There is no pleasure so satisfactory as that which an old man feels in
recalling the happiness of his youthful days. All the woes, and
anxieties, and heart-burnings that disturbed him then have passed away,
and left only sunshine in his memory. And this retrospective enjoyment
increases with every repeated recital, until the scenes of his past
history assume a magnificence of proportion that bewilders the narrator
himself, and sets the principles of optics entirely at defiance. It is
with old men looking back on their younger days very much as it is with
people who have travelled in Italy. How do the latter glow with
enthusiasm at the mere mention of the "land of the melting lyre and
conquering spear"! How do their eyes glisten as they tell of the time
when they mused among the broken columns of the Forum, or breathed the
air of ancient consecration under the majestic vaults of the old
basilicas, or walked along the shores of the world's most beautiful bay,
and watched the black form of Vesuvius striving in vain to tarnish with
its foul breath the blue canopy above it! They have forgotten their
squabbles with the _vetturini_, the draughtless chimneys in their
lodgings, and the dirty staircase that conducted to them; the fleas,
with all the other disagreeable accompaniments of Italian life, have
fled into oblivion; and Italy lives in their memories only as a land of
gorgeous sunsets, and of a history that dwarfs all other human annals.
And so it is with an old man looking back upon his youth: he forgets how
he cried over his arithmetic lessons; how unfilial his feelings were
when his governor refused him permission to set up a theatre in the
cellar; how sheepishly he slunk through all the back alleys on the day
when he first mounted a tail-coat and a hat; how unhappy he was when he
saw his heart's idol, Mary Smith, walking home from school with his
implacable foe, Brown; how his head used to ache after those _noctes
coenaeque deum_ with his club at the old Exchange Coffee House; and what
a void was created in his heart when his crony of cronies was ordered
off by a commission from the war department. There is no room in his
crowded memory for such things as these. Sitting by his fireside, as I
do now, he recalls his youth only as a season of bats and balls, and
marbles, of sleds, and skates, and bright buttons, and clean ruffled
collars, of Christmas cornucopias of hosiery, and no end of Artillery
Elections and Fourths of July, with coppers enough to secure the
potentiality of obtaining egg-pop to an alarming extent.
How he fires up if you mention the theatre to him! He will allow that
Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Warren are most excellent in their way; but bless
your simple heart, what is the stage now compared to what it was in the
first part of this century? And he is about right. It is useless for us,
who remember the old Federal Street playhouse, and the triumphs of Cooke
and the great Kean, to try to go to the theatre now. Our new theatre is
more stately and splendid than Old Drury was, but our players do not
reach my youthful standard. I miss those old familiar faces and voices
that delighted me in times long past, and the stage has lost most of its
charms. I can find my best theatrical entertainment here at home. I call
up from among the shadows that the flickering firelight casts upon the
wall, the tall, knightly figure of Duff, the brisk, busy, scolding Mrs.
Barnes, the sedate and judicious Dickson, the grotesque Finn, the
stately and elegant Mrs. Powell, looking like the personification of
tragedy, and bluff old Kilner, fat and pleasant to the sight, and with
that hearty laugh that made all who heard it love him.
What is the excitement occasioned by the Ellsler or Miss Lind compared
to that which attended the advent of the elder Kean? What crowds used to
beset the box office in the ten-footer next to the theatre, from the
earliest dawn until the opening! I often think, when I meet some of our
gravest and grayest citizens in their daily walks, what a figure they
cut now compared with the days when they were fighting their way into
the box office of the old theatre! Talk of enthusiasm! What are all our
political campaigns and public commemorations compared with that evening
during the last war with Great Britain, when Commodore Bainbridge came
into Boston Bay after his victory over the Java! That admirable actor,
the late Mr. Cooper, was playing Macbeth, and interrupted his
performance to announce the victory.
