ways? Every thing in the country, animate and inanimate, seems to
whisper, be serene, be kind, be happy. We grow tolerant there
unconsciously. We feel that in the city we are not only hard, but that
we by no means get the most out of life. We wonder if, after all, the
opera is better than the gushing melody which is ours for the
listening, whenever we will. We wonder if the silken sheen of the
Queen of Sheba fabrics, which our splendid store-windows display,
quite comes up to the autumnal splendor of the woods and mountains.
Our bones ache with the necessity of _spick-and-span-ness_
trammelling every movement indoors and out. And if, as Goethe asserts,
"the unconscious are alone complete," what chance do city people stand
of ever being rounded out, mentally and morally, where everybody is on
the _qui vive_ lest his neighbor outshine him? Where the _must haves_
multiply faster than rabbits, and grow so clamorous that we forget
there is a possibility of silencing their tyrant voices? It is so
long, too, since we have seen a drunkard, or a beggar, or a wretched
woman who dare not think of her sinless infancy, that these things
come to us with such an appalling newness, that we are shocked and
pained that we could ever have become accustomed to their presence, or
shall ever grow so again, by daily contact.
We almost dread ourselves. Our life seems puerile, and ignoble, and
cruel. It seems dreadful to take all this wretchedness, and waste of
life, as a matter of course, and that with which we have nothing to
do. We can't get used to the worn faces, the hurried footsteps, the
jostling indifference, the dust, and grime, and shabbiness through
which we plunge at every turn. Visions of moss-dripping rocks, huge
and grand; sweet, grassy roads, full of birds, and darting squirrels;
plentiful orchards and barns; stout, round, rosy children, tumbling
therein. Cows, with their rich burdens, going slowly homeward. The
farmer, brown and happy, sitting with his happy wife, in the low
doorway, at eventide, with _peace_ written upon their faces. Oh, we
had much rather think of these, and close our eyes on all this
maelstrom-misery, and tinselled grandeur. We feel stifled. We throw up
the window, and wonder what can ail us? for unrest, unquiet, and
strife seem to be in the very atmosphere that we breathe.
We want to get out of it, since the times are out of joint, and we
can't help _everything_, at least. We feel a cowardly desire to fly,
and simply enjoy ourselves; somewhere, anywhere, but in this Babel of
odds and ends; where everything is always beginning, and never is
finished; where mouths keep opening, faster than loaves of bread can
be baked; where churches are built so grand, that poor people can't
say a prayer in them; where rulers are elected by whiskey, instead of
wisdom; where, on the other side of the thin wall which frames your
home, the awful tragedies of life and death go on, without a thought
or care from you; where bitter tears fall, which you might, but
_don't_ assuage, because your neighbor, having enough of this world's
goods, is supposed to need nothing else.
Oh, I dare say I shall ossify in time; but at present these thoughts
keep me quite miserable after the serene, heavenly peace, and plenty,
and content of the country.
_BOSTON AND NEW YORK.--THE DIFFERENCE._
To live in Boston is to feel necessitated to wear your "Sunday
clothes" all through the week. To live in New York is to wear a loose
wrapper every day in the seven if you choose, without danger of being
sent to Coventry for so doing; not because Gotham admires your
wrapper, but because it has not time or inclination to overhaul so
minute a circumstance. In New York, you may wash your one pair of
stockings every night; or you may have seven changes of the same for
all New York will care about it. In Boston the pedigree of your
stockings, shawls, and bonnets is, by no contrivance of ingenuity,
hidden. In New York, good Christians can take a walk on Sunday, if it
_does not_ lead straight to the church door. In Boston, one perils his
salvation, and business standing, by taking a breath of air that has
not first blown round a pulpit. In Boston, a rich man or woman must,
in public places, keep within the talismanic circle marked out for
them, nor cross the line of demarkation at peril of non-recognition.
In New York a rich man or woman, by virtue of such position, feels at
liberty to take any loafer-ish jump over the customary fence that
inclination shall dictate. In Boston, the literary knee is not
literary, if it has not knelt before certain shrines. In New York, if
it is a _genuine_ knee, it may kneel or not kneel, so far as perilling
its safe foundation is concerned. In Boston, one who carries a parcel
is supposed not to be able to hire it sent. In New York one may carry
a double armful, without being suspected of living at the Five Points.
