were more country faces and country garbs to be seen, though it was
still, on the whole, a regular-featured and well-dressed crowd, with
still very few but American visages. It seemed to be also a very
frugal-minded crowd, and to spend little upon the refreshments and
amusements provided for it. In these, oddly enough, there was nothing
of the march of mind to be observed; they Were the refreshments and
amusements of a former generation. I think it would not be extravagant
to say that there were tons of pie for sale in a multitude of booths,
with lemonade, soda-water, and ice-cream in proportion; but I doubt if
there was a ton of pie sold, and towards the last the venerable pastry
was quite covered with dust. Neither did people seem to care much for
oranges or bananas or peanuts, or even pop-corn,--five cents a package
and a prize in each package. Many booths stood unlet, and in others the
pulverous ladies and gentlemen, their proprietors, were in the enjoyment
of a leisure which would have been elegant if it had not been forced.
There was one shanty, not otherwise distinguished from the rest,
in which French soups were declared to be for sale; but these alien
pottages seemed to be no more favored than the most poisonous of our
national viands. But perhaps they were not French soups, or perhaps
the vicinage of the shanty was not such as to impress a belief in their
genuineness upon people who like French soups. Let us not be too easily
disheartened by the popular neglect of them. If the daring reformer who
inscribed French soups upon his sign will reappear ten years hence, we
shall all flock to his standard. Slavery is abolished; pie must follow.
Doubtless in the year 1900, the managers of a Jubilee would even let the
refreshment-rooms within their Coliseum to a cook who would offer the
public something not so much worse than the worst that could be found in
the vilest shanty restaurant on the ground. At the Jubilee, of which
I am writing, the unhappy person who went into the Coliseum rooms to
refresh himself was offered for coffee a salty and unctuous wash, in
one of those thick cups which are supposed to be proof against the hard
usage of “guests” and scullions in humble eating-houses, and which are
always so indescribably nicked and cracked, and had pushed towards him
a bowl of veteran sugar, and a tin spoon that had never been cleaned in
the world, while a young person stood by, and watched him, asking, “Have
you paid for that coffee?”
The side-shows and the other amusements seemed to have addressed
themselves to the crowd with the same mistaken notion of its character
and requirements; though I confess that I witnessed their neglect with
regret, whether from a feeling that they were at least harmless, or an
unconscious sympathy with any quite idle and unprofitable thing. Those
rotary, legless horses, on which children love to ride in a perpetual
sickening circle,--the type of all our effort,--were nearly always
mounted; but those other whirligigs, or whatever the dreadful circles
with their swinging seats are called, were often so empty that they must
have been distressing, from their want of balance, to the muscles as
well as the spirits of their proprietors. The society of monsters was
also generally shunned, and a cow with five legs gave milk from the
top of her back to an audience of not more than six persons. The public
apathy had visibly wrought upon the temper of the gentleman who lectured
upon this gifted animal, and he took inquiries in an ironical manner
that contrasted disadvantageously with the philosophical serenity of the
person who had a weighing-machine outside, and whom I saw sitting in the
chair and weighing himself by the hour, with an expression of profound
enjoyment. Perhaps a man of less bulk could not have entered so keenly
into that simple pleasure.
There was a large tent on the grounds for dramatical entertainments,
with six performances a day, into which I was lured by a profusion of
high-colored posters, and some such announcement, as that the beautiful
serio-comic danseuse and world-renowned cloggist, Mile. Brown, would
appear. About a dozen people were assembled within, and we waited a
half-hour beyond the time announced for the curtain to rise, during
which the spectacle of a young man in black broadcloth, eating a
cocoa-nut with his pen-knife, had a strange and painful fascination. At
the end of this half-hour, our number was increased to eighteen, when
the orchestra appeared,--a snare-drummer and two buglers. These took
their place at the back of the tent; the buglers, who were Germans, blew
seriously and industriously at their horns; but the native-born citizen,
who played the drum, beat it very much at random, and in the mean time
smoked a cigar, while his humorous friend kept time upon his shoulders
by striking him there with a cane. How long this might have lasted, I
cannot tell; but, after another delay, I suddenly bethought me whether
it were not better not to see Mile. Brown, after all? I rose, and
stole softly out behind the rhythmic back of the drummer; and the
world-renowned cloggist is to me at this moment only a beautiful
dream,--an airy shape fashioned upon a hint supplied by the engraver of
the posters.