But, pardon me, I did not sit down here to lose myself in the
reminiscences of half a century ago. Let me try to govern this truant
pen, and keep it more closely to my chosen theme. Do you remember,
beloved reader, your second visit to the theatre? If you do, cherish it;
let it not depart from you, for in the days that are in store for you,
when age and infirmity shall stand guard over you, and you are obliged
to find all your pleasures by your fireside, the memory of your second
play will be very precious to you. You will find, on looking back to it
through a vista of sixty years or more, that all the pleasure you then
enjoyed was placed on the credit side of your account, and has been
increasing by a sort of moral compound interest during the long years
that you have devoted to delights less innocent, perhaps, and certainly
less satisfactory, or to the pursuit of objects far more fleeting and
unreal than those which then fascinated your youthful mind. I say your
"second play," for the first dramatic performance that the child
witnesses is too astonishing to afford him its full measure of
gratification. It is only after he has told his playmates all about it,
and imitated the wonderful hero who rescued the beautiful lady in white
satin, and dreamed of the splendour of the last great scene, when all
the persons of the drama stood in a semicircle, and the king, with a
crown of solid gold upon his head, addressed to the magnanimous hero the
thrilling words,--
"It is enough: the princess is thine own!"--
and all the characters struck impressive attitudes, and the curtain
descended upon a tableau lighted up by coloured fires of ineffable
brilliancy,--it is only after all these things have sunk deep into the
young mind, and he has resolved to write a play himself, and never to
rest satisfied until he can bring down the house with the best of the
actors he has seen, that he fully appreciates the entertainment which
has been vouchsafed to him.
What a charm invests the place where we made our first acquaintance with
the drama! It becomes an enchanted spot for us, and I doubt if the
greatest possible familiarity in after life can ever breed contempt for
it in our hearts. For my own part, I regarded the destruction of the old
theatre in Federal Street, and the erection of warehouses on its
hallowed site, as a positive sacrilege. And I cannot pass that spot,
even at this late day, without mentally recurring to the joys I once
tasted there. Perhaps some who read this may cherish similar sentiments
about the old Tremont Theatre, a place for which I had as great a
fondness as one can have for a theatre in which he did not see his first
play. The very mention of it calls up its beautiful interior in my
mind's eye,--its graceful proscenium, its chandeliers around the front
of the boxes, its comfortable pit, where I enjoyed so much good acting,
and all the host of worthies who graced that spacious stage. Mr. Gilbert
was not so fat in those days as he is now, nor Mr. Barry so gray. What a
picturesque hero was old Brough in the time when the Woods were in their
golden prime, and the appearance of the Count Rodolpho on the distant
bridge was the signal for a tempest of applause! Who can forget how Mr.
Ostinelli's bald head used to shine, as he presided over that excellent
orchestra, or how funny old Gear's serious face looked, as he peered at
the house through those heavy, silver-bowed spectacles? Perhaps for some
of my younger readers the stage of the Museum possesses similar charms,
and they will find themselves, years hence, looking back to the happy
times when Mr. Angier received their glittering quarters, and they
hastened up stairs, to forget the wanderings of AEneas and the
perplexities of arithmetic in the inimitable fun of that prince-regent
among comedians, Mr. William Warren.
But wherever we may have commenced our dramatic experience, and whatever
that experience may have been, we have all, I am sure, felt the
influence of that mysterious charm which hangs over the stage. We have
all felt that keen curiosity to penetrate to the source of so much
enjoyment. Who has not had a desire to enter that mysterious door which
conducts the "sons of harmony" from the orchestra to the unknown depths
below the stage? It looks dark and forbidding, but we feel instinctively
that it is not so, when we see our venerated uncle Tom Comer carrying
his honest and sunshiny face through it so often. That green curtain,
which is the only veil between us and a world of heroes and
demigods,--how enviously do we look at its dusty folds! With what
curiosity do we inspect the shoes of varied make and colour that figure
in the little space between it and the stage! How do we long to follow
the hero who has strutted his hour upon the stage into the invisible
recesses of P. S. and O. P., and to know what takes the place of the
full audience and the glittering row of footlights in his eyes when he
makes his exit at the "upper entrance, left," or through the "door in
flat" which always moves so noiselessly on its hinges! I think that the
performance of the "Forty Thieves" awakened this curiosity in my mind
more than almost any other play. I longed to inspect more closely those
noble steeds that came with such a jerky gait over the distant
mountains, and to know what produced the fearful noise that attended the
opening of the robbers' cave. I believed in the untold wealth that was
said to be heaped up in those subterranean depths, but still I wished to
look at the "cavern goblet," and see how it compared with those that
adorned the cases of my excellent friends, Messrs. Davis and Brown. I
can never forget the thrill that shot through me when Morgiana lifted
the cover of the oil jar, and the terrible question, "Is it time?"
