Part 31

[18] The universal hour of dining, in New York, when first we arrived, was three o'clock; after which hour the cooks took their departure, and nothing was to be obtained fit to eat, either for love or money: this intolerable nuisance is gradually passing away; but even now, though we can get our dinner served at six o'clock, it is always dressed at three; its excellence may be imagined from that. To say the truth, I think the system upon which all houses of public entertainment are conducted in this country is a sample of the patience and long-suffering with which dirt, discomfort, and exorbitant charges may be borne by a whole community, without resistance, or even remonstrance. The best exceptions I could name to these various inconveniences are, first, Mr. Cozzen's establishment at West Point; next, the Tremont at Boston, and, lastly, the Mansion House at Philadelphia. In each of these, wayfarers may obtain some portion of decent comfort: but they have their drawbacks; in the first, there are no private sitting-rooms; and in the last, the number of servants is inadequate to the work. The Tremont is by far the best establishment of the sort existing at present. Mr. A----, the millionnaire of New York, is about to remedy this deficiency, by the erection of a magnificent hotel in Broadway. One thing, however, is certain; neither he nor any one else will ever succeed in having a decent house, if the servants are not a little superior to the Irish savages who officiate in that capacity in most houses, public and private, in the northern states of America.

[19] It is fortunate for the managers of the Park Theatre, and very unfortunate for the citizens of New York, that the audiences who frequent that place of entertainment are chiefly composed of the strangers who are constantly passing in vast numbers through this city. It is not worth the while of the management to pay a good company, when an indifferent one answers their purpose quite as well: the system upon which theatrical speculations are conducted in this country is, having one or two "stars" for the principal characters, and nine or ten sticks for all the rest. The consequence is, that a play is never decently acted, and at such times as stars are scarce, the houses are very deservedly empty. The terrestrial audiences suffer much by this mode of getting up plays; but the celestial performers, the stars propped upon sticks, infinitely more.

[20] Stewart--Bonfanti. The name of shopkeepers in Broadway: the former's is the best shop in New York.

[21] Were the morality that I constantly hear uttered a little more consistent, not only with right reason, but with itself, I think it might be more deserving of attention and respect. But the mock delicacy, which exists to so great a degree with regard to theatrical exhibitions, can command neither the one nor the other. To those who forbid all dramatic representations, as exhibitions of an unhealthy tendency upon our intellectual and moral nature, I have no objections, at present, to make. Unqualified condemnation, particularly when adopted on such grounds, may be a sincere, a respectable, perhaps a right, opinion. I have but one reply to offer to it: the human mind requires recreation; is not a theatre (always supposing it to be, not what theatres too often are, but what they ought to be), is not a theatre a better, a higher, a more noble, and useful place of recreation than a billiard-room, or the bar of a tavern? Perhaps in the course of the moral and intellectual improvement of mankind, _all_ these will give way to yet purer and more refined sources of recreation; but in the mean time, I confess, with its manifold abuses, a play-house appears to me worthy of toleration, if not of approbation, as holding forth (when directed as it should be) a highly intellectual, rational, and refined amusement.

