Our honor is solely in our own keeping. To have your nose pulled is not to be dishonored, but so to behave that it deserves pulling. But, Alcibiades of the clubs, remember that it is not the pulling which makes the dishonor.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
And Cassius also says what bears a very different interpretation from that which he designed:
"Well, honor is the subject of my story.I cannot tell what you and other menThink of this life; but, for my single self,I had as lief not be, as live to beIn awe of such a thing as I myself."
Fear of yourself, fear of your own rebuke, fear of betraying your consciousness of your duty and not doing it—that is the fear which Lovelace loved better than Lucasta; that is the fear which Francis, having done his duty, saved, and justly called it honor.
OFTEN during the long and sorrowful days of the war, as the Easy Chair wound its slow way to its corner, it heard a quiet greeting, and, looking up, saw a friend standing aside upon the steps, calm, unhurried, and the greeting was followed by the significant and challenging question, "Well?" The tone was tender and tranquil, and conveyed all the meaning of many words: "Where are we now? What will come of this last news? How, when, and where will the bitter struggle end?" Then stepping out upon one of the bridges that connect the tower of the staircase with the various floors of the huge buildings in which thisMagazineis prepared, the Easy Chair and its friend conversed. There was a singular sagacity and justicein all that the calm friend said, and the most truculent opponent of the cause to which his hopes and faith were given would have heard nothing acrid or exasperating from his lips, even in the darkest hour of the struggle. As they parted and the Easy Chair resumed its way, it was with a soothed and cheerful conviction that whatever might happen to states and nations, nothing could shake the power of steadfast, manly character.
During the same day or any other, if it chanced to move into some other part of the buildings, whether in the artists', the engravers', or the editor's room; in the bindery, the press-rooms, the folding-rooms, the composing-rooms, or in the counting-room, the Easy Chair encountered that same friendly, serene presence which had yet its voice of authority upon occasion, but which seemed to pervade all the rooms like sunshine. And upon all who met him that friend made the same impression. To every one, editor, printer, errand-boy, unknown visitor, or distinguished guest, he was so simply courteous and kind that he controlledwithout commanding; and in other days, when he had been the head of the most turbulent work-room, he had kept the peace without an oath or a blow. It was the man, not his clothes or his condition, that this man regarded. It was as natural for him to stop in the street and talk with an old black woman whom he knew as with the most renowned author whose works he published. When Oliver Goldsmith lay in his coffin the poor women who had known him sat weeping upon the stairs of the house. And so when this true gentleman died, even the old pie-woman who sells cakes and apples through the buildings left her traffic for a day, and, clad in her sad best, stood, tearful at his funeral.
It was not strange, therefore, that when the fire of twenty years ago seemed to have destroyed everything and to have ruined him and his partners, the quality of the man appeared reflectively in the feeling that was shown towards him by those who see us all without disguise. When the misfortune was supposed to be complete the domestics in his family assembled,apparently by a common feeling, to consider how they could express their sympathy; and as he returned home at evening he was met by one of them whom they had chosen, to tell him that they had all agreed to continue their service at reduced wages, or for no wages at all, until he should recover from the heavy loss. "I stood everything very well up to that time," he said to a friend who tells the story to the Easy Chair, and who had asked him if it were true, "but that broke me down." And the tears were in his eyes as he said it.
Of course every one who, during the last forty-five years, has been familiar with this publishing house, knows that the Easy Chair is speaking of Joseph Wesley Harper, the third of the four brothers by whom the house was founded, and who recently died in the sixty-ninth year of his age. He was so truly modest, he avoided publicity so unostentatiously, that the Easy Chair almost feels as if it were doing wrong to mention him here with praise; so hard is it to believe that his eyes will not rest upon these lines withall the old kind appreciation. But it is a sermon or a poem which none of us can spare, the life of a man who in very great prosperity kept not only the true heart of a child, but the humble heart that owned no inferior. We are judged usually by our public successes, by the esteem of distinguished persons. But the real test of character is the feeling of those before whom we play no part. What does the nurse in the nursery think of us, or the porter in the store, or the butcher-boy? If a man's children confide in him, if all whom he employs at home or in his business feel that he is full of thought and sympathy for them as for brethren, if those who meet him perceive the charm of his urbanity, and as they draw nearer and know him better, honor and love him more and more, we can be very sure that he has the noblest human qualities, whose influence will be a possession to us forever.
Such was the friend whom for so many years in its little labors upon these pages the Easy Chair has constantly seen, and whom it will see no more; and as it meditates,not sadly, but with the sober cheerfulness which his own serene faith in the divine order could not but inspire, upon that good life now peacefully ended, it feels how truly Wesley Harper will always be remembered by those who knew him well.