What, then, did the public desire, if it would not smile upon the
swings, or monsters, or dramatic amusements that had pleased so long?
Was the music, as it floated out from the Coliseum, a sufficient
delight? Or did the crowd, averse to the shows provided for it, crave
something higher and more intellectual,--like, for example, a course
of the Lowell Lectures? Its general expression had changed: it had no
longer that entire gayety of the first day, but had taken on something
of the sarcastic pathos with which we Americans bear most oppressive and
fatiguing things as a good joke. The dust was blown about in clouds; and
here and there, sitting upon the vacant steps that led up and down
among the booths, were dejected and motionless men and women, passively
gathering dust, and apparently awaiting burial under the accumulating
sand,--the mute, melancholy sphinxes of the Jubilee, with their unsolved
riddle, “Why did we come?” At intervals, the heavens shook out fierce,
sudden showers of rain, that scattered the surging masses, and sent them
flying impotently hither and thither for shelter where no shelter was,
only to gather again, and move aimlessly and comfortlessly to and fro,
like a lost child.
So the multitude roared within and without the Coliseum as I turned
homeward; and yet I found it wandering with weary feet through the
Garden, and the Common, and all the streets, and it dragged its
innumerable aching legs with me to the railroad station, and, entering
the train, stood up on them,--having paid for the tickets with which the
companies professed to sell seats.
How still and cool and fresh it was at our suburban station, when
the train, speeding away with a sardonic yell over the misery of the
passengers yet standing up in it, left us to walk across the quiet
fields and pleasant lanes to Benicia Street, through groups of little
idyllic Irish boys playing base-ball, with milch-goats here and there
pastorally cropping the herbage!
In this pleasant seclusion I let all Bunker Hill Day thunder by, with
its cannons, and processions, and speeches, and patriotic musical
uproar, hearing only through my open window the note of the birds
singing in a leafy coliseum across the street, and making very fair
music without an anvil among them. “Ah, signer!” said one of my doorstep
acquaintance, who came next morning and played me Captain Jenks,--the
new air he has had added to his instrument,--“never in my life, neither
at Torino, nor at Milano, nor even at Genoa, never did I see such
a crowd or hear such a noise, as at that Colosseo yesterday. The
carriages, the horses, the feet! And the dust, O Dio mio! All those
millions of people were as white as so many millers!”
On the afternoon of the fourth day the city looked quite like the mill
in which these millers had been grinding; and even those unpromisingly
elegant streets of the Back Bay showed mansions powdered with dust
enough for sentiment to strike root in, and so soften them with its
tender green against the time when they shall be ruinous and sentiment
shall swallow them up. The crowd had perceptibly diminished, but it was
still great, and on the Common it was allured by a greater variety
of recreations and bargains than I had yet seen there. There were, of
course, all sorts of useful and instructive amusements,--at least a
half-dozen telescopes, and as many galvanic batteries, with numerous
patented inventions; and I fancied that most of the peddlers and
charlatans addressed themselves to a utilitarian spirit supposed to
exist in us. A man that sold whistles capable of reproducing exactly the
notes of the mocking-bird and the guinea-pig set forth the durability of
the invention. “Now, you see this whistle, gentlemen. It is rubber, all
rubber; and rubber, you know, enters into the composition of a great
many valuable articles. This whistle, then, is entirely of rubber,--no
worthless or flimsy material that drops to pieces the moment you put
it to your lips,”--as if it were not utterly desirable that it should.
