XII

I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old

ricketty bill-board in Fifth Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as

ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazed

with the rich appeal of Mr. Barnum, whose "lecture-room," attached to

the Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical

bravery disavowed by its title. It was my rueful theory of those

days--though tasteful I may call it too as well as rueful--that on all

the holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentist's we attended as

a matter of course at Barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to be

able to; which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every time

the case. The case was too often, to my melancholy view, that W. J.,

quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of

joy with the easy Albert--_he_ at home there and master of the scene to

a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he

quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the aesthetic

bent and the determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, by the

general Barnum association and revelation. It was not, I hasten to add,

that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the

spring; for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense of

the connection?--the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid

bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the

lecture-room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in

especial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't be rapt

away before it did open. The impression appears to have been mixed; the

drinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular against

failure of food and of stage-fares, provision for transport to and fro,

being questions equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in its

essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources that even the

sustaining doughnut of the refreshment-counter would mock our desire and

the long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway and further, seem to

defy repetition. Those desperate days, none the less, affect me now as

having flushed with the very complexion of romance; their aches and

inanitions were part of the adventure; the homeward straggle,

interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt

contemplations--that for instance of the painted portrait, large as

life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the Broadway

Theatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal

beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the throat.

It was thus quite in order that I should pore longest, there at my

fondest corner, over the Barnum announcements--my present inability to

be superficial about which has given in fact the measure of my

contemporary care. These announcements must have been in their way

marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe

with its analytic "synopsis of scenery and incidents"; the synoptical

view cast its net of fine meshes and the very word savoured of

incantation. It is odd at the same time that when I question memory as

to the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall

of audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtain

rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only stand

out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess

and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles--I see that still as the blazonry

of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the

face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and

clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of

her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the

minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate

crisis that I forget. I forget Huon the serf, whom I yet recall

immensely admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but Miss

Mestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her

highest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast

protuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; I

say always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase,

the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly higher

a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though in

an age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage to

call itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe she

also usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there

was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and

eagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would

have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving

and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I

am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had

come, comparatively speaking, into her own--the sight of her,

accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly

moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region,

down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had

given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my

young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the

very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a

battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, _thing_ of the theatre,

very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the

orchestra might have been. It was but an effect doubtless of the heat

that she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though

somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketch

of a dressing-gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of

thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost

of "amusing the public" in a case of amusing it, as who should say,

every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in

"Love"--such contrasted combinations! But she carried her head very

high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades--had in fact

much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant

allowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hat

to her.

To which I must add the other of my two Barnumite scenic memories, my

having anciently admired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's Cabin, her

swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and her flight across the

ice-blocks of the Ohio, if I rightly remember the perilous stream,

intrepidly and gracefully performed. We lived and moved at that time,

with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel--which, recalling my prompt

and charmed acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute for The

Initials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-up

fiction. There was, however, I think, for that triumphant work no

classified condition; it was for no sort of reader as distinct from any

other sort, save indeed for Northern as differing from Southern: it knew

the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and

the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of

finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a

state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn't

sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and

laughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the

irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. Appreciation and

judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had

been no process--any process so related having in other cases _had_ to

be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written

book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and "noticed,"

probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without

having at least groped for that goal _as_ a book or by the exposure of

some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle

Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short cuts through the

medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily

roundabout it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, had

simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprising

creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it

did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without

exception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in

such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken

up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of

Mrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it

lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes

flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and

went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions.

These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than

that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first

exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering

achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the

National Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come

faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now

supposed to reward the curious. Our numerous attendance there under this

spell was my first experience of the "theatre party" as we have enjoyed

it in our time--each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to me

as the most recent of the same family. Precious through all indeed

perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small

encouraged state as a free playgoer--a state doubly wondrous while I

thus evoke the full contingent from Union Square; where, for that

matter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned. I am lost

again in all the goodnature from which small boys, on wild evenings,

could dangle so unchidden--since the state of unchiddenness is what

comes back to me well-nigh clearest. How without that complacency of

conscience could every felt impression so live again? It is true that

for my present sense of the matter snubs and raps would still tingle,

would count double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that I mirror

myself in these depths of propriety. The social scheme, as we knew it,

was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age--though I can't

sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest:

the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together,

the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and of

reach, doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionate

share. My appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied Uncle

Tom might have brooked certainly any comparison; I must have partaken

thoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separate

and so strong. It was a great thing to have a canon to judge by--it

helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings (for use ever

after) to the shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantage

I could be _sure_ my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, and

that my first "Cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy

of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the National

prosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just

as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with the

desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the

other, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated a

trifle more, to my perception, the real water of Mr. Crummles's pump.

They can't, even at that, have emulated it much, and one almost envies

(quite making up one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of an age

beguiled by arts so rude.

However, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in

order _not_ to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic

detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our

sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. To have

become thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one small

spectator at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of that

possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw

him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had

considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he

is himself at least interested in seeing the matter--as a progress in

which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his

wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for

_them_, ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the

tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be

legitimately and tastefully held to begin. Uncanny though the remark

perhaps, I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of our

party, under my tiny recording thumb, than in the beat of the drama and

the shock of its opposed forces--vivid and touching as the contrast was

then found for instance between the tragi-comical Topsy, the slave-girl

clad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become for Anglo-Saxon

millions the type of the absolute in the artless, and her little

mistress the blonde Eva, a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition of

pantalettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite suicidally,

with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of the

Mississippi steamboat which was to facilitate her all but fatal

immersion in the flood. Why should I have duly noted that no little

game on her part could well less have resembled or simulated an

accident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescued

from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had

plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes,

than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count

the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a

story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually

condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic

adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was

to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not

restless.

The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I insist on prolonging a

little further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliest

aesthetic seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands by which they

were sown, but practically appointed none the less to cause that

peculiarly flurried hare to run--flurried because over ground so little

native to it--when so many others held back. Is it _that_ air of romance

that gilds for me then the Barnum background--taking it as a symbol;

that makes me resist, to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty,

any impulse to translate into harsh terms any old sordidities and

poverties? The Great American Museum, the down-town scenery and aspects

at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then

flourishing?--why, they must have been for the most part of the last

meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant

face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor

vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in

effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous

and abnormal living--from the total impression of which things we

plucked somehow the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justice

proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at Niblo's, which represented

in our scheme the ideal evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day; so

that I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the rich

cover of night (which was the supreme charm,) how it comes that this

larger memory hasn't swallowed up all others. For here, absolutely,

_was_ the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else--grown in the

great garden of the Ravel Family and offered again and again to our deep

inhalation. I see the Ravels, French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists,

as representing, for our culture, pure grace and charm and civility; so

that one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt to

a race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal and

grateful a relation with them. They must have been, with their

offshoots of Martinettis and others, of three or four generations,

besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had our

particular friends and favourites among them; we seemed to follow them

through every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering steps

along the tight-rope as very small children kept in equilibrium by very

big balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in case of falls;) to

greet them as Madame Axel, of robust maturity and in a Spanish costume,

bounding on the same tense cord more heavily but more assuredly; and

finally to know the climax of the art with them in Raoul or the

Night-Owl and Jocko or the Brazilian Ape--and all this in the course of

our own brief infancy. My impression of them bristles so with memories

that we seem to have rallied to their different productions with much

the same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections;

and they were so much our property and our pride that they supported us

handsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional Albany

cousins. I remember how when one of these visitors, wound up, in honour

of New York, to the very fever of perception, broke out one evening

while we waited for the curtain to rise, "Oh don't you hear the cries?

They're _beating_ them, I'm sure they are; can't it be stopped?" we

resented the charge as a slur on our very honour; for what our romantic

relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from

behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some

acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible such

horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a

temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its

_abords_ of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side," must

have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What

more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate of

wondrous Martinetti Jocko, who, after befriending a hapless French

family wrecked on the coast of Brazil and bringing back to life a small

boy rescued from the waves (I see even now, with every detail, this

inanimate victim supine on the strand) met his death by some cruel

bullet of which I have forgotten the determinant cause, only remembering

the final agony as something we could scarce bear and a strain of our

sensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom of

exposing us.

These performers and these things were in all probability but of a

middling skill and splendour--it was the pre-trapeze age, and we were

caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something

sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own

humanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to

be renewed; but I light this taper to the initiators, so to call them,

whom I remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given us

a silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweet

names never thought of from then till now. Signor Leon Javelli, in whom

the French and the Italian charm appear to have met, who was he, and

what did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do I thus recall and

admire him? I am afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most domestic

of our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch of

the rope, into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, where

they leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to face

with us; but I dare say he bounded, brave Signor Leon, to the greatest

height of all: let this vague agility, in any case, connect him with

that revelation of the ballet, the sentimental-pastoral, of other years,

which, in The Four Lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson as in words

of one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll, would have affected us

as classic, I am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term of

appreciation. When we read in English story-books about the pantomimes

in London, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were the

only things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were masters

of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London

constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true,

though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking

liberties with policemen--these last evidently a sharp note in a

picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying

nothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and

columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover all

about clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when I

add them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circuses

under tents set up in vacant lots, with which New York appears at that

time to have bristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken for

most other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. And the

case is aggravated as I remember Franconi's, which we more or less

haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental

effect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with Roman chariot-races up

there among the deserts of Twenty-ninth Street or wherever; considerably

south, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations that

gave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since,

following--not _passibus aequis_, alas--the London structure of 1851,

this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the Paris Palais de

l'Industrie of 1855. Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those

occasions on which I dragged--if I must here once more speak for myself

only--after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember

being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and

very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome

buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was

somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over,"

which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in

some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly,

the Albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of big

European Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enormous Christ and the

Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of dark

maroon walls. If this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, and

we rose to it on the wings of wonder; never were we afterwards to see

great showy sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of whatever

period or school, without some renewal of that charmed Thorwaldsen hour,

some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweetness with

which the great white images had affected us under their supper-table

gaslight. The Crystal Palace was vast and various and dense, which was

what Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of impressions

that were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find

foreign words and practices; over which formidably towered Kiss's

mounted Amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that

day sublime and the glory of the place; so that I felt the journey back

in the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time)

a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Street

horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would

still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of which

one cultivated the seed.