"The wise who soar but never roam,True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
THE victorious armies had marched home and into history. The two days of review at the end of May was a spectacle not likely to be forgotten by those who saw it or did not see it. It belonged to that series of events for which there is no precedence, because there never was before a continental republic. Like every remarkable occurrence in these remarkable days of ours, the disbanding of the armies of the East and West, and their quiet absorption into the mass of the people, is a spectacle which has another illustration to the extreme practicability of a popular government. Usually the return of the victorious army is dreaded by its country somewhat as its advance is by the enemy, and governmentprovides other wars to employ it. But our men are citizens who have been defending their own rights. It is their own government they have been maintaining. The endeavor to represent the government as a power different from the people and dangerous to their liberty has failed several times during the war, and will always fail so long as the broadest base of the government is jealously guarded. And nothing is more honorable to human nature, nothing so truly vindicates the wisdom of our institutions and the faith that supports them, than that during the Civil War, of which the event seemed sometimes doubtful, there has not been even the suspicion of a desire upon the part of any popular general to seize power and dictate to the authorities. Indeed, in the only instance in which such a whisper was breathed the suggestion was known to come from the politicians who surrounded the general, and not from himself.
The review was, according to all reports, a noble sight. The Army of the Potomac, which, often baffled, at laststruck the crowning blow of the war, and the Army of the West, whose history is immortal, poured through the capital amid the shouts and exultation of thousands of spectators, and marched, with the inspiring clash and peal of martial music, before the President, the Lieutenant-General, and the notable civilians all the day. The Western Army had with them the spoils of war: large red roosters and fighting-cocks, tied on to the backs of mules; cows, donkeys, and goats came also. The army moved as though Washington were but a village upon the road of its march through Georgia or the Carolinas. The critical spectators thought they observed the Western men were of a finer physique and more entirely American, and the Eastern of a stricter military drill. The slouched hat was worn by the officers and men of the West, the French kepi by the more showy Eastern officers. Sherman himself, the hero of the magnificent campaign which the Richmond papers said was merely the flight of an arrow through the air—but which literally pierced therebellion to the heart—was saluted by the grandest acclamations. History will rank him with the really great soldiers. His men are very proud of him—how could they help it?—and if for a moment there was wonder at his arrangements with Johnson, there is no man now so poor as to doubt his sincerity or question his patriotism.
It would have been pleasant if, with the other heroes, the eager, proud crowd could have seen General Thomas, the soldier who, by indomitable tenacity, saved the day at Chickamauga and destroyed the rebel army before Nashville; but he was on duty elsewhere.
As the armies passed it must have been impossible to forget—as in reading of the spectacle we constantly remember—the disbanding of the army of the Revolution. The soldiers at the review are only a part of the men now in arms, yet they were about two hundred thousand. Since the war began there have been many more than a million in the armies. During the Revolution (as we learn from Professor G. W. Greene's very interestingvolume on the Revolution), there were altogether in the service 239,791 regulars in the Continental army and 56,163 of the militia, and the sufferings of that early army are not to be described. "During the first winter soldiers thought it hard that they should have nothing to cook their food with; but they found, before the close, that it was harder still to have nothing to cook." Few Americans have ever known what it was to suffer for want of clothing; but thousands, as the war went on, saw their garments falling by piecemeal from around them, till scarce a shred remained to cover their nakedness. They made long marches without shoes, staining the frozen ground with the blood from their feet. They fought battles with guns which were hardly safe to bear half a charge of powder. They fought, or marched, or worked at the intrenchments all day, and laid them down at night with but one blanket to three men.
Mr. Greene tells us that the condition of the officers was hardly better than that of the men. They, too, had sufferedcold and hunger; they, too, had been compelled to do duty without sufficient clothing, to march and watch and fight without sufficient food. We are told of a dinner where no officer was admitted who had a whole pair of pantaloons, and of all who were invited there was not one who did not establish his claims for admission.
The treatment of the army of the Revolution by the Continental Congress was unworthy the fame of that body which Lord Chatham so loftily praised to Dr. Franklin. The army was disbanded stealthily, "as if the nation were afraid to look their deliverers in the face; all through the summer of 1783 furloughs were granted freely, and the ranks gradually thinned. Then on the 18th of October a final proclamation was issued for their discharge. On the 2d of November Washington issued his final orders from Rocky Hill, near Princeton. On the 3d they were disbanded. There was no formal leave-taking. Each regiment, each company, went when it chose. Men who had stood side by side in battle,who had shared the same tent in summer, the same hut in winter, parted, never to meet again. Some still had homes, and, therefore, definite hopes. But hundreds knew not whither to go.... For a few days taverns and streets were crowded. For weeks soldiers were to be seen on every road, or lingering bewildered about public places, like men who were at a loss to know what to do with themselves. There were no ovations for them as they came back, toilworn before their time, to the places that had once known them; no ringing of bells; no eager opening of hospitable doors. The country was tired of the war, tired of the sound of the drum and fife; anxious to get back to sowing and reaping, to buying and selling, and town meetings, and general elections."
