Part 7

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?"

With energy Mercury responded: "He whipped the bloody Britishers."

"And what became of him when he grew up?"

"He was President."

"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you see that house across the street?"

"The old Walton House?"

"The old Walton House."

"Of course I do."

"Well, Mercury, he lived there."

"Who lived where?" demanded Mercury, with wide-opening eyes.

"George Washington lived in the old Walton House."

"But not the same George?" asked Mercury, doubtfully. "Not the first President?"

"The first wood-chopper of fame, and the first President," replied the brother quill.

Mercury gazed at the house earnestly for a little while and then warmly demanded, "Why don't they keep his old sign-board up to let folks know?"

_Bugle of Freedom!_ out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the truth proceeds. It was the same instinct that caused the Easy Chair to exclaim a year ago, as it contemplated the prospect of changing the old and famous State-house, "Why take the old sign down?"

THE BOSTON MUSIC HALL

It is not, of course, possible that New York feels any chagrin that Boston has given the most colossal concert ever known upon the continent; but it is observable that, as wind and fire finally levelled the last timbers of the Boston Coliseum in the dust, the first step taken was taken towards the Beethoven Centennial Celebration, in New York. The project is not yet matured; but a vision of something very large indeed, something "metropolitan," begins to allure expectation; and Boston, having scored handsomely in the game, sits upon the ruins of her Coliseum and the profits of her Jubilee to see what New York will do.

If New York will build a proper hall for music and other public purposes, she will do well, and the Beethoven Centennial will not be in vain. The Cooper Institute hall is large enough for political meetings, and Steinway Hall is good for many purposes; but it is not a beautiful nor imposing room, as a great hall should be. The most impressive hall in the country is still the Boston Music Hall, where the great height and the two galleries, one above the other, with the organ and imposing statue of Beethoven, give a feeling of dignity. But the Music Hall lacks one of the chief characteristics of a noble room for the purposes to which it is devoted, and that is brilliancy. It is too dark. There is no smiling splendor of effect, which is always so enlivening. The darkness of the hall may be agreeable to weak eyes, it may even be described as "very much better than a glare of light," but brilliancy remains an indispensable quality of a great hall devoted to popular enjoyment.

Yet, whether dark or light, how much has been enjoyed in that stately room! What memorable figures have passed across that platform! What exquisite strains of music, sung, played, or spoken, have died along those walls! No one who is familiar with our history for the last twenty years will sit in the hall for any purpose but suddenly he sees it crowded with a silent and attentive throng; sees a reading-desk with vases of flowers, and a man[A] of sturdy figure standing behind it, whose voice is deep and penetrating and sincere; whose words are things; who has a certain rustic shyness of movement; but whose sentences roll and flash like volleys of trained soldiery, and who stands in the warmth of his own emotion and the sympathy of his audience, an indomitable gladiator, compelling the admiration even of his enemies as he fights with the Ephesian beasts. Against him, as he stands there every Sunday preaching to that vast multitude what seems to him the truth, and breaking to them what he believes to be the very bread of life, other men are preaching and praying, and the excommunications of the Vatican against Luther, shorn of their thunder and lightning, are hurled. Who is he that judges motives and sincerity? We do not know in this world what is believed, but only what is said and done.

[A] Theodore Parker.

This man, with bald head set low upon high square shoulders, who looks firmly at the great audience through spectacles, and speaks in a low half-nasal tone, visits the widows and fatherless, and keeps himself unspotted from the world. What he believes, others may question. What he is, every aspiring soul must admire. Although almost every one of them would have theologically cast him out and have recoiled from him with dismay, yet he preserves more than any other the traditional power and individualism of the old New England clergy. He applies the eternal truth and the moral law as he feels it to the life and times around him. They are heated white, and his words are blows of a sledge-hammer to mould them into noble form. That dauntless mien is the true symbol of his mental aspect as he confronts the menacing principalities and powers, and the man whose voice has so often charmed the crowded hall is one of the few who distinctly see and foretell the terrible war.