However, as I before said, my quarrel is not with those who condemn indiscriminately all theatrical exhibitions; they may be right: at all events, so sweeping a sentence betrays no inconsistency. But what are we to say to individuals, or audiences, who turn with affected disgust from the sallies of Bizarre and Beatrice, and who applaud and laugh, and are delighted, at the gross immorality of such plays as the Wonder, and Rule a Wife and have a Wife; the latter particularly, in which the immorality and indecency are not those of expression only, but of conception, and mingle in the whole construction of the piece, in which not one character appears whose motives of action are not most unworthy, and whose language is not as full of coarseness, as devoid of every generous, elevated, or refined sentiment. (The tirades of Leon are no exception; for in the mouth of a man who marries such a woman as Marguerita, by such means, and for such an end, they are mere mockeries.) I confess that my surprise was excited when I was told that an American audience would not endure that portion of Beatrice's wit which the London censors have spared, and that Othello was all but a proscribed play; but it was infinitely more so, when I found that the same audience tolerated, or rather encouraged with their presence and applause, the coarse productions of Mrs. Centlivre and Beaumont and Fletcher. With regard to the Inconstant, it is by far the most moral of Farquhar's plays; that, perhaps, is little praise, for the Recruiting Officer, and the Beaux' Stratagem, are decidedly the reverse. But in spite of the licentiousness of the writing, in many parts, the construction, the motive, the action of the play is not licentious; the characters are far from being utterly debased in their conception, or depraved in the sentiments they utter (excepting, of course, the companions of poor Mirable's last revel); the women, those surest criterions, by whose principles and conduct may be formed the truest opinion of the purity of the social atmosphere, the women, though free in their manners and language (it was the fashion of their times, and of the times before them, when words did not pass for deeds, either good or bad), are essentially honest women; and Bizarre, coarse as her expressions may appear, has yet more _real_ delicacy than poor Oriana, whose womanly love causes her too far to forget her womanly pride. Of the catastrophe of this play, and its frightfully-pointed moral, little need be said to prove that its effect is likely to be far more wholesome, because far more homely, than that of most theatrical inventions; invention, indeed, it is not, and its greatest interest, as perhaps its chief utility, is drawn from the circumstance of its being a faithful representation of a situation of unequalled horror, in which the author himself was placed, and from which he was rescued precisely as he extricates his hero. Of the truth and satirical power of the dialogue, none who understand it can dispute; and if, instead of attaching themselves to the farcical romping of Bizarre and her ungallant lover, the modest critics of this play had devoted some attention to the dialogues between young and old Mirable, their nice sense of decency would have been less shocked, and they might have found themselves repaid by some of the most pointed, witty, and pithy writing in English dramatic literature. I am much obliged to such of my friends as lamented that I had to personate Farquhar's impertinent heroine; for my own good part, I would as lief be such a one, as either Jane Shore, Mrs. Haller, Lady Macbeth, or the wild woman Bianca. I know that great crimes have a species of evil grandeur in them; they spring only from a powerful soil, they are in their very magnitude respectable. I know that mighty passions have in their very excess a frightful majesty, that asserts the vigour of the natures from which they rise; and there is as little similarity between them, and the base, degraded, selfish, cowardly tribe of petty larceny vices with which human societies abound, as there is between the caterpillar blight, that crawls over a fertile district, gnawing it away inch-meal, and the thunderbolt that scathes, or the earthquake that swallows the same region, in its awful mission of destruction. But I maintain that freedom of expression and manner is by no means an indication of laxity of morals, and again repeat that Bizarre is free in her words, but not in her principles. The authoress of the most graceful and true analysis of Shakspeare's female characters has offered a better vindication of their manners than I could write; I can only say, I pity sincerely all those who, passing over the exquisite purity, delicacy, and loveliness of their conception, dwell only upon modes of expression which belong to the times in which their great creator lived. With respect to the manner in which audiences are affected by what they hear on the stage, I cannot but think that gentlemen, who wish their wives and daughters to hear no language of an exceptionable nature, had better make themselves acquainted with what they take them to see, or, at all events, avoid, when in the theatre, attracting their attention to expressions which their disapprobation serves only to bring into notice, and which had much better escape unheard, or at least unheeded. Voluminous as this note has become, I cannot but add one word with respect to the members of the profession to which I have belonged. Many actresses that I have known, in the performance of unvirtuous or unlovely characters (I cannot, however, help remembering that they were also secondary parts), have thought fit to impress the audience with the wide difference between their assumed and real disposition, by acting as ill, and looking as cross as they possibly could, which could not but be a great satisfaction to any moral audience. I have seen this done by that fine part in Milman's Fazio, Aldabella, repeatedly, and not unfrequently by the Queen in Hamlet, Margarita in Rule a Wife and have a Wife (I scarcely wonder at that, though), and even by poor Shakspeare's Lady Falconbridge. I think this is a mistake: the audience, I believe, never forget that the actress is not indeed the wicked woman she seems. In one instance that might have been the case, perhaps. I speak of a great artist, whose efforts I never witnessed, but whose private excellence I have a near right to rejoice in, and who was as true in her performance of the wretch Millwood, as in her personifications of Shakspeare's grandest creations.

[22] The Russians and Danes are rich in the possession of an original and most touching national music; Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, are alike favoured with the most exquisite native melodies, probably, in the world. France, though more barren in the wealth of sweet sounds, has a few fine old airs, that redeem her from the charge of utter sterility. Austria, Bohemia, and Switzerland, each claim a thousand beautiful and characteristic mountain songs; Italy is the very palace of music, Germany its temple; Spain resounds with wild and martial strains, and the thick groves of Portugal with native music, of a softer and sadder kind. All the nations of Europe, I presume all those of all the world, possess some kind of national music, and are blessed by Heaven with some measure of perception as to the loveliness of harmonious sounds. England alone, England and her descendant America, seems to have been denied a sense, to want a capacity, to have been stinted of a faculty, to the possession of which she vainly aspires. The rich spirit of Italian music, the solemn soul of German melody, the wild free Euterpe of the Cantons, have in vain been summoned by turns to teach her how to listen; 'tis all in vain--she does listen painfully; she has learnt by dint of time, and much endurance, the technicalities of musical science; she pays regally her instructors in the divine pleasure, but all in vain: the spirit of melody is not in her; and in spite of hosts of foreign musicians, in spite of the King's Theatre, in spite of Pasta, in spite of music-masters paid like ministers of state, in spite of singing and playing young ladies, and criticising young gentlemen, England, to the last day of her life, will be a dunce in music, for she hath it not in her; neither, if I am not much mistaken, hath her daughter.