“Now, I'll give you the mocking-bird, gentlemen, and then I'll give you
the guinea-pig, upon this pure _India_-rubber whistle.” And he did so
with a great animation,--this young man with a perfectly intelligent and
very handsome face. “Try your strength, and renovate your system!” cried
the proprietor of a piston padded at one end and working into a cylinder
when you struck it a blow with your fist; and the owners of lung-testing
machines called upon you from every side to try their consumption
cure; while the galvanic-battery men sat still and mutely appealed with
inscriptions attached to their cap-visors declaring that electricity
taken from their batteries would rid you of every ache and pain known
to suffering humanity. Yet they were themselves as a class in a state
of sad physical disrepair, and one of them was the visible prey of
rheumatism which he might have sent flying from his joints with a single
shock. The only person whom I saw improving his health with the
battery was a rosy-faced school-boy, who was taking ten cents' worth
of electricity; and I hope it did not disagree with his pop-corn and
soda-water.
Farther on was a picturesque group of street-musicians,--violinists
and harpers; a brother and four sisters, by their looks,--who afforded
almost the only unpractical amusement to be enjoyed on the Common,
though not far from them was a blind old negro, playing upon an
accordion, and singing to it in the faintest and thinnest of black
voices, who could hardly have profited any listener. No one appeared to
mind him, till a jolly Jack-tar with both arms cut off, but dressed in
full sailor's togs, lurched heavily towards him. This mariner had got
quite a good effect of sea-legs by some means, and looked rather drunker
than a man with both arms ought to be; but he was very affectionate,
and, putting his face close to the other's, at once entered into talk
with the blind man, forming with him a picture curiously pathetic
and grotesque. He was the only tipsy person I saw during the Jubilee
days,--if he was tipsy, for after all they may have been real sea-legs
he had on.
If the throng upon the streets was thinner, it was greater in the
Coliseum than on the second day; and matters had settled there into
regular working order. The limits of individual liberty had been better
ascertained; there was no longer any movement in the aisles, but a
constant passing to and fro, between the pieces, in the promenades. The
house presented, as before, that appearance in which reality forsook
it, and it became merely an amazing picture. The audience supported the
notion of its unreality by having exactly the character of the former
audiences, and impressed you, despite its restlessness and incessant
agitation, with the feeling that it had remained there from the first
day, and would always continue there; and it was only in wandering upon
its borders through the promenades, that you regained possession of
facts concerning it. In no other way was its vastness more observable
than in the perfect indifference of persons one to another. Each found
himself, as it were, in a solitude; and, sequestered in that wilderness
of strangers, each was freed of his bashfulness and trepidation. Young
people lounged at ease upon the floors, about the windows, on the upper
promenades; and in this seclusion I saw such betrayals of tenderness as
melt the heart of the traveller on our desolate railway trains,--Fellows
moving to and fro or standing, careless of other eyes, with their arms
around the waists of their Girls. These were, of course, people who
had only attained a certain grade of civilization, and were not
characteristic of the crowd, or, indeed, worthy of notice except as
expressions of its unconsciousness. I fancied that I saw a number of
their class outside listening to the address of the agent of a patent
liniment, proclaimed to be an unfailing specific for neuralgia and
headache,--if used in the right spirit. “For,” said the orator, “we like
to cure people who treat us and our medicine with respect. Folks say,
'What is there about that man?--some magnetism or electricity.' And the
other day at New Britain, Connecticut, a young man he come up to the
carriage, sneering like, and he tried the cure, and it didn't have the
least effect upon him.” There seemed reason in this, and it produced a
visible sensation in the Fellows and Girls, who grinned sheepishly at
each other.