In Boston, people settle your claims to notice by inquiring if you
know Mr. This or visit Mrs. That. New York is more interested to know,
whether you are eligible by virtue of good manners, and general
jolliness, without reference to your tailor, hatter, or dressmaker. In
New York, if you choose only to board two servants instead of five,
and decline wasting your life in superintending their neglect of
upholstery, silver, and china, your intelligence, and irreproachable
grammar, are considered an equivalent. In Boston, under such
circumstances, the golden gate turns not on its hinges to let you into
the crystal city.
In other words, well as I love old Boston--and I do love it--I must
own that it is a snob of the first water. It makes a vast difference
what my opinion is, of course; but for all that, when Boston stays all
its life in Boston, it becomes fossilized, mummy-ized, swathed round
and round, from neck to heel, so that growth and expansion are morally
impossible.
Still, let Boston always be _born_ in Boston; but after it grows
vigorous, if it would stay vigorous, and not get the cramp of
self-conceit till it can't turn its "Boston neck," no matter how
loudly the wheel of progress is dashing past, let it migrate betimes
to New York; where it will get wholesomely thumped and bumped, and
its conservative corns pounced upon by the rushing crowd; who will
knock its respectable shiny hat over its eyes fifty times a day, all
the same as though it was not one of the "highly respectable
citizens," the state of whose kitchen-chimney is gravely reported to a
gaping universe, in their daily papers.
I don't know what would become of New York had it not its Paradise in
the Central Park. I never go there without blessing its originator,
and wishing it might be baptized with a more suggestive and prettier
name. But never mind names. In its lovely October dress, with its
sparkling lake, and drooping willows, its white swans, its lovely
velvet greensward; the myriads of sweet children alighting here and
there, in their bits of gay dresses, like little humming birds or
orioles, with happy mothers and fathers who have left their cares and
frets in the city, and come there to be young again for too brief an
hour, with the little ones; all this is a picture to feast the eye and
gladden the heart. In one respect Central Park might borrow a hint
from Boston Common. There the little children are allowed to run upon
the grass at all times; not on certain days of the month or week as in
Central Park. Said a bright little child of six the other day, when
asked if it would like to go to Central Park: "No! (emphatically)
_no_! I don't want _to waste my time going_ where they won't let me
step on the grass."
I sometimes wish that the policeman on duty there--so Argus-eyed to
arrest the tiny shoe, when temptation is too strong for childhood
which has always been cooped within city limits--would bestow some of
their notice upon the men-loafers who stretch themselves at full
length upon benches, occupying them to the exclusion of the children;
puffing vile tobacco, and making a spittoon of the path through which
ladies pass. It strikes me there might be an improvement on the
strain-at-a-gnat and swallow-a-camel system now in vogue there.
To return to Boston, which I always like to do occasionally: that city
needs not our Central Park drives, with its lovely and easily
accessible environs.
Here in New York one does not get to the environs until it is time to
come home; what with clogged streets and ferry-boats, and
Babel-hindrances too numerous to mention, such as scratched sides of
the pet carriage, and often-recurring "locked wheels," the fright of
prostrate horses, and the music of profanity, from the lips of hurried
and irate drivers of teams, and drays, in every direction. All this is
death to the repose one seeks in "a drive." Therefore we New Yorkers
love our quiet accessible Central Park. May its boundaries be
limitless as our tax bills! I couldn't say more. But my first
love--that dear old gem of a Boston Common! How happy were the
Saturday and Wednesday afternoons, when, under the blessed old school
system, before children were forced with grammar and geography, like
hot-house plants,--and we had short forenoon and _afternoon_ sessions,
with the exception of the above-mentioned holidays; how happy were the
afternoons I spent there, picking buttercups, and blowing off
thistledown, "to see if mothers wanted us at home;" which by the way,
was sure to be answered in the negative. And as to the Frog-Pond--what
was the Atlantic Ocean to that? On the Atlantic Ocean, they had
dreadful ship-wrecks; on the Boston Frog-Pond, we sent out our tiny
ventures, sure to find safe arrivals when we ran round the other side
of the Pond. And the big Tree--hooped all round like a modern
belle--with what big eyes of wonder we looked up into its branches, as
our elders told us wonderful stories of what it had seen in its long,
eventful life. And _now_ there are many big trees where _little_ ones
used to stand. Bless me! it shows how old I must be; just as it does
to go back there and meet in the street some radiant fresh young girl,
"the very image of her mother," with whom I used to play buttercups,
on Saturday afternoons. There are the same bright eyes, and lovely
hair, and smiling lips--bless me, how old I _really_ must be! and why
don't I walk with a stick?