These were the veterans of one of the most glorious and important wars in the progress of the race. Yet the men who were so unhandsomely suffered to depart from the service were also grudgingly paid when they were released. "Their claims were disputed inch by inch. Moneywhich should have been given cheerfully as a righteous debt was doled out with a reluctant hand as a degrading charity."
It is refreshing to turn from the page of this melancholy historian to the newspaper of to-day, and read that the men who have received the jubilant ovation of the review are not only to be paid in full and at once, as the most sacred of national debts, but that the most strenuous effort will be made to employ them by preference in the public offices to which they may be fitted, while private persons will bear in mind the same just and generous purpose. Indeed, there is no forgetfulness of the soldiers of to-day. The sense of their vital service to the country is universal and commanding. They will be honored heroes while they live, and our children shall be proud that we cherish them.
It is not easy even yet, although the victors have returned and are disbanded, fully to comprehend that the war is over and the country saved. But it is so, and the living and the dead are joined in aglorious remembrance. How many an eye must have grown dim, swimming in tears as it gazed on the splendid pageant because of the brave and beautiful who had shared the peril and the long, long doubt and struggle, but not the triumph of victory and return. The victory is won; the country is saved; but at what inestimable cost! Four years ago Theodore Winthrop fell at Great Bethel, on a summer morning, and those that loved him learned that the war had begun. Three years ago, on a winter evening, Joseph Curtis sank dead from his horse at Fredericksburg, and Theodore Parkman perished at Princeton on an autumn day. Two years ago, on a soft midsummer night, Robert Shaw fell upon the ramparts of Wagner, and was "buried with his niggers." Eight months ago, in the Shenandoah Valley, Charles Lowell died at Cedar Creek, in the very shock of victory. They were five only, all young, and they gave gladly for us all that makes life glad and beautiful. Yet how many as young and brave and beloved as they have died like them, and, like them,are remembered and mourned! They, too, let us believe, smile still above us, and bend over us with serene joy at this happy time. Let their sweet memory hallow our jubilee! Let us take care that our lives are worthy their glorious death.
AMOST genial and friendly letter to the Easy Chair, dated simply "Home," and speaking tenderly of the late President, reminds us that our loss is a blow to every home in the country. This peculiar personal affection for Mr. Lincoln was so evident that every orator spoke of it, and with an emotion that attends a private sorrow. No tribute could be so pathetic and so suggestive of the character of the man who had more deeply endeared himself to the heart and fixed himself in the confidence of the American people than any man in our history. Among the inscriptions that were displayed during the days of mourning in the city there was one hung upon a shop that was touching in its very baldness: "Alas! alas! our father Abraham is dead." That wasthe feeling in all true hearts and homes. It was a feeling which no Cæsar, no Charlemagne, no Napoleon ever inspired. The Netherlands wept with a sorrow as sore for the Prince of Orange, France bewailed with romantic grief the death of Henry IV. But the people of England and France were comparatively few, and the relation between the victims and the mourners was that of prince and subjects. Our leader was one of the poorest of the people. He was great in their greatness. They felt with him and for him as one of themselves, and in his fall, more truly than Rome in that of Cæsar, we all fell down.
The month of April, 1865, was curiously eventful in the annals of this country. General Grant moved upon the enemy's works, and Petersburg and Richmond fell. He pursued and fought the retreating army, and the rebel commander-in-chief surrendered. In the very jubilee of a national joy the President was murdered. While yet his body was borne across the country by the reverent hands of a nation, his murderer was tracked,brought to bay, shot, and buried in a nameless spot to protect his corpse from wild popular fury. In the midst of the tragical days General Sherman, whom, only last month, the Easy Chair was celebrating as so skilful and resistless a soldier, instead of summoning Johnston to a surrender upon the terms granted to Lee, allowed himself to sign recognition of the rebel government and to open a future political discord, while he was yet able to prescribe the simple surrender of an army. The shock of disappointment and regret was universal. The authorities unanimously disapproved his convention. The Lieutenant-General went immediately to the front, and the month that had opened with President Lincoln trusted and beloved, with Davis defended by Lee and his army in the rebel capital, and Sherman confronted by Johnston, and Mobile holding out, closed with the rebel capital in possession of the government, Lee a paroled prisoner, his army disbanded, Davis a skulking fugitive, Johnston and his army paroled prisoners, Mobile captured, President Lincoln dead,President Johnson at the head of the government, and the assassin dead and buried.
Through such a succession of great events this country had never as rapidly passed. It swept the scale of emotion. From the height of joy triumphant it sank to the very depths of sorrow, from confidence and pride in a military leader it passed to humiliating amazement, yet not for a moment paused in its work or shook in its purpose, and was never so calm, so strong, so grand, as in that tumult of emotion.
