A few months ago the Easy Chair, seeing that changes were making in the
old State-house in Boston, one of the few Revolutionary and truly
historic buildings that remain, modestly ventured to regret it, and to
deplore the rapid disappearance of the venerable relics that had come
down to us from former generations. It suggested, or meant to suggest,
or might, could, would, or should have suggested, and will now, under
correction, suggest that there are very few buildings in New York which
recall that earlier epoch of the country. With a national and pardonable
logic, or association of ideas, the Easy Chair enlarged upon the value
of historical relics, of monuments, of visible traditions; and urged
possibly that it made life a little barer, a little less poetic, here
than it would otherwise be.
The temerity of such a strain of remark does not seem very extravagant;
it might indeed be put forth without any secret hostility to human
rights, to liberty, to the equality of men, and even without a sigh for
the repose of effete despotisms, and the traditions of outworn
monarchies. But not in the opinion of a certain excellent journal, which
we will agree to call the _Bugle of Freedom_, and which blew a sonorous
blast and rallying cry against the sentiments of the Easy Chair's mild
and innocent suggestions. "Monuments!" blew the _Bugle of Freedom_,
"monuments! remains, traditions! Old lumber and rotten timber! What in
the name of humanity have all these to do with a manly and patriotic
sentiment? Look at Egypt; what have the Pyramids done for the
civilization of Egypt? and we hope they are monuments, and ancient
enough. Look at Greece; the very queen-mother of the noblest
architecture! Look at Italy, teeming with 'storied monuments,' and what
do we see?" played the _Bugle of Freedom_. "What do we see? Do we wish
to be Egyptians, or modern Greeks, or Italians? Heaven forbid!" And the
resounding _Bugle_ seemed to execute roulades and runs and trills of
contempt at the unhappy Easy Chair, which was gazing vacantly at Egypt,
Greece, and Italy, as the _Bugle_ had directed.
Has the _Bugle of Freedom_ no drawer, or box, or casket of any kind, in
which there is, possibly, a yellow rose-bud, faded years and years ago,
in the days when it was a mere raw, shrill, piping flageolet? Has it no
bundle of letters, worn and parted at the seam; no knotted handkerchief
hidden out of sight, that shall never be more unknotted; no glove,
delicate and perfumed, still holding the form gained by soft pressure
upon a hand that shall never again be pressed. Is there no tree in the
garden, in a public square, by the road-side, in a green field by a
brook, under which, at every hour of the day and night, whenever and
with whomsoever it is passed, there stand a youth and maid who shall be
seen of men no more. Is there no house in town or country from whose
windows long vanished faces look when the _Bugle_ passes by, and in
whose unchanged rooms there are figures of old and young whose presence
is infinitely tender and chastening? Would life be richer and better and
more manly and inspiring for the _Bugle_ if all these were swept away?
Would the rights of man and eternal justice be more secure if some
morning Biddy should throw old letters, old rose-buds, and old
handkerchiefs into the fire, and the woodman would not spare the old
tree, and the haunted old household be burned up or pulled down? That is
the whole question.
It is merely a matter of association. It is in human nature; the Easy
Chair did not put it there. The mysterious delight in the most ancient
and inarticulate remains of human skill is the recognition by the soul
of man of its identity and endless continuation; and when you descend
from that Cyclopean work in the foundation of the wall of the temple at
Jerusalem to the knotted handkerchief and the yellow bud, you have only
come, O _Bugle_, to the individual delight in one's own experience, to
the unsealing of sweet fountains forgotten, and the quickening of
sanitary emotions. Surely when you were travelling and delighting
yourselves in Greece you did not come upon the plain of Marathon with
the same emotion that you cross the Hackensack meadows in the
Philadelphia train. But what was the difference? Byron's lines sang
themselves out of your mouth:
"The mountains look upon Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea."