Long since his tongue is silent. He who came of the toughest stock and might have looked to live almost a century, died when it was half spent. It may have seemed to the great throng easy to climb that platform and preach a sermon every Sunday morning; but to study early and late as if he would master all knowledge; to write books, lectures, and speeches; to travel hard by night and day, losing his sleep and his food, and by the dim light in the car still pushing out the frontiers of his learning; to deny himself exercise and needful rest while the mental tension was so constant and the moral warfare so intense--this was not easy; this was to violate all the laws of life, which none knew better; and suddenly the stretched harp-string snapped, and there was no more music!

Not every one who knew his power knew into what sweetness and tenderness it could be softened, nor suspected that in the gladiator there was the loving and simple heart of the boy. Here, as the Easy Chair sits listening to the orchestra, it recalls the preacher when he was the minister of a rural parish, and used to come strolling through the fields and patches of wood to measure his wit with the friendly scholar who was the chief at Brook Farm, or to sit docile at his feet of counsel and sympathy. Or, again, it sees him in his country pulpit, the same sturdy, heroic athlete, trying and tempering the weapons with which he was to fight upon this larger scene. It was a noble character; a devoted, generous, inspiring life, a memory always hallowed in this hall. The conductor waves his baton! The symphony thunders from a hundred instruments, but through them all breathes the low tone of the remembered voice.

"Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?"

And as the concert proceeds--one of the series of the Harvard Musical Association, whose concerts are the musical pride of Boston, at which the performance is all of the purest classical music, so pure and so severe that the profane sometimes secretly ask whether melody in music is the unpardonable sin, and are peremptorily answered by the elect: "No, but rub-a-dub-dub and tumti-id-dity are not music"--and as the concert proceeds it is surely a striking spectacle. The great hall, rather dimmer than ever because of the consciousness of daylight outside, is full of people, gathered in the afternoon not only from the city, but from all the environs within twenty miles, and they sit as attentive and absorbed as a class of students at an interesting lecture. If, in such a concert, melody is not the unpardonable sin, whispering is. Woe betide the whisperer at a Harvard Musical. It were better for him, or even her, that the money for the ticket had been expended at the minstrels or the museum. You might as well be a forger, a swindler, a perjurer, or a burglar in ordinary life as to be a whisperer at a Harvard Musical. Yes, you might as well "speak right out in meetin'" itself as whisper here.

Such a disciplined audience, so quiet, so attentive, so susceptible to the slightest sigh of the oboe or wail of the violin, is a marvellous spectacle. They are hearing the finest and much of the freshest music in the world. They are not exactly sympathetic; perhaps the character of the music does not permit it. They applaud calmly--as it were, with reservations. It really seems sometimes as though they approve the music rather than enjoy it. But the Easy Chair reflects with pride that the organizer of these concerts, if such a word may be used, and certainly with no exclusion of the co-operation which alone makes such concerts possible, is a Brook-Farmer; and it complacently smiles upon the great multitude as unconscious pupils of that Arcadian influence.

And, indeed, in other days in this same city of Boston, in the halcyon days of the "Academy" concerts at the old Odeon, or still more ancient Boston Theatre, many of the Brook-Farmers were present in the flesh. Those were the days--or, rather, the nights--when Beethoven was truly introduced to America. Preluded with the pretty "Zannetta" overture by Auber, or with the "Serment" or the "Domino Noir," or with Herold's shrill "Zanetta," or some strain which would not now be tolerated in the Harvard concerts, the Fifth Symphony was played until it became familiar. And the long, willowy Schmidt stood at the head directing, proud as a general commanding his column. In the audience, earnest, interested, attentive, sparkling with humor, was Margaret Fuller, not hesitating, when the thoughtless girls whispered and tittered and giggled in the most solemn adagio strains, to lean over when the movement ended and to say to the offenders: "But let us have our turn, too; some of us came to hear the music."

There, also, was the delegation from Brook Farm, in whose appearance it was plain to see that in Arcadia the hair was worn long, that the stiff collar and cravat were repudiated, and that woollen blouses were a mute protest against the body coats of a selfish and competitive civilization. Those young fellows walked in from Brook Farm and out again. They made nothing of ten miles or so each way under the winter stars. And with them and of them, already accomplished in the beautiful science, already familiar with the great works of the great composers, was the present tutelary genius of the Harvard concerts, whose life, consecrated as critic and lover to this art, has been a true service to his city, and, reflectively, to the country.