Every man who has been proud of his country hitherto has now profounder cause for pride. Our system has been tried in every way; it rises purified from the fire. No one man is essential to her, however deeply beloved, however generously trusted. The history of the war from May, 1861, to May, 1865, proves that she cannot be hopelessly bereaved. The sceptics who have sneered, the timid who have feared, the shrewd who have doubted, must now see that the principles of popular government have beenamply vindicated. We have only clearly to understand and fearlessly to trust these principles, and the future, like the past, is secure.
In the earlier days of the war a sagacious foreign observer, resident in the country, said that he feared we were making a mistake perilous to the American principle. The suspension of the habeas corpus he thought a very dangerous political, however necessary a military, experiment it might be. But he was answered by another European, who had been a political pupil of Cavour's, that, unlike such an act in other countries, it was here done by the people themselves, and they must be trusted in it, or else the whole American experiment failed. Such power must be used, he said; the crucial test is the way in which it is used. If the people cannot use it in a way which shall be permanently harmless, then they are not capable of self-government. Oh, wise young judge! In the whole world no heart will be more sincerely glad, no face more bright with joy, or sadder withsorrow, at the strange April news from America than yours!
What a May day! Stricken as all hearts are, what a May day! Budding and blooming on every hand, on every hill-side and meadow and wood, flushing and glittering with the lavish beauty of the spring softly gliding over grieving hearts, and with her royal touch healing our varied sorrow, came the Queen of May, for whom the people sighed and the land yearned, came the well-beloved, the long-desired, palms in her hand and doves flying before her; and the name of that May-day Queen was Peace.
THE gay young European diplomatist, accustomed to the charms of the great foreign capitals—London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, and the scores of small but delightful cities—probably regards an attachment to the embassy of his country in the United States as a B[oe]otian exile. But when, eagerly curious to see the capital of this remote region, he is dumped in the railroad-shed at Washington, and emerges upon the depthless mud or blinding dust of the city, upon its hackmen and porters, greedy of his last penny, and upon its general hopelessness of aspect, it is not difficult to imagine how his heart sinks and how bitter the exile seems.
To the independent native of the country, however, Washington as a city is simplyexasperating and ridiculous. Its one truly magnificent building, the Capitol, seems to have absorbed everything else. Like a huge wen, it has apparently sucked up all the life of the other buildings. Feeble, shapeless, ineffective, they huddle along the sides of the vast avenues, and, however closely they stand, give nothing but the impression of a straggling and clumsy village. Then there is the eternal absurdity of the plan. It is not only a straggling and clumsy village, but it is utterly dislocated. Washington is laid out upon the plan of cart-wheels within cart-wheels. The stranger is always going wrong. You meet him, say, near the junction of some avenue with some Fourth and a Half Street north. He has the expression of a long-confirmed but mild lunatic; and after gazing at you blandly and inquiringly for a moment, he says, "I am trying to find the corner of Ninth and Fifteenth streets." Of course he is; we all are in Washington. The folly would be evident elsewhere, but in Washington it is the most natural effort possible. There is but one reply to thecandid and inquiring fellow-maniac: "My dear sir, I have not the remotest conception where I am, or where anything is." There is a fond delusion that the city radiates from the Capitol. Nothing is more fallacious. Washington is a system of hubs, and a consequent combination of radiations.
The depression arising from arrival and the problem of streets is hardly relieved by arrival at Willard's. The entrance to that hotel is a cigar-shop, a newspaper-stand, and a loafing-room. You press through to the office. But what is man that an American landlord should regard him? The house is full, has been full, will be full. A few crisp words inform you that by-and-by, some time, perhaps, possibly, you may be stowed away in the seventh story, and allowed to pay four or five dollars a day. The moderation of the landlords is always a subject of wonder and gratitude. It seems a matter of mere grace and good-will that they do not charge twenty dollars a night, with the privilege of making your own bed.
"Whew!" cried Don Giovanni when,arriving at the capital of this country, he was made to undergo these initiatory steps, "will you please to tell me one single particular in which travel in Europe is not incomparably more agreeable and comfortable than in this country?" And he went on to compare the universal comfort and courtesy of foreign travel, sadly to the disadvantage of the home of the brave. "Certainly there is no country in which the guest upon reaching his hotel is treated with such laughable condescension as in this. A wretched hole of a room, shabbily furnished, the dirty walls and a suspicious bed, with a quart of water and a pocket-handkerchief of a towel, for which he is to pay four or five dollars or more daily, is awarded to the humbly expectant visitor as a high favor. A great American hotel is a penitentiary for travellers, and the gentlemen at the office are the lofty turnkeys and lord high-constables. A self-respecting man will travel here as little as possible."