And then I laugh as I look up at Boston State-House and its
awe-inspiring dome of our childhood; and recall the "members of the
Legislature," crawling up and down stairs and galleries like great
black ants; and think of the terrific "_Inquisition_"-doings which we
used to be sure must be going on, inside those wonderful halls, and to
which Blue-Beard's locked apartment was nothing. Oh, it is all very
funny now, when I go there; and though I sit on a seat in the Common,
and try to conjure all the myriad hours, and days, and years, between
then and now, and try to feel like the second Methusaleh I am, I
declare to you I never can do it,--but, instead, catch myself trotting
off home under the trees, as briskly as a squirrel. I suppose, some
day, I shall be dead though, for all that.
_ABOUT SOME THINGS IN NEW YORK WHICH HAVE INTERESTED ME._
The Battery was my first New York love. I shall never forget how
completely it took possession of me, or how magnetically it drew me
under the shade of its fine trees, to breathe the fresh sea-breeze,
and watch the graceful ships come and go, or lie calmly at anchor,
with every line so clearly defined against the bright sky. It was not
"the fashion," even then, to go there; so much the better. It is still
less the fashion now; but there I found myself, one bright Sunday not
long since, as I left the leafy loveliness of Trinity church, with its
sweet choral music still sounding in my ears.
Alas! for my dear old Battery. The sea is still there, to be sure--no
"corporation" can meddle with that; and still the picturesque ships
come and go; but the blades of grass grow fewer and thinner, and the
dirty, dusty paths call aloud for a "vigilance committee." What a sin
and shame! I exclaimed, that this loveliest spot in New York should
present so forlorn an appearance. Is there not room enough in the
purses and affections of New Yorkers for the Central Park and the
Battery too? In good truth, when I reflect upon it, I am jealous of
this new aspirant for the public favor. What is a _horse_ to a ship?
sacrilege though it be to say so. What is the gaudy, over-dressed
equestrian "swell" of fine ladies and fine "Afghans" to the majestic
_swell of the sea_? What are the stylish equipages and liveries, to
the picturesque crowd of newly-arrived emigrants, with their funny
little, odd-looking babies, their square, sturdy forms and bronze
faces, chattering happy greetings in an unknown tongue, and gazing
about them bewildered, at the strange sights and sounds of a great new
city; or sauntering up to Trinity church, and in happy ignorance of
novel steeples and creeds, dropping on their catholic knees in its
aisles, in thankful, devout recognition of their safe arrival in a new
country. What is the pretty toy-lake, and the hearse-like "gondola,"
and "the swans," and the posies, and the "bronze-eagle," and the
blue-coated policemen, who stand ready to handle rogues _with_ gloves,
and _white ones_ at that, to my dear old Battery, battered as it is.
I call capricious, fickle New York to order, for thus forsaking the
old love for the new. I demand an instant settlement of any protracted
dispute there may be on hand, as to "whose business it is" to renovate
the Battery, before it quite runs to seed, like the City Hall Park.
Not that _I_ won't keep on going to the Battery, though they should
build a small-pox hospital on it; for it is not my way to forsake an
old friend because he is shabby; but I _should_ like to be a female
General Butler, for one month, and put this business through in his
chain-lightning executive fashion.