But even Boston does not deny the charm of Theodore Thomas's orchestra and the delight of the New York Philharmonic music. Indeed, there was no audience which, for its training, was more authorized to judge the great excellence of the Thomas orchestra than that of the Harvard concerts. But when he went to Boston it was not as a doubting Thomas. He did not play Bach and Beethoven only, but he tickled the amazed multitude with positive tunes. He raised his baton, and his varied orchestra, a single instrument in his magic grasp, consented to waltzes; or, like a cathedral choir becoming suddenly a lark, trilled airy roundelays, at which the delighted (but not all assured of the propriety of delight) audience smiled and shook, and the youngest catechumens even tapped time faintly with their feet!--a sound which, could it be conceived audible in the midst of one of the Harvards, would probably cause such a shudder of horror that the hall itself would fall as by an earthquake.

Thus the Music Hall itself is a kind of symphony of memories. It is full of delightful ghosts. Among the visible figures there are a host of the unseen, and every singer, player, speaker, as he stands for an hour upon the platform, is measured by the masters of his art. But in the famous Peace Jubilee it had no part. Indeed, the musical taste of which it is peculiarly the temple resisted the colossal and continuous concert with bells, anvils, and cannon as something monstrous, and as repulsive to true art as a huge and clumsy Eastern idol. But not even the finest taste of the Music Hall denied the impressiveness and grandeur of the result. New York, in the Beethoven Centennial, will have immense advantages. The musical resources of the city are truly "metropolitan," and such should the festival be.

PUBLIC BENEFACTORS

There is a class of unrecognized public benefactors to which the Easy Chair wishes to offer a respectful tribute of gratitude. Their service is none the less because it is unconscious; and it is not confined to either sex. It is, besides, a very varied service, as will be readily seen as we advance in our description. Let us, then, without delay, and to begin with, specify as benefactors of this kind the young and other gentlemen who do duty at club windows, and the ladies who kindly appear only in the latest fashions. Most men, intent upon the necessary industry wherewith they maintain their families, are content to live plainly, and can seldom escape their work. There is Sunday, indeed, and a happy hour in the Park, and perhaps a run in the summer for a week or two to Long Branch or the mountains. But black care generally attends as a body-servant, not always or immediately recognizable, but like that solemn waiter whom Mr. George Hadder describes at a dinner given by Leech, the artist, who announced the feast with the air of an undertaker, and who proved to be the clerk of the neighboring parish,--a little story which may be found, with much other entertaining reading, in a handy volume of Mr. Stoddard's "Bric-a-Brac Series."

But the busy man's imagination is still at play, and he fancies a life which he does not know, a life of elegant and boundless leisure, which hovers above and around his weary routine, and a life in which his home is spacious and splendid, where he is clad in handsome clothes and never troubled by his tailor's bill, because he has always a balance in the bank; a life in which he opens his eyes in the morning, not to wonder if he has overslept himself and to plunge out of bed and into his clothes and through his breakfast, to hurry to the car or omnibus, dreading to be too late--opens his eyes, we say, not for this, but languidly to wonder, as he looks from under the hangings, how most easily and pleasantly to while away the time. A wise author says that the beauty of the landscape is only a mirage seen from the windows of a diligence. So is the life of leisure which the busy man sees in fancy and in the tales which in his hasty way he sometimes reads on a rainy Sunday or in the evening. Yet it would be mere fable to him except for the benevolent genii in the club window. As he hurries homeward when his day's work is done, he lifts his eye as he passes upon the sidewalk, or he peers from the omnibus window, and lo! there stands the man to whom this leisure of his dreams is a daily reality.