"There is no doubt that much travel at home is a discipline," replied the Easy Chair.
"Yes," continued the indignant Don. "If you are known personally to the gentlemanly gentleman who dispenses chambers you may be tolerably quartered. But if you are merely one of the herd who have the temerity to arrive by steamer or car, you may thank your stars if you are graciously permitted to leave your luggage in the hall and to have a room by-and-by."
Now the Easy Chair humbly hopes that all gentlemanly gentlemen concerned will not understand him as making these remarks. They all proceeded from the person named, who is alone responsible. The Easy Chair has not quite come to the end of his travels; and would he malign the gentlemanly and accommodating? He desires to state distinctly that if he could not open the window of his room, it was merely because he had a foolish wish for fresh air; and if he could not turn round, it was because of the inordinate size of his trunk; and if his fingers went through the towel, it was because his manner was rude towards a chamber ornament so delicate and small; and ifthe sheets of the bed were not wholly fresh, it was because the gentlemanly and accomplished chamber-maiden lady was of a nobly economical turn of mind; and if the bell would not ring, it was because some former guest had been so little able to restrain himself as to pull it down. Indeed, there was nothing which did not admit of the fullest explanation. It is only the unreasonable who would complain of paying four or five dollars a day for such accommodations. "Let me tell you, sir," whispered the gentlemanly gentleman at a certain office to a bewildered person who had been ordered up to a burrow in the seventh story, "you are very lucky to get in at all." But the bewildered traveller's face, it is asserted, was not so humbly grateful as circumstances demanded.
Washington itself merely multiplies the impression of Willard's. Everything is feverish and transitory. The fine houses are rented by senators, by representatives, by foreign ministers, by army and navy officers, by families from other cities. They are taken for a season. Thosewho occupy them have no permanent interest in the city. The rule is almost universal. The Capitol, the White House, the departments, the public buildings are all full of men who came yesterday and are going to-morrow. Washington is a huge perch. All this tumult of twittering is from birds upon the wing, who have lighted for a moment only. Even the noisiest crows, the most solemn owls, are but for a day, or for two years, or four years, or for six years.
There is a certain permanent population of the military and naval bureaus, over whose heads the storms of fashion and politics roar and break like tempests that toss the surface of the sea far above the placid monsters and coral insects of the deep. And there are a few memorial office-holders—quiet men, who have grown old in certain ruts in which they can run with a facility that is absolutely essential. They feel that they have become part of the government. The very oldest senators and representatives excite in their breasts a kind of compassionate sympathy as mere boys and tyros. And likeheirs of old royal lines long since superseded, who cherish a secret conviction that modern times are a mere delusion and progress an absurd infatuation, and who are sure that some day the world will discover what a huge mistake it made in not continuing to be governed by the extinct line, and so return to its allegiance, the faithful plodders in the official ruts do still believe that the party, whatever it was, which appointed them is the Heaven-appointed ruler of the country, and that when the froth of the present moment is blown away, the clear, deep, sound good old times will be again discerned. The droll old Jacobites! They drink to the king over the water. They might as well drink to the king with his head off!
HERR Teufelsdrockh informs those who read his famous book, theTailor Sewer Over; or, the Philosophy of Clothes, that Mr. Pellum announces, among other canons regulating human apparel, that it is permitted to mankind, under certain conditions, to wear white waistcoats. But it now appears that, under certain conditions also, straw-colored gloves are not only permissible, but imperative. When a Japanese ambassador appears, and the white flag with the orb of day in its centre is unfurled, straw-color, as to the hands, is the only wear. Therefore, when the reception was to take place in Washington the deeply initiated held hands of thatmystic color. The only chagrin was that nobody seemed to know the significant fact nor to care for it; and one honorable gentleman asked with interest whether it would not be extremely orthodox to wear a straw-hat. But these levities were ill becoming the august occasion.
The feast of the straw-colored gloves in honor of the Japanese ambassadors fell upon an evening when the poetic policeman thought of every belle who stepped from her carriage,
"The bleak winds of MarchMade her tremble and shiver."
But he thought it only; he did not say it. Yet the bleak wind of the cold night had little chance at the guests, for a pavilion was laid to the very curb-stone, and everybody stepped out into friendly shelter. Then up the steep stairs, just as the illustrious guests were passing from the cloak-room to the hall. As they entered it the crowd, swelling upward from the door below, made for the ladies' room, or for the little hole in a corner into which the gentlemen were to thrust their coats,in the vague hope that they might be recovered. Some of the Japs who at a later hour were buffeting the crowd and struggling towards the aperture must have been impressed, if they were philosophers, with the fact that a nation of so many happy contrivances as they fondly believe us to be has not yet learned how to take charge of overcoats at public feasts. It would not be very difficult to avoid the fierce crush at the cloak-room; but it is not avoided, and it is as good-humored as it is disagreeable and unnecessary.
