some of our San Francisco girls." "I hope," I replied, "that she boxed your ears." He did not smile; he only looked pained. Once only have I seen the Californiac silenced.
I have discovered recently that the fact that I happened to be born in Rio Janeiro offers some amelioration. But nothing can entirely remove the handicap. So, I reiterate, indurated as I am to pity, the contemptuous attitude of the average Californiac did not at first annoy me. But after a while even I, calloused New Englander that I am, began to resent it.
To it, the Latin has contributed his art instinct; and not art instinct alone but in an infinity of combinations, the dignity of the Spaniard, the spirit of the French, the passion of the Italian. into All the foregoing is put in, not to make it harder, but because as a Californiac I couldn't help it, and to show you what, in the way of a State, the Native Son is accustomed to.
The Californiac is unable to talk about anything but California, except when he interrupts himself to knock every other place on the face of the earth. He looks with pity on anybody born outside of California and he believes that no one who has ever seen California willingly lives elsewhere. He himself often lives elsewhere, but he never admits that it is from choice.
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