The figure which is making these dreams real, and which he cannot but regard as a benefactor, stands in the spacious window, and there is often a group of such figures; always with the hat on, and generally with a cane in the hand, and such garments as are seen only in the plates of the fashions and upon the tailor's lay-figures. Why, being in a warm house, he should wear his hat, when he takes it off upon entering all other houses, doth not appear. But it is part of his office to wear it. For this representative of leisure models himself upon the habits of similar ministers in those tales which the busy man sometimes reads; and as Fitz-Clarence Mortimer wears his hat in the club window upon Pall Mall, so must the hat be worn in our own club windows. Do not think that hatted figure gazing at the passing ladies and carriages rolling to the Park is a useless dandy. Nature wastes nothing. Nature does not inspire him to pay tailors and shoemakers and jewellers and hatters, and then to stand sucking the head of a cane in a club window without a purpose. The brilliancy and perfume of flowers and the song of birds, as science shows, are not for our delight only; they serve the reproduction and perpetuity of life. The final cause of that hatted figure is not the advertising of a tailor; it is the effect upon the imagination. It serves the end of all art. It makes real to the busy citizen that life of leisure and of opportunity of which he reads and dreams.

Nor does it end with the suggestion. As the busy man goes by and beholds the apparition, he reflects upon the use of such opportunity as is revealed to him at the window. That man, he says, born to a fortune, or having by faithful industry and sagacity early amassed it, is now master of his life. He commands time and money, the two levers which are so powerful in heaving the world forward. He has but to devise how he can be of service to others, and obey the leading of his generous soul. Think of the hearths and the hearts that he cheers! Think of the knowledge that he acquires, the studies that he pursues, for the enlightenment of legislation and the practical advantage of government! Think how gladly he bears his part in the work of organized charities! He has what so few of us have--time and money. He can do so much, so much! What can he not do? So muses the busy man, who must give all his day, and some of the night often, to earning the pittance upon which he lives. And as he muses his good heart asks him why he should require everything of the hatted figure of leisure in the club window, and discharge his own debt of duty by thinking how easily another can discharge his. Everything in its degree, he says, as his steps quicken with the thought. One star differeth from another star in glory. Why, because that man, born in the purple or winning it, can do so much, can I do nothing? Because his whole life is that leisure of endless opportunity of which I can only dream, have I no minutes, no chances? Haunted by this thought, he finds even his full-stretched day elastic. He pulls it out until he, too, cheers some hearth and heart that would otherwise have been frozen! and the busy man is busier, indeed, but happier, and the amount of human suffering is a little less. In this light does not the hatted figure at the window become a real benefactor? Nothing, indeed, is further from its mind. It does not even see the busy citizen by whom it is seen. But Nature has attained the object for which she placed it in a club window with a hat on and sucking the head of a cane.

MR. TIBBINS'S NEW-YEAR'S CALL

Mr. Tibbins wishes that his experience in making New-Year's calls may be made useful as an illustration of the deceitfulness of appearances. He is one of the gentlemen who do not keep dogs, although he lives in the country, and who decline social visits to persons who do. Mr. Tibbins is, however, just and impartial. "My friends," he says, "shall not complain of any obscurity in my conduct. I simply offer them the alternative, me or your dog--not both. If your tastes and preferences are such that you will have large or small animals lying within your gates, yelping and growling at every person who enters, smelling at ankles, and producing lively apprehensions which are not in the least allayed by calling the beast a good fellow, and remarking that he was never known to bite,--if," says Mr. Tibbins to his friends, "these are your preferences, we will not quarrel. I respect your idiosyncrasies, and I beg you to respect mine, while I embrace this occasion to mention that among the most prominent of mine is an indisposition to have my ankles smelled at by dogs of any breed or of any size, whether they are good fellows or not, and an insuperable disgust with the barking of beasts when I go to make a call. That it is very selfish in you or any person to subject his friends to such ordeals I do not say; that I leave entirely to your own judgment, only remarking that although black snakes and green snakes are not venomous reptiles, and are probably 'good fellows,' I do not think that those who delight in having them coiling and gliding about their parlors ought to be vexed with their neighbors for not calling. The line must be drawn somewhere," says Mr. Tibbins; "you may not draw it until you come to snakes; I draw it at dogs."