But who cared for the crush at the door of the opera-house on a Jenny Lind night, when coat skirts strewed the pavement, and the most elaborately tied cravats were undone? Not otherwise was this pressure when the door was passed and the pretty hall entered. Was this also an opera? And had the curtain risen? For the first impression of the brilliant scene was that of the trilling and warbling of canaries in clusters of cages hung high overhead, and for a moment giving a sense of enchanted gardens and rose bowers upon Bendermere'sstream. Was this impression disturbed when from their tiring-room the nymphs and dames emerged powdered, beflowered, effulgent? There were toilets of all kinds. There were even ladies in bonnets, as if they had run in neighborly to hobnob an hour with Iwakura. There were others in the very extreme of fashion. There was every kind of tasteful and rich and beautiful and plain and grotesque attire. And now and then behold! the ineffable calm of the lady—not one, but many—of whom Mr. Emerson tells the excellent story that she said to feel herself perfectly well dressed imparted a tranquil happiness that religion itself could not bestow.
The hall was very light, draped and festooned simply with the American and two Japanese flags intertwined, the whole giving a certain gauzy effect, which was pretty, if not fairy-like nor magnificent. Upon a little platform at the end of the hall stood the guest and other distinguished ministers. The space in the middle of the hall, between improvised columns, was kept clear for some time, so that the picture was charming. Thethrong pressed slowly up one side of the room towards the platform, and, passing across it in front of the various members of the embassy, were received by the Secretary of State and the Japanese minister, and by the latter presented to Iwakura. He was dressed, with all his associates, in the sad sables with which Western nations mourn their own gayety. Instead of some glittering cloth of gold, in which, whatever the fact may have been at the White House, we might have expected an ambassador from Zipango or El Dorado to be arrayed, we had the familiar and useful black broadcloth coat and trousers of civilization. But when Sir Philip Sidney, in flowered velvet, was presented to the great William of Orange, William was clad in a plain serge coat, and Sir Philip probably did not know it, or forgot it. And as the gallant Sidneys at this feast were presented to the chief ambassador, they doubtless saw the man and not his clothes.
Iwakura is about fifty years old; not a large man; of great dignity and serenity of character and manners, with a high-bredand elegant air, and a face of clear intelligence and refinement. He bowed courteously to every guest, with a subtile distance of salutation without offence which is peculiar to many men of high self-respect. Hand-shaking is the most religiously observed of all the social rites in Washington, and especially and amusingly by the diplomatic corps, who evidently constrain themselves to observe punctually this sacred habit; but Iwakura did not offer his hand, yet did not refuse to engage in the ceremony when it was unavoidable. Beyond him in the line were the chief ladies of the occasion, the wives of the Vice-President, of the Secretary of State, of the Speaker, and of the other secretaries. It was simply a republican court, recalling the days when President Washington and his wife stood upon a slightly raised dais at the end of the hall, there being about those three inches of monarchy left at the beginning of the republic, before Thomas Jefferson, alighting from his horse, hitched him by the bridle to the fence, and then went into the Capitol to be inaugurated President.
Descending from the immediate presence, the guests gathered in lines along the hall, or slowly promenaded, engaged in watching and in criticising each other. Meanwhile the band played, and the canaries, excited by the music and the lights, sang loud and clear. Not so sweetly sang the gossips, as they whispered and exclaimed at each other's fresh oddity or extravagance of attire. Gently, good gossips! gently! for even at this moment is the Scripture fulfilled, and ye who judge are judged. "In a world where Martin Farquhar Tupper passes to the thirty-seventh edition," said Thackeray, in a company of authors, "let us all think small-beer of ourselves." When to the eye of men the dress of the fairer sex is altogether bewildering, and certainly not, as Professor Teufelsdrockh would say, unbeautiful, why should the good gossip invidiously discriminate? Peace, peace! The sober matron at whom you smile wears the plain dress because she preferred to pay her boy's college bills with the money that would have arrayed her in Parisian robes had he stayed athome. And you, dear madam, daughter of Fortunatus and heiress of his purse, you wear those ponderous diamonds and nudge your neighbors to look and laugh with you.
Hark the soft prelude of the waltz. What is the mysterious pathos of that long pulsing strain? Why is that measure, moving to which the joy and the hope of youth celebrate their triumph, of all measures the most passionately sad? One after another the partners glide into the dance. They swim, they float, they circle, they move in music and to music. And what is this, and who is here? this comet, this meteor of a couple, who come pumping and dashing through the throng. Are her hands really laid upon his shoulders? Do his hands clasp her elbows, or is it an extraordinary dream? No wonder that Japan draws to the edge of the dais and gazes in wonder, for America also looks on in amazement. The amused incredulity of the foreign guests as they watch the dancing is interesting to see. Iwakura regards the scene with smiling gravity. To him the spectacleseems a thousandfold more against nature than the vision of a woman voting can possibly be to the most conservative American. Yet the ambassador will find that the loveliest woman may waltz with a man and still be womanly, and the conservative American may go and do likewise. The fashions of a time and the traditions of a nation are not the final laws of nature, and even Horatio's philosophy does not exhaust the things in heaven and earth that are yet to be.