It is a great plague to be a woman. I think I've said that before, but
it will bear repeating. Now the wharves are a great passion of mine; I
like to sit on a pile of boards there, with my boots dangling over the
water, and listen to the far-off "heave-ho" of the sailors in their
bright specks of red shirts, and see the vessels unload, with their
foreign fruits, and dream away a delicious hour, imagining the places
they came from; and I like to climb up the sides of ships, and poke
round generally, just where Mrs. Grundy would lay her irritating hand
on my arm and exclaim--"What _will_ people think of you?"
I am getting sick of people. I am falling in love with things. They
hold their tongues and don't bother.
* * * * *
I like also to stroll forth in New York, just at dusk, and see the
crowds hurrying homeward. The merchant, glad to turn his back at last
on both profit and loss. The laboring man with his tools and his empty
dinner pail. The weary working-girl, upon whose pallid face the fresh
wind comes, like the soft caressing touch of her mother's fingers. The
matron, with her little boy by the hand, talking lovingly, as he skips
by her side. The young man, full of hope for the future, looking, with
his eagle eye, and fresh-tinted cheek, as if he could defy fate. The
young girl, rejoicing in her prettiness, for the power it gives her
to win love and friends. The little beggar children, counting their
pennies on some doorstep, to see how much supper they will buy. The
small boot-blacks, who stoop less, after all, than many men whose feet
they polish, singing as merrily as if they were sure of a fortune on
the morrow. The bright glancing lights in the shop windows, touching
up bits of scarlet, and yellow, and blue, and making common beads and
buttons gleam like treasures untold. The lumbering omnibuses, crawling
up and down, heavy with their human freight. The rapid whirl of gay
carriages, with their owners. The little bits of conversation one
catches in passing, showing the depth or shallowness of the speakers.
The tones of their voices, musical or otherwise. The step, awkward or
graceful, and the sway of the figure. The fading tints of the sky, and
the coming out of the stars, that find it hard to get noticed among so
many garish lights. The interior glimpses of homes, before caution
draws the curtains. Now--some picture on the wall. Now--a maiden
sitting at the piano. Now--a child, with its cunning little face
pressed close against the window. Now--a loving couple, too absorbed
in the old--old--but ever _new_ romance, to think that their clasped
hands may be noted by the passer by. Now--a woman for whom your heart
aches; walking slowly; glancing boldly; going anywhere, poor thing!
but--_home_. Now--oh! the contrast--a husband and wife, with locked
arms, talking cheerily of their little home matters. Now--a policeman
with folded arms, standing on the corner, past being astonished at
anything. Now a florist's tempting window, whence comes a delicious
odor of tube-roses, and heliotrope, and geranium. There is a huge,
fragrant pyramid for some gay feast. There is a snowy wreath and
cross, white as the still, dead, face, above which they are soon to be
laid. There is a snowy coronal for a bride. There is a gay,
bright-tinted bouquet for an actress. Lingering, you look, and muse,
and spell out life's alphabet, by help of these sweet flowers; and now
you are jostled away by a policeman, dragging a wretched, drunken
woman to the station-house.
People talk of Niagara, and tell how impressive is its roar. What is
the roar of a dumb thing like that to the roar of a mighty city?
There, _souls_ go down, and alas! the shuttle of life flies so swiftly
that few stop to heed.
* * * * *
There are persons who can regard oppression and injustice without any
acceleration of the pulse. There are others who never witness it, how
frequent soever, without a desperate struggle against non-interference,
though prudence and policy may both whisper "it's none of your
business." I believe, as a general thing, that the shopkeepers of New
York who employ girls and women to tend in their stores, treat them
courteously; but now and then I have been witness to such brutal
language to them, in the presence of customers, for that which seemed
to me no offence, or at least a very trifling one, that I have longed
for a man's strong right arm, summarily to settle matters with the
oppressor. And when one has been the innocent cause of it, merely by
entering the store to make a purchase, the obligation to see the victim
safe through, seems almost imperative. The bad policy of such an
exhibition of unmanliness on the part of a shopkeeper would be, one
would think, sufficient to stifle the "damn you" to the blushing,
tearful girl, who is powerless to escape, or to clear herself from the
charge of misbehavior. When ladies "go shopping," in New York, they
generally expect to enjoy themselves; though Heaven knows, they must be
hard up for resources to fancy this mode of spending their time, when
it can be avoided. But, be that as it may, the most vapid can scarcely
fancy this sort of scene.