Why did Byron's lines rise in your memory? Why did Byron write the
lines? Why was your glance eager and your mind pensive and your
imagination alert and your soul full of generous impulse when you stood
on the plain of Marathon? Because of the great conflict between two
civilizations long and long and long ago--the conflict of ideas of which
you are the child; the conflict of men essentially like you and your
brothers who fought at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
But if there be this subtle and over-powering influence in association
with a place, although it is earth and trees and grass and stone, is
there not the same charm and power in association with a building, a
tree, a stream? And while Marathon has not saved Greece from decline,
has it not been one of the natural influences that have pleaded against
national decay? And could Marathon and Salamis and Plataea have been
swept out of mind, would not the decline have been a thousandfold
hastened? Are we not stronger and braver for Bunker Hill and Saratoga,
for the sunken _Alabama_ and the Wilderness?
For the same reason, O loud-blowing _Bugle of Freedom_, that it would be
a national injury to forget the great deeds, it is in a lesser degree a
misfortune, although an inevitable one, gradually to lose from sight the
objects that recall them. Would it be a pity to shovel Bunker Hill into
Boston Back Bay? The battle of Bunker Hill would still remain in
history, the advantages of the Revolutionary War which it began would
still survive; but something we should have lost, and the argument that
urged the sparing of the hill would be sound and natural. So with the
old State-house. To destroy it or essentially to change it was in a
lesser degree to shovel Bunker Hill into the Back Bay.
The town of Stratford-upon-Avon seemed not to be conscious of the great
truth which the Easy Chair is expounding when it seemed disposed to let
the house of Shakespeare be sold, and even moved away. But England at
least was wiser, and the house remains. Some day--and the Easy Chair
dedicates the remark as a conciliatory conclusion to the _Bugle of
Freedom_--some day the Bugles of that same honored name will gaze at the
present printing-office, where a sympathetic Easy Chair trusts the jobs
are many and profitable, and will say, with emotion, "There the parental
_Bugle of Freedom_ blew its melodious note." It will do the Buglets no
harm, as they return to their palatial mansions, to reflect upon the
simple and sturdy origin of their prosperity.
The Easy Chair has the more feeling upon this subject because directly
opposite to the vast and many-windowed building from which it surveys
the world stands the old Walton House. Eighty years ago it was one of
the finest houses in town. The Square, where now business hums and
roars, then softly murmured with fashion, and this was the Faubourg St.
Honore of the republican city. The house still has the stately air of
the old regime. The stone pediment of the windows is elaborate and
arrests the idle eye. But it is now a sailors' boarding-house. The walls
are cracked, and the house has an indescribable aspect of shabbiness and
neglect. Surrounded by the mere mob of three-storied modern brick
buildings, it has evidently become reckless and lost to shame, like a
king's heir fallen into debauched and degraded courses. Long since
slighted and forgotten, its peers utterly gone, their descendants moved
miles away, and become a modern generation about the reservoir on Murray
Hill, the Easy Chair has yet more than once, late on a summer afternoon,
when trade had gone up-town, and silence and dreams were setting in,
beheld the old Walton House glancing covertly across the street at our
modern, many-windowed, bustling palace of busy traffic with a look of
high-born haughtiness and contempt. "There may be trade going on within
my walls," it seems to say as it gazes, "but I am innocent of it. I was
not built for trade, at least." And then the Easy Chair, with its own
eyes fixed upon the cracked and leaning walls, seems to see it reeling
away into its dingy obscurity.
It is a tradition of Franklin Square that Washington once lived in the
Walton House; and it is certain that Citizen Genet married there the
daughter of Governor George Clinton. Once indeed, some years since, the
Easy Chair, hearing an extraordinary and novel sound like the smooth
rolling of a stately chariot, thought, as the day was late and the
twilight was already beginning, that some of the fine old societies of
that fine old day had somehow forgotten themselves into somehow
returning to the scene of so much last-century festivity; and anxious to
see both them and their amazement at the transformation of the
fashionable square, rolled itself to the window, and, looking out--saw
the first horse-car rumbling gravely along to the neighboring ferry.
Remaining at the window, and mindful of Washington at the old Walton
House, the Easy Chair was aware of Mercury, who runs the editorial
errands and is a much-meditating young messenger, standing by his side
with one of the editorial brethren.
"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you know who Washington was?"
"The father of his country," promptly replied the messenger.
"And what did he ever do that was notorious and disreputable?"
Mercury was plainly indignant at this question, and answered, evasively:
"Well, he never told a lie, if he did chop down his father's
apple-tree."
"And what else did he do?"