The ambassadors are still gazing, the band is still playing, and the birds are still singing over the happy dancers as we come away. There is a desperate but brief struggle at the orifice in the corner, whence, to our delight, our coats emerge. We have a glimpse into the ladies' tiring-room, where, like bright-winged birds, they are pluming themselves for flight. Upon the steep staircase, where they stand waiting for their carriages, there is tranquillity and order, so excellent are the arrangements. Scores of sentences are left in fragments upon the stairs, for in the midst of a remark the cry resounds, "TheHonorable Mr. Iago's carriage, Mrs. Bluebeard's, The Ambassador from San Salvador, Mr. Smith-Jones's carriage!" And instantly the bright-winged birds are flown, and rose-buds and violets go home to happy dreams.
THE fabled stream that sank from sight, and emerged far away, still flowing, is an image of the course of all progress. The argument which establishes the reason and the benefit of reform does not, therefore, at once establish it, still less complete it. There are obstructions, delays, disappearances; but still the stream flows, seen or unseen, still it swells, and reappearing far beyond where it vanished, moves brimming to the sea.
The Lady Mavourneen, who, coming to us straight from Paris, found here a courteous regard for women, which she said that after a life's residence she had not found in France, was only just to Americans. Nowhere is there such instinctive and universal consideration for the gentler sex, notwithstanding the occasionalspectacle of the woman standing in the elevated railroad car, and the necessity under which the elderly wit found himself in the omnibus, when, seeing a comely young woman standing, he said to his son sitting in his lap, "My son, why don't you get up and give the lady your seat?"
Despite such gayety in the omnibus, and such devout reading of the newspapers in the elevated cars that the devotees cannot see women standing, even those women, if they are travelled, would agree that, upon the whole, in no civilized country have they encountered more deference to the sex as such than in America. Yet the courtesy is that of a clever as well as polite people. If the comely maid in the omnibus had suddenly and sweetly asked the elderly wit whether he was a true American, and believed that taxation and representation should go together, he would have promptly replied, "Yes, ma'am." But if she had then whipped out her logical rapier and thrust at him the question, "Are you, then, in favor of giving me a vote?" his clevernessand his courtesy would have blended in his reply, "Madam, when women demand it, they will have it." It is the universal reply of the ingenious patriot who is aware that the argument is against him, but who is still unconvinced. The stream of logic sinks in the sands of his scepticism, but it will reappear still further on, flowing with a fuller current towards its goal.
If the omnibus were a convenient ground for such bouts of argument, the maid has plenty of other keen rapiers in reserve with which she would pierce his courteous incredulity. One of the sharpest would be the rejoinder of inquiry whether it was the general custom of Legislatures to wait until everybody interested in a reform asked for it before granting it. Having inserted the point of the weapon, she would turn it around, to the great inconvenience of the elderly wit, by further asking specifically whether imprisonment for debt was abolished because poor debtors as a body requested it or because it was deemed best in the general interest that it should be abolished,or whether hanging for stealing a leg of mutton was renounced because the hapless thieves demanded it, or because Romilly showed that humanity and the welfare of society and of respect for law required it.
The comely maid, once aroused, would not spare him, and while declining to occupy his son's seat, she would challenge him to say whether the slave-trade was stopped and the West Indian slaves emancipated by England because the slaves petitioned, or because Parliament thought such reforms desirable for the interests of England. That inquiry, doubtless, she would have pushed more closely home, and there would have been no escape for the nimble wit except in some happy and elusive epigram. Nothing would have followed. He would have lifted his hat courteously as the lady smiled and left the omnibus. The stream of logic would have disappeared. But its volume would have been stronger, and when it reappeared, it would have been flowing nearer its goal.
The comely maid recently smiled, probablyas if she saw the reappearance, when she learned that venerable Yale, even before venerable Harvard, had opened her post-graduate courses upon absolutely the same conditions to women as to men. This is not co-education; far from it; it is as far as eleven o'clock from twelve. Still less is it co-suffrage. No, indeed; it is as different as the blossom of May from the fruit of September. It means no more than that the good sense of Yale, perceiving that there is a goodly company of women actually devoted to higher studies, and not perceiving anything unwomanly or undesirable in larger knowledge and stricter intellectual training, invites Hypatia and Mrs. Somerville and Maria Mitchell to avail themselves of her opportunities and resources to prosecute their studies, and recognizes that in a modern world of larger and juster views, which permits women to use every industrial faculty to the utmost, and to own property and dispose of it, it is useless longer to insist with chivalry that woman is a goddess "too bright and good," or with the Orient that she is aslave in this world and a houri in the next.