[23] It is but justice to state, that this house has passed into other hands, and is much improved in every respect. Strangers, particularly Englishmen, will find a great convenience in the five o'clock ordinary, now established there, which is, I am told, excellently conducted and appointed.

[24] The whole of this passage is in fact a succession of small bays, forming a continuation to the grand bay of New York, and dividing Staten Island from the mainland of New Jersey; the Raritan river does not properly begin till Amboy, where it empties itself into a bay of its own name.

[25] I had always heard that the face of nature was gigantic in America; and truly we found the wrinkles such for so young a country. The ruts were absolute abysses.

[26] The southern, western, and eastern states of North America have each their strong peculiarities of enunciation, which render them easy of recognition. The Virginian and New England accents appear to me the most striking; Pennsylvania and New York have much less brogue; but through all their various tones and pronunciations a very strong nasal inflection preserves their universal brotherhood. They all speak through their noses, and at the top of their voices. Of dialects, properly so called, there are none; though a few expressions, peculiar to particular states, which generally serve to identify their citizens; but these are not numerous, and a jargon approaching in obscurity that of many of our counties is not to be met with. The language used in society generally is unrefined, inelegant, and often ungrammatically vulgar; but it is more vulgar than unintelligible by far.

[27] This appears to me to be a most frequent ailment among the American ladies: they must have particularly bilious constitutions. I never remember travelling in a steam-boat, on the smoothest water, without seeing sundry "afflicted fair ones," who complained bitterly of _sea-sickness_ in the river.

[28] In spite of its beauty, or rather on that very account, an American autumn is to me particularly sad. It presents a union of beauty and decay, that for ever reminds me of that loveliest disguise death puts on, when the cheek is covered with roses, and the eyes are like stars, and the life is perishing away; even so appear the gorgeous colours of the withering American woods. 'Tis a whole forest dying of consumption.

[29] The magnolia and azalia are two of these; and earlier in the summer, the whole country looks like fairy-land, with the profuse and lovely blossoms of the wild laurel, an evergreen shrub unequalled for its beauty, and which absolutely overruns every patch of uncultivated ground. I wonder none of our parks have yet been adorned with it: it is a hardy plant, and I should think would thrive admirably in England.

[30] In the opening chapter of that popular work, Eugene Aram, are the following words:--"It has been observed, and there is a world of homely, ay, and of legislative knowledge in the observation, that wherever you see a flower in a cottage garden, or a bird-cage at the window, you may feel sure that the cottagers are better and wiser than their neighbours." The truth of this observation is indisputable. But for such "humble tokens of attention to something beyond the _sterile labour_ of life" you look in vain during a progress through this country. In New England alone, neatness and a certain endeavour at rustic elegance and adornment, in the cottages and country residences, recall those of their fatherland; and the pleasure of the traveller is immeasurably heightened by this circumstance. If the wild beauties of uncultivated nature lead our contemplations to our great Maker, these lowly witnesses of the industry and natural refinement of the laborious cultivator of the soil warm our heart with sympathy for our kind, and the cheering conviction that, however improved by cultivation, the sense of beauty, and the love of what is lovely, have been alike bestowed upon all our race; 'tis a wholesome conviction, which the artificial divisions of society too often cause us to lose sight of. The labourer, who, after "sweating in the eye of Phoebus" all the day, at evening trains the fragrant jasmine round his lowly door, is the very same man who, in other circumstances, would have been the refined and liberal patron of those arts which reflect the beauty of nature.

[31] In all my progress I looked in vain for the refreshing sight of a hedge--no such thing was to be seen; and their extreme rarity throughout the country renders the more cultivated parts of it arid looking and comparatively dreary. These crooked fences in the south, and stone walls to the north, form the divisions of the fields, instead of those delicious "hedge-rows green," where the old elms delight to grow, where the early violets and primroses first peep sheltered forth, where the hawthorn blossoms sweeten the summer, the honeysuckle hangs its yellow garlands in the autumn, and the red "hips and haws" shine like bushes of earthly coral in the winter.