issued from it, nor my admiration for the fearlessness of that
self-possessed maiden when she answered with those eloquent and
memorable words, "Not yet, but presently." I believed that the compound
which Morgiana administered so freely to the concealed banditti was just
as certain death to every mother's son of them as M. Fousel's _Pabulum
Vitae_ is renewed life to the consumptives of the present day; and,
years after I had supposed my recollections of the "Forty Thieves" to
have become very misty and shapeless, I found myself startled in an
oriental city by coming upon several oil jars of the orthodox model, and
I astonished the malignant and turbaned Turk who owned them, and amused
the companion of my walks about Smyrna, by lifting the lid of one of
them, and quoting the words of Morgiana. My superstitions concerning
that pleasant old melodrama of course passed away when I became familiar
with the theatre by daylight, and was accustomed to exchange the
compliments of the morning with the estimable gentleman who played
Hassarac; but the illusion of its first performance has never been
entirely blotted from my mind.
Some years ago it was my privilege to visit a place which is classical
to every lover of the drama and its literature. Drury Lane Theatre, now
that its ancient rival, Covent Garden, has passed away, and been
replaced by a house exclusively devoted to the lyric muse, is the only
theatre of London which is associated in every mind with that host of
geniuses who have illustrated dramatic art from the times of Garrick to
our own. That gifted and versatile actor, Mr. Davenport, who stands as
high in the favour of the English as of the American public, conducted
me through that immense establishment. We entered the door, which I had
often looked at with curiosity as I passed through the long colonnade of
the theatre, encountering several of those clean-shaven personages in
clothes that would be much refreshed if they were allowed to take a nap,
and, after traversing two or three dark corridors, found ourselves upon
the stage. The scene of so many triumphs as have there been achieved is
not without its attractions, even though it may look differently _en
deshabille_ from what it does in the glitter of gaslight. The stage
which has been trod by the Kembles, the Keans, Siddons, Macready, Young,
Palmer Dowton, Elliston, Munden, Liston, and Farren, is by no means an
ordinary combination of planks. We know, for Campbell has told us, that
"----by the mighty actor brought,
Illusion's perfect triumphs come;
Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And sculpture to be dumb."
Yet what a shadowy, intangible thing the reputation of a great actor
would seem to be! We simply know of him that in certain characters his
genius held the crowded theatre in willing thraldom, and made the hearts
of hundreds of spectators throb like that of one man. Those who felt his
wondrous power have passed away like himself; and all that remains of
him who once filled so large a space in the public eye is an ill-written
biography or a few hastily penned sentences in an encyclopaedia.
I was too full of wonder at the extent of that vast stage, however, to
think much of its ancient associations. Those lumbering stacks of
scenery that filled a large building at the rear of the stage, and ran
over into every available corner, told the story of the scenic efforts
of Old Drury during nearly half a century. How many dramas, produced
"without the slightest regard to expense," and "on a scale of
unparalleled splendour," must have contributed to the building up of
those mighty piles! The labyrinthine passages, the rough brick walls,
darkened by time and the un-Penelope-like spiders of Drury Lane, were in
striking contrast to the stage of that theatre as it appears from the
auditorium. The green-room had been placed in mourning for the "goodlie
companie" that once filled it, by the all-pervading, omnipresent smoke
of London. Up stairs the sight was still more wonderful. The space above
the stage was crowded full of draperies, and borders, and dusty ropes,
and wheels, and pulleys. Davenport enjoyed my amazement, and led me
through a darksome, foot-wide passage above the stage, through that
wilderness of cordage to the machinists' gallery. Take all the
rope-walks that you have ever visited, dear reader, and add to them the
running gear of several first-class ships, and you may obtain something
of an idea of the sight that then met my view. I have often heard an
impatient audience hiss at some trifling delay in the shifting of a
scene. If they could see the complicated machinery which must be set in
motion to produce the effects they desire, their impatience would be
changed to wonder at the skill and care which are so constantly exerted
and make so few mistakes. A glance into two or three of the
dressing-rooms, and a hasty visit to the dark maze of machinery beneath
the stage for working the trapdoors, completed my survey of Old Drury,
and I left its ancient walls with an increased respect for them, and a
feeling of self-gratulation that I was neither an actor nor a manager.