Why will the young man with long hair force himself at this point into
a history, which is striving to devote itself to graver interests? There
he stood with the other people, gazing up at the gay line of streamers
on the summit of the Coliseum, and taking in the Anvil Chorus with the
rest,--a young man well-enough dressed, and of a pretty sensible face,
with his long black locks falling from under his cylinder hat, and
covering his shoulders. What awful spell was on him, obliging him to
make that figure before his fellow-creatures? He had nothing to sell;
he was not, apparently, an advertisement of any kind. Was he in the
performance of a vow? Was he in his right mind? For shame! a person may
wear his hair long if he will. But why not, then, in a top-knot? This
young man's long hair was not in keeping with his frock-coat and his
cylinder hat, and he had not at all the excuse of the old gentleman
who sold salve in the costume of Washington's time; one could not take
pleasure in him as in the negro advertiser, who paraded the grounds in
a costume compounded of a consular _chapeau bras_ and a fox-hunter's
top-boots--the American diplomatic uniform of the future--and offered
every one a printed billet; he had not even the attraction of the
cabalistic herald of Hunkidori. Who was he? what was he? why was he?
The mind played forever around these questions in a maze of hopeless
conjecture.
Had all those quacks and peddlers been bawling ever since Tuesday to
the same listeners? Had all those swings and whirligigs incessantly
performed their rounds? The cow that gave milk from the top of her back,
had she never changed her small circle of admirers, or ceased her flow?
And the gentleman who sat in the chair of his own balance, how much did
he weigh by this time? One could scarcely rid one's self of the illusion
of perpetuity concerning these things, and I could not believe that,
if I went back to the Coliseum grounds at any future time, I should not
behold all that vast machinery in motion.
It was curious to see, amid this holiday turmoil men pursuing the
ordinary business of their lives, and one was strangely rescued and
consoled by the spectacle of the Irish hod-carriers, and the bricklayers
at work on a first-class swell-front residence in the very heart of the
city of tents and booths. Even the locomotive, being associated with
quieter days and scenes, appealed, as it whistled to and fro upon the
Providence Railroad, to some soft bucolic sentiment in the listener, and
sending its note, ordinarily so discordant, across that human uproar,
seemed to “babble of green fields.” And at last it wooed us away, and
the Jubilee was again swallowed up by night.
There was yet another Jubilee Day, on the morning of which the thousands
of public-school children clustered in gauzy pink and white in the place
of the mighty chorus, while the Coliseum swarmed once more with people
who listened to those shrill, sweet pipes blending in unison; but I
leave the reader to imagine what he will about it. A week later, after
all was over, I was minded to walk down towards the Coliseum, and behold
it in its desertion. The city streets were restored to their wonted
summer-afternoon tranquillity; the Public Garden presented its customary
phases of two people sitting under a tree and talking intimately
together on some theme of common interest,--“Bees, bees, was it your
hydromel?”--of the swans sailing in full view upon the little lake of
half a dozen idlers hanging upon the bridge to look at them; of
children gayly dotting the paths here and there; and, to heighten the
peacefulness of the effect, a pretty, pale invalid lady sat, half in
shade and half in sun, reading in an easy-chair. Far down the broad
avenue a single horse-car tinkled slowly; on the steps of one of the
mansions charming little girls stood in a picturesque group full of the
bright color which abounds in the lovely dresses of this time. As I drew
near the Coliseum, I could perceive the desolation which had fallen
upon the festival scene; the white tents were gone; the place where the
world-renowned cloggist gave her serio-comic dances was as lonely and
silent as the site of Carthage; in the middle distance two men were
dismantling a motionless whirligig; the hut for the sale of French soups
was closed; farther away, a solitary policeman moved gloomily across the
deserted spaces, showing his dark-blue figure against the sky. The vast
fabric of the Coliseum reared itself, hushed and deserted within and
without; and a boy in his shirt-sleeves pressed his nose against one
of the painted window-panes in the vain effort to behold the nothing
inside. But sadder than this loneliness surrounding the Coliseum, sadder
than the festooned and knotted banners that drooped funereally upon its
facade, was the fact that some of those luckless refreshment-saloons
were still open, displaying viands as little edible now as carnival
_confetti_. It was as if the proprietors, in an unavailing remorse, had
condemned themselves to spend the rest of their days there, and, slowly
consuming their own cake and pop-corn, washed down with their own
soda-water and lemonade, to perish of dyspepsia and despair.
SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS.
Any study of suburban life would be very imperfect without some glance
at that larger part of it which is spent in the painful pursuit
of pleasures such as are offered at the ordinary places of public
amusement; and for this reason I excuse myself for rehearsing certain
impressions here which are not more directly suburban, to say the least,
than those recounted in the foregoing chapter.
It became, shortly after life in Charlesbridge began, a question whether
any entertainment that Boston could offer were worth the trouble of
going to it, or, still worse, coming from it; for if it was misery to
hurry from tea to catch the inward horse-car at the head of the street,
what sullen lexicon will afford a name for the experience of getting
home again by the last car out from the city? You have watched the clock
much more closely than the stage during the last act, and have left your
play incomplete by its final marriage or death, and have rushed up to
Bowdoin Square, where you achieve a standing place in the car, and,
utterly spent as you are with the enjoyment of the evening, you endure
for the next hour all that is horrible in riding or walking. At the end
of this time you declare that you will never go to the theatre again;
and after years of suffering you come at last to keep your word.
While yet, however, in the state of formation as regards this
resolution, I went frequently to the theatre--or school of morals,
as its friends have humorously called it. I will not say whether any
desired amelioration took place or not in my own morals through the
agency of the stage; but if not enlightened and refined by everything I
saw there, I sometimes was certainly very much surprised. Now that I go
no more, or very, very rarely, I avail myself of the resulting
leisure to set down, for the instruction of posterity, some account of
performances I witnessed in the years 1868-69, which I am persuaded will
grow all the more curious, if not incredible, with the lapse of time.
There is this satisfaction in living, namely, that whatever we do will
one day wear an air of picturesqueness and romance, and will win the
fancy of people coming after us. This stupid and commonplace present
shall yet appear the fascinating past; and is it not a pleasure to think
how our rogues of descendants--who are to enjoy us aesthetically--will
be taken in with us, when they read, in the files of old newspapers,
of the quantity of entertainment offered us at the theatres during the
years mentioned, and judge us by it? I imagine them two hundred years
hence looking back at us, and sighing, “Ah! there was a touch of the
old Greek life in those Athenians! How they loved the drama in the
jolly Boston of that day! That was the golden age of the theatre: in the
winter of 1868-69, they had dramatic performances in seven places, of
every degree of excellence, and the managers coined money.” As we always
figure our ancestors going to and from church, they will probably figure
us thronging the doors of theatres, and no doubt there will be some
historical gossiper among them to sketch a Boston audience in 1869, with
all our famous poets and politicians grouped together in the orchestra
seats, and several now dead introduced with the pleasant inaccuracy and
uncertainty of historical gossipers. “On this night, when the beautiful
Tostée reappeared, the whole house rose to greet her. If Mr. Alcott was
on one of his winter visits to Boston, no doubt he stepped in from the
Marlborough House,--it was a famous temperance hotel, then in the height
of its repute,--not only to welcome back the great actress, but to enjoy
a chat between the acts with his many friends. Here, doubtless, was seen
the broad forehead of Webster; there the courtly Everett, conversing in
studied tones with the gifted So-and-so. Did not the lovely Such-a-one
grace the evening with her presence? The brilliant and versatile Edmund
Kirke was dead; but the humorous Artemas Ward and his friend Nasby
may have attracted many eyes, having come hither at the close of their
lectures, to testify their love of the beautiful in nature and art;
while, perhaps, Mr. Sumner, in the intervals of state cares, relaxed
into the enjoyment,” etc. “Vous voyez bien le tableau!”
That far-off posterity, learning that all our theatres are filled every
night, will never understand but we were a theatre-going people in the
sense that it is the highest fashion to be seen at the play; and yet we
are sensible that it is not so, and that the Boston which makes itself
known in civilization--in letters, politics, reform--goes as little to
the theatre as fashionable Boston.