Part 6
The shores teemed with people. The heights of Staten Island twinkled and fluttered with the gay toilets of the spectators that covered them. The Jersey shores were alive. The Battery looked white with human faces. The piers upon the river, the decks of vessels in the stream, and the windows and roofs of the buildings that commanded the water, were crowded with eager watchers. But the prettiest sight was the convoy of every kind that attended the surprising guest. Yachts, sloops, schooners, steamers, and tow-boats, large and small, moved down towards her, came out from the shore, sailed round her, sailed beside her, crossed her bows, followed her, so that the bay was bewitched with excitement. Cannon roared, bells rang, flags waved, and the crowd huzzaed welcome.
Through all the great ship glided majestically on. In response to each fresh salute of steam-whistle the bell was touched upon the deck--it was the quiet nod or smile of a prince in reply to the noisy complimenting of a Common Council. There was an air of dignity and of grandeur in the size and movement of the ship; and as the public was not disappointed in her size, but found that she really looked as large as she had been described and represented; and as every circumstance of her arrival was propitious, so that she slipped quietly into her dock, like a ferry-boat--it may fairly be claimed that the _Great Eastern_ had already won the hearty regard of the New York public.
How she lost it--is it not all related in indignant reports and letters and caricatures? How she dared to charge a dollar for admission--how hapless sailors lost their lives--how she went to Cape May--and there black night rushes down upon the tale. After a visit of forty-nine days, in which she had unhappily, but too surely, worn out her welcome, she prepares to depart. But at the last moment petty suits almost detain her. She shakes them off, however, and with them the cables that bound her to our shore. She slips into the stream. She promptly points her head down the bay. It is a lovely afternoon--it is the same river full of craft--there are the wharves, the windows, the roofs--but where, oh! where are the people? She fires her departing gun. A few loiterers, whom chance or business has called to the water-side, look up for a moment as she goes by. Idle boys upon the wharves joke and jeer at her. Where are the wolves, naughty boys? How dare you cry bald-head? Everything in the river and the city slouches in the every-day costume of habit. There are no gala garments, no fluttering flags, and merry bells, and booming guns, and cheering crowds. The _Great Eastern_ is going away--who cares? She will never come back--so much the better! Alas! the poor old King of yesterday is dying, and there is no one to close his eyes. No; the courtiers are booted and spurred to dash away the moment the breath is out of his body and salute the young Prince, the next Sensation, who shall rule the realm for a day.
When she came in I saw her come up the bay. I saw her come down as she departed. In the distance, blending with the spires of the city and the lesser masts, there was the towering cluster rising above all. I listened for the guns. I looked for the attendant craft. There were neither, except a brief salute from the Cunarder in port. But the bay of New York will be watched for many a year before so grand and stately a sight will be seen again as that great ship making her way through the Narrows to the sea. When she entered the bay she seemed majestic and conciliatory; as she left it, she was majestic and disdainful. Yet this was only the impression of a moment and of the distance. As she neared the forts at the Narrows entirely alone, with no accompanying steam or sail vessel, with all the hard luck of her life behind her and following her even to the latest hour of her stay in America, with the fact that she had utterly lost all hold upon public interest made glaringly palpable by the absolute loneliness of her departure, she yet fired a proud salute as she swept out of the upper bay--a stern farewell that echoed coldly from unanswering shores--and with the stars and stripes floating at her peak, magnificent and majestic, the _Great Eastern_ departed.
Gradually, as she passed far down the lower bay, she returned into the same hazy vastness that I remembered when I first saw her--in which, in the memories of all who saw her, she will forever remain.
CHURCH STREET
On the earliest of the really spring-like mornings as the Easy Chair turned into Church Street it could not help perceiving that in some romantic ways the New-Yorker has the advantage of the Londoner and Parisian. Church Street does not, indeed, seem at the first mention to be a promising domain of romance, nor a fond haunt of the Muses. Indeed, it must not be denied that it has an unsavory name; and when the city loiterer recalls Wapping, or a May morning on the Seine quais, he will smile at Church Street as a field of romance, and the Easy Chair grants him absolution. London, perhaps, does not strike the American imagination, or, let us more truly say, the imagination of the travelling American, as a romantic city. That citizen of the world reserves for himself Venice, Constantinople, Grand Cairo. Yet if after his arrival he will buy Peter Cunningham's _Hand-book for London_ at the nearest book-store, and turn its pages slowly, he will discover that for him, an American, he is in a very romantic city indeed. Mr. Hepworth Dixon's _Tower of London_ will show him how copious a sermon may be preached from one romantic text. Of course he can be expected to have no feeling but pity for the unfortunates who fill the streets, and whose fate it was to be born Britishers. Yet, let him reflect that it was not their fault, and except for that precise unhappy fact of being Britishers, which causes all the mischief, their parents too would have lived elsewhere.