Not long after the above visit, I availed myself of an opportunity to
make a similar inspection of the _Theatre Francais_, in the Palais Royal
at Paris. The old establishment is not so extensive as that of Drury
Lane, but its main features are the same. There was an air of government
patronage about it which was apparent in its every department. The stage
entrance was through a long and well-lighted corridor that might have
led to a banking-house. Its green-room was a luxurious saloon, with a
floor of tessellated walnut and oak, waxed and polished so highly that
you could see your figure in it, and could with difficulty avoid
becoming a lay figure upon it. Its frescoed ceiling and gilded cornices,
its immense mirrors, and its walls covered with the portraits of several
generations of players, whose genius has made the very name of that
theatre venerable throughout the civilized world, were very different
from most of the green-rooms that I had seen. In the ancient colleges in
Italy the walls of the classrooms are hung with portraits of the
distinguished scholars, illustrious prelates, and sometimes of the
canonized saints, who once studied under their time-honoured roofs. In
the same spirit, the green-room of the _Theatre Francais_ is adorned
with busts and pictures; and the chairs that once were occupied by a
Talma, a Mars, and a Rachel are held in honour in the place where their
genius received its full development. The dressing-rooms of the
brilliant company which sustains the high reputation of that house are
in perfect keeping with its green-room. Each of the leading actors and
actresses has a double room, furnished in a style of comfortable
elegance. In the wardrobe and property rooms, the imperial patronage is
visible in the richness of the stage furniture and the profusion of
dresses made of the costliest silks and velvets. The stage, however, is
very much like that of any other theatre. There were the same obscure
passages, the same stupendous collection of intricate machinery, and the
same mysterious odour, as of gas and musty scenery, pervaded the whole.
I was permitted to view all its arcana, from the wheels that revolve in
dusty silence eighty or ninety feet above the stage to the ponderous
balance weights that dwell in the darkness of the second and third
stories below it; and enjoyed it so keenly that I regretted to be told
that I had seen all, and to find myself once more in the dazzling
sunshine of the Rue de Richelieu.
We are accustomed to speak of the theatre as a repository of shams and
unrealities, and to contrast it with the actualities of every-day life.
I hope that you will excuse me, gentle reader, for venturing to deny the
justice of all such figures of speech. They are as false as that common
use of the expressions "sunrise" and "sunset," when we know that the sun
does not really rise or set at all. No, it is the theatre that is the
reality, and the life we see on every side the sham. The theatre is all
that it pretends to be--a scenic illusion; and if we compare it to the
world around us, with its loving couples, my-dearing each other before
folks, and exchanging angry words over the solitary tea-tray,--its
politicians, seeking nominations and votes, and then reluctantly giving
up their private interests and comforts for the "public good," (as the
spoils of office are facetiously termed,)--its so-called ministers of
the gospel, who speak of an offer of increased salary as "an opportunity
to labour in a wider sphere of usefulness,"--and its funerals, where
there is such an imposing show of black crape and bombazine, but where
the genuine mourning commences only after the reading of the will of the
deceased,--I am sure that we shall be justified in concluding that the
fictitious affair which we try to dignify with the title of "real life"
is a far less respectable illusion than the mimic scene that captivates
us in the hours of relaxation.