As for the logic of such an invitation, Yale is doubtless indifferent. She invites women to study not with her under-graduates, but with her post-graduates. Probably she recoils with instinctive conservatism from the vision of a possible Hypatia seated among her faculty in a professorial chair. That might do in Alexandria in the fifth century. But in New Haven in the nineteenth, or even the twentieth—? She recoils still further from the prospect of covoting. Elizabeth Tudor was a creditable head of a kingdom and a fellow-counsellor of state with Burleigh and Walsingham. But does it follow that a Connecticut woman possessed of great estates should have a voice in the disposition of her property? Probably Yale would agree that when all such amply endowed women unite in asking for such a voice, it might be worth while to consider. Meanwhile she opens the hospitable doors of her post-graduate intellectual treasury, and every woman who will may enter and share the riches.
Oliver asked for more, but not until he had consumed his portion. The comely maid of the omnibus smiles as she sees those treasury doors hospitably opening. She seems perhaps to see the stream of logic at once vanishing and reappearing. If a woman may mingle wisely with post-graduates, why not with under—but no. Something, she would say with womanly good sense, may be left to time and the inevitable sequence of events. Shall all be done at once, and the sound seed be spurned because it must be planted and grow and ripen before there is a harvest? In this Columbian year shall we think that nothing was gained when Columbus reached San Salvador, as we used to be taught, or Watling Island, or Grand Turk, or Samana, among which bewildered knowledge now doubtfully gropes—because he had not reached the continent, and because he believed it to be the old and not a new India?
That comely damsel, with her face towards the morning, says, quietly, with Durandarte, "Patience, and shuffle the cards." One glance at the woman in the Athensof Pericles and at woman in the New Haven of President Dwight answers the question which the nimble elderly wit eluded.
ISAW theGreat Easternsail away. The afternoon was exquisite—one of the cool, clear, perfect days that followed the storm in the middle of August; and it seemed to hang over the great ship like a cordial smile. But it was the only smile the poor Leviathan received. There was a Christian resignation in her departure. The big ship, like Falstaff, "'a made a finer end and went away, an it had been any christom child: 'a parted even just between" four and five, "ev'n at turning o' the tide." But as when a prince is born, and the bells are rung, and the cannon fired, and the city is illuminated, and with music and shouting the people swarm the streets—and when the same prince, grown to be a bad king andtyrant, dies, outcast and contemned, with never a tear to fall nor a bell to toll for him—even such was the coming and the going of theGreat Eastern.
I remember also the June afternoon when she arrived, and at the same hour. The city was excited as London used to be by the news of a famous victory. It was reported early in the morning that she was below, and public expectation, which had been feeding upon print and picture of her, was despatching the population to the Battery, to the wharves, to the excursion boats, and wherever she could be seen. At four o'clock you could see, off Staten Island, a pyramid of towering masts above all other masts. She looked a mighty admiral; and as she came up the bay, attended by the little boats—for all other craft are little beside her—you could easily remember the approach of Columbus to the shore and the canoes of curious savages that darted and swarmed around his ship. Her very size gave her a kind of superiority: the silence of her progress was full of majesty.
The shores teemed with people. Theheights 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 ofthe 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 theGreat Easternhad 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. TheGreat Easternis 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, magnificentand majestic, theGreat Easterndeparted.
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.
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'sHand-book for Londonat 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'sTower of Londonwill 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 opensGalignani'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 Château Rouge; and if some Easy Chair accidentally encountered straying along the Boulevards, or seated at the door of a café, 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 isan emigré. 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 fromwhich 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 dozenyears 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 istapes-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 andspiritual 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 thepaper, 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 Café 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 fromthe 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 wasdone 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 modestretailer 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. Itwill 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.
AFEW 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 littlebarer, 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 theBugle 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 theBugle 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 theBugle ofFreedom. "What do we see? Do we wish to be Egyptians, or modern Greeks, or Italians? Heaven forbid!" And the resoundingBugleseemed to execute roulades and runs and trills of contempt at the unhappy Easy Chair, which was gazing vacantly at Egypt, Greece, and Italy, as theBuglehad directed.
Has theBugle of Freedomno 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 orcountry from whose windows long vanished faces look when theBuglepasses 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 theBugleif 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,OBugle, 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 andover-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 Platæa 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 sunkenAlabamaand the Wilderness?
For the same reason, O loud-blowingBugle 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 theargument 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 theBugle 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 parentalBugle of Freedomblew 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 oppositeto 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. Honoré of the republican city. The house still has the stately air of the old régime. 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 Houseglancing 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 fashionablesquare, 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."