Then the American citizen of the world, pitying England, will cross to France, to another country, a new world, and in Paris will breathe more freely as being at last in the metropolis of the globe--always excepting New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, or Chicago, as the case may be. If he opens _Galignani's Guide_, the excellent and well-informed traveller will immediately discover that he is in another romantic city, and that there is something more to see and consider than the bal d'opera, and the Chateau Rouge; and if some Easy Chair accidentally encountered straying along the Boulevards, or seated at the door of a cafe, should chance to ask whether the well-informed traveller had ever taken a romantic stroll in Church Street, New York, he would be rewarded with a smile for his admirable humor. By-and-by, after the coffee was drunk and the pipe smoked out, the Easy Chair and his approving Mentor would perhaps stroll about until they came far away from the haunts of to-day to the respectable old Place Louis Quinze. It is always an attractive spot for that well-informed traveller. He looks at it with pensive emotion, and turns warmly to the Easy Chair and says:
"How delightful this is! Here dwelt the noblesse! This is the Fifth Avenue--what do I say?--the Murray Hill of old Paris! And now all is gone! Fashion is an emigre. Inquire in the Faubourg St. Germain. What a pity we have nothing of this kind in America."
"But we have," replies the Easy Chair.
The incredulous well-informed traveller again smiles a mild, melancholy smile at the inscrutable methods of Providence, which has provided no Place Louis Quinze for the Yankees and aborigines.
"We certainly have," persists the Easy Chair.
"Where, pray?"
"Well, Church Street."
The reply seems to be beating out a jest very thin; but gradually the Easy Chair contrives to explain.
The movement of life in New York is so rapid, fashion and trade sweep from one point to another with such impetuosity, that the romance of changed interest can be enjoyed in the same spot twice or thrice in a lifetime. In older cities, in Paris or London, it is not the individual experience, but history only which covers the change. The gentlemen and dames of the Louis Quinze era do not moralize over the Place from which the glory has departed, but only their descendants. The change is so gradual that it is not within their personal experience. It is a tide that rises and falls once in sixscore years, not in six hours. But the fortunate New-Yorker has his romance making for him while he sleeps. The sorry streets of to-day will disappear within a dozen years, and the instant they are gone, or seen just at the moment of the final lapse, they have passed into the realm of romance.
Here is Church Street, for instance; it is not very long, and you turn into it from Fulton or from Canal. So turned the Easy Chair, and there was the long, narrow vista walled by lofty buildings, the spacious houses of trade, built yesterday, piled with dry goods, bold with prosperous newness, but instantly suggesting the street of palaces in Genoa. And a few rods off some old Knickerbocker is gravely stalking down Broadway who has not turned aside into Church Street for many a year, and who supposes Church Street is still a place not to be named, an unspeakable Gehenna. So it was a dozen years ago. Once, also, it was the Black Broadway. It was a kind of voluntary Ghetto of the colored people. Then, again, it was an offshoot of the Five Points. There were low ranges of dingy buildings. Dirty men and women slouched along on the walks and lounged out of the windows, and their idle, ribald laughter echoed along the street that few carriages travelled. Dens of every kind were just around every corner. Slatternly women emptied slops upon the pavement, and the stench was perpetual. Dirty little children screamed and played, and sickly babies squalled unheeded. It was a street fallen out of Hogarth; the street of worst repute in the city.
And now it is a double range of stately buildings--symmetrical, massive. Horse-cars struggle on it with light carts of dry-goods dealers, with the slow, enormous teams that shake the ground. At every corner there is an inextricable snarl of wagons, and porters are heaving boxes, and young clerks are directing, and huge windows are filled with huge pattern cards, so that the narrow way is tapes-tried. "Look out, there!" cries a porter-compelling clerk to the Easy Chair, which smiles to think that only yesterday it was in Exchange Place, and Pearl Street, and elsewhere that the peremptory youth was ordering him to mind his eye. And if the employer who now sits in the spacious office opposite had known that his clerk was familiar with Church Street, he would have warned him of the gates of destruction, and have admonished him that Church Street, though a narrow street, was a broad way.
The people that push and hurry and skip along this busy avenue are alert and well dressed. The slouchers and loungers, the old slatterns with the slop-pails, the fat, frouzy, jolly, dirty women with bare red arms and loud voices, the sneaks, the thieves, and the unclean groups at the grog-shop, where are they? No sneaks now, no thieves--honorable gentlemen with clean collars everywhere. What a consolation! As you watch the passers closely, as you read the signs, it occurs to you that the population, with the universal tendency in our mental and spiritual habits that Matthew Arnold sparklingly deplores, is clearly Hebraized. Here, where this especially fine warehouse or handsome shop stands, stood the French church. It has jumped up-town a few miles. Here was the church of Dr. Potts. Could you believe that the people who go to meeting in the snug, brown little edifice in an ivy mantle at the corner of University Place and Tenth Street, which probably seems to the young clerk coeval with the city, day before yesterday, as it were, came down here among the merchants? Then they came once a week for an hour or two. What did you say was the name of the deity to whom these temples were dedicated?