But the Americans are in too great a hurry to plant hedges: they have abundance of native material; but a wooden fence is put up in a few weeks, a hedge takes as many years to grow; and, as I said before, an American has not time to be a year about anything. When first the country was settled, the wood was an encumbrance, and it was cut down accordingly: that is by no means the case now; and the only recommendation of these fences is, therefore, the comparative rapidity with which they can be constructed. One of the most amiable and distinguished men of this country once remarked to me, that the Americans were in too great a hurry about every thing they undertook to bring any thing to perfection. And certainly, as far as my observation goes, I should _calculate_ that an American is born, lives, and dies twice as fast as any other human creature. I believe one of the great inducements to this national hurry is, that "time is money," which is true; but it is also true, sometimes, that "most haste makes worst speed."

[32] These are two very pretty villages, of Quaker origin, situated in the midst of a fertile and lovely country, and much resorted to during the summer season by the Philadelphians.

[33] It has happened to me after a few hours' travelling in a steam-boat to find the white dress, put on fresh in the morning, covered with yellow tobacco stains; nor is this very offensive habit confined to the lower orders alone. I have seen _gentlemen_ spit upon the carpet of the room where they were sitting, in the company of women, without the slightest remorse; and I remember once seeing a gentleman, who was travelling with us, very deliberately void his tobacco-juice into the bottom of the coach, instead of through the windows, to my inexpressible disgust.

[34] I wish that somebody would be so obliging as to impress people in general with the extreme excellence of a perception of the _fitness of things_. Besides the intrinsic beauty of works of art, they have a beauty derived from their appropriateness to the situations in which they are placed, and their harmony with the objects which surround them: this minor species of beauty is yet a very great one. If it were more studied, and better understood, public buildings would no longer appear as if they had fallen out of the clouds by chance; parks and plantations would no more have the appearance of nurseries, where the trees were classed by kind, instead of being massed according to their various forms and colours; and Gothic and classic edifices would not so often seem as if they had forsaken their appropriate situations, to rear themselves in climates, and among scenery, with which they in no way harmonise.

[35] Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country, as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives,--the aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling. Whatever may be the immediate cause of excitement or discussion, these are the two master-springs to which they are referable. Every man in America is a politician; and political events, of importance only because they betray the spirit which would be called into play by more stirring occasions, are occurring incessantly, and keeping alive the interest which high and low alike take in the evolutions of their political machine. Elections of state officers, elections of civil authorities, all manner of elections (for America is one perpetual contest for votes), are going on all the year round; and whereas the politics of men of private stations in other countries are kept quietly by them, and exhibited only on occasions of general excitement, those of an American are as inseparable from him as his clothes, and mix up with his daily discharge of his commonest daily avocations. I was extremely amused at seeing over a hat-shop in New York one day, "Anti-Bank Hat-Store," written in most attractive characters, as an inducement for all good democrats to go in and purchase their beavers of so republican a hatter. The universal-suffrage system is of course the cause of this general political mania; and during an election of mayor or aldermen, the good shopkeepers of New York are in as fierce a state of excitement as if the choice of a perpetual dictator were the question in point. Politics is the main subject of conversation among American men in society; but, as I said before, the immediate object of discussion being most frequently some petty local interest or other, strangers cannot derive much pleasure from, or feel much sympathy in, the debate.

[36] I have often thought that the constant demand for small theatres, which I have heard made by persons of the higher classes of society in England, was a great proof of the decline of the more imaginative faculties among them; and the proportionate increase of that fastidious and critical spirit, which is so far removed from every thing which constitutes the essence of poetry. The idea of illusion in a dramatic exhibition is confined to the Christmas spectators of old tragedies and new pantomimes; the more refined portions of our English audiences yawn through Shakspeare's historical plays, and _quiz_ through those which are histories of human nature and its awful passions. They have forgotten what human nature really is, and cannot even _imagine it_. They require absolute reality on the stage, because their incapable spirits scoff at poetical truth; and that absolute reality, in our days, consists in such representations as the Rent Day; or (crossing the water, for we dearly love what is foreign) the homely improbabilities of Victorine, Henriette, and a pack of equally worthless subjects of exhibition. Indeed, theatres have had an end; for the refined, the highly educated, the first classes of society, they have had an end; it will be long, however, before the mass is sufficiently refined to lose all power of imagination; and while our aristocracy patronise French melodramas, and seek their excitement in the most trashy sentimentalities of the modern _école romantique_, I have some hopes that our plebeian pits and galleries may still retain their sympathy for the loves of Juliet and the sorrows of Ophelia. I would rather a thousand times act either of those parts to a set of Manchester mechanics, than to the most select of our aristocracy, for they are "nothing, if not critical."