The most disgusting part of such an exhibition is, when the
gentlemanly employer, having got through "damning" his embarrassed
victim, turns, with a sweet smile and dulcet voice, to yourself, and
inquires, "what else he can have the pleasure of showing you?" You are
tempted to reply, "Sir, I would like you to show me that you can
respect womanhood, although it may not be hedged about with fine
raiment, or be able to buy civil words with a full purse." But you
bite your tongue to keep it quiet, and you linger till this Nero has
strolled off, and then you say to the girl, "I am so sorry to have
been the innocent cause of this!" and you ask, "Does he often speak
this way to you?" and she says, quietly, as she rolls up the ribbons
or replaces the boxes on the shelves, "Never in any other!" It is
useless to ask her why she stays, because you know something about
women's wages and women's work in the crowded city; and you know that,
till she is sure of another place, it is folly for her to think of
leaving this. And you think many other things as you say Good-morning
to her as kindly as you know how; and you turn over this whole
"woman-question" as you run the risk of being knocked down and run
over in the crowded thoroughfare through which you pass; and the
jostle, and hurry, and rush about you, seem to make it more hopeless
as each eager face passes you, intent on its own plans, busy with its
own hopes and fears--staggering perhaps under a load either of the
soul or body, or both, as heavy as the poor shop-girl's, and you gasp
as if the air about had suddenly become too thick to breathe. And then
you reach your own door-step, and like a guilty creature, face your
dressmaker, having forgotten to "match that trimming;" and you wonder
if you were to sit down and write about this evil, if it would deter
even one employer from such brutality to the shop-girls in his employ;
not because of the brutality, perhaps, but because by such a
short-sighted policy, he might often drive away from his store, ladies
who would otherwise be profitable and steady customers.
* * * * *
There is an animal peculiar to New-York, who infests every nook and
corner of it, to everybody's disgust but his own. He is a boy in
years, but a man in vicious knowledge. Every woman who is unfortunate
enough to be in his presence is simply a _she_--nothing more. He may
be seen making a charmed circle of expectoration, about the seat he
occupies in a ferry-boat, ferry-house, or car, while she stands half
fainting with exhaustion, in hearing distance of his coarse, prurient
remarks to some other little beast like himself. Pea-nuts are the
staple food of this creature, the shells of which he snaps dexterously
at those about him, when other means of amusement give out. When a
public conveyance has reached its point of destination, this animal is
the first to make an insane rush for egress, treading down young
children, and tearing ladies' clothing in his triumphal march.
Sometimes he stops on the way to "bung out the eye" of an offending
youngster, in so tight a place for a combat that somebody's corpse
seems inevitable. Terrified ladies, who would fain give him elbow room
if they had it, faintly ejaculate "Oh!" as they squeeze themselves
into the smallest breathable space; nor does he desist, till his
adversary is punished for the crime of existing, without this brute's
permission; he then emerges into the open street, settling his greasy
jacket and indescribable hat, muttering oaths, and squaring off
occasionally, as he looks behind him, as though he wished somebody
else was "spiling for a licking."
Often this animal may be found in the city parks; where the city
corporation generously furnishes about one seat to every hundred
children, and selecting the shadiest and most eligible, stretches
himself on it upon his stomach, while tired little children and their
female attendants, wander round in vain for a resting-place. Sometimes
sitting upon it, he will stretch out his leg so as to trip some
unwary, happy little child in passing; or perhaps he will suddenly
give a deafening shout in its ear, for the pleasure of hearing it cry;
or from a pocket well stuffed with pebbles will skillfully pelt its
clean clothes from a safe distance; and sometimes this animal, who
smokes at ten years like a man of forty, will address a passing lady
with such questions as these:
"Oh, aint _you_ bully? Oh, give _her_ room enough to walk!--oh, yes!"
Or, "Who's _your_ beau, Sally?" which last cognomen seems with them to
constitute a safe guess.