And at this corner--why, if it were an April thicket it could not more sweetly bubble with song, only this music is the spirit ditty of no tone--here was the old National Theatre. Do you see that very respectable old gentleman in the office who carries an ostrich egg in his hat? for so his grandchildren describe grandpapa's baldness. He sits and reads the paper, and is presently going down to the bank of which he is a director, and of which he seems always to those grandchildren to smell, so tenacious is the peculiar odor of a bank; that is the very gentleman who in the temple of the Drama upon this spot used to lead the loud applause, and at whom in his buckish costume of those merry days and nights, the lovely Shirreff herself used to level her eyes and her voice as she trilled: "Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad." Can you imagine that excellent grandparent kissing his hand rapturously to the retiring prima donna, going off to sup at the Cafe de l'Independence, and hieing home at two in the morning waking the echoes of Murray Street with a reproduction of that arch song, followed by a loud whistle to prove whether that vision of delight really will come to him, and bringing only the gruff Charley, obese guardian of the night? Will you find in your famous Place Louis Quinze any roisterer of the regency grown old and careful of his diet?
Here is one wall which survives from the prehistoric days of thirty years ago; it is the rear wall of the old hospital, that blessed green spot in the midst of the city, which is to be green no more, but will soon be piled with more palaces. And opposite this wall is a short street running from Church to West Broadway. A few years ago this was one of the worst of city slums. At the corner of West Broadway a wooden building still remains--a sullen, sickly, defiant cur of a building--that sits and snarls impotent over the savagery departed. And there is one tall rookery still, a tenement-house, with a system of fire-escapes in front, and the slattern slopping at the curb as in the ancient day, and a cooper's shop, and a blacksmith's, and one, two, three, how many whiskey shops? But they are all faint and feeble and submerged in the lofty buildings, and to-morrow all trace of them will be gone. And then who will remember the murder? The mysterious, awful, romantic murder. The murder that filled all the newspapers, and fed speculation at all the corner groggeries and in all offices. The murder that was done into a romance, and of which the hero--that is the murderer--was acquitted, after one of the famous eloquent criminal appeals which are so effective because their power is measured by human life. And this hero occasionally reappears in the newspapers even to this day. Somebody writes from a remote somewhere that on a steamer far away a mysterious man, after much mysterious conduct, imparts the awful truth that he is the hero. Does he sometimes return to this spot? Does he look at the site of the house where the deed was done? Does he appear in the guise of a merchant, a jobber, a retailer from that remote southwestern somewhere, and higgle and chaffer in the noble warehouse on the very site of the wretched building where he murdered his mistress? Good heavens! Do you see that man of about those years, looking about as if to find a sign or number? (As if he didn't know the very place; as if it were not burned and cut into his heart and conscience!) Do you think it could possibly be he, or is it, after all, only the honest Timothy Tape, the modest retailer from Skowhegan or Palmyra?... The typhus-fever used to rage here; the cholera was fearful. The sanitary reports say that there were always cases of the worst diseases to be found here. The city missionaries also used to find their worst cases here too, and now, what cleanliness of collar, what modishness of coat! No more sin; what a consolation!
And so, as the Easy Chair strolled along, bumped and hustled and severely looked upon by the eager throng in the narrow street, more radically reconstructed than any doubtful State, it could not help feeling that London with Her Majesty's Tower, and Paris with her deserted Place Louis Quinze, are not the only romantic cities in the world, and that a city of such rapid and incessant change as New York offers even some poetic aspects which its elder sisters want. The Easy Chair has pleaded formerly for some respect towards old historic buildings, like the old State-house in Boston, for instance, and has been indignantly laughed at for its pains. It will not deny that, unabashed by such laughter, it contemplates the old Walton House with satisfaction. It repairs, also, to the corner of Broad and Pearl streets, and, reflecting upon General Washington's parting with his officers, turns its eyes towards Wall Street, and beholds the Grecian temple which has taken the place of the old City Hall, upon whose balcony the first predecessor of President Grant was inaugurated. But the romance of Church Street is of another kind. It is the romance of striking and sudden change merely, not of historic interest, nor of personal association. Perhaps the gentle reader may not find it when he goes there. Then let him carry it.
HISTORIC BUILDINGS
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.