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THE OLD BOWERY

_A Reminiscence of New York Plays and Acting Fifty Years Ago_

In an article not long since, "Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth," in "The
Nineteenth Century," after describing the bitter regretfulness to
mankind from the loss of those first-class poems, temples, pictures,
gone and vanish'd from any record of men, the writer (Fleeming Jenkin)
continues:

If this be our feeling as to the more durable works of art, what
shall we say of those triumphs which, by their very nature, la
no longer than the action which creates them--the triumphs of the
orator, the singer, or the actor? There is an anodyne in the words,
"must be so," "inevitable," and there is even some absurdity in
longing for the impossible. This anodyne and our sense of humor
temper the unhappiness we feel when, after hearing some great
performance, we leave the theatre and think, "Well, this great thing
has been, and all that is now left of it is the feeble print up
my brain, the little thrill which memory will send along my nerves,
mine and my neighbors; as we live longer the print and thrill must
be feebler, and when we pass away the impress of the great artist
will vanish from the world." The regret that a great art should in
its nature be transitory, explains the lively interest which many
feel in reading anecdotes or descriptions of a great actor.

All this is emphatically my own feeling and reminiscence about the
best dramatic and lyric artists I have seen in bygone days--for
instance, Marietta Alboni, the elder Booth, Forrest, the tenor
Bettini, the baritone Badiali, "old man Clarke"--(I could write
a whole paper on the latter's peerless rendering of the Ghost in
"Hamlet" at the Park, when I was a young fellow)--an actor named
Ranger, who appear'd in America forty years ago in _genre_ characters;
Henry Placide, and many others. But I will make a few memoranda at
least of the best one I knew.

For the elderly New Yorker of to-day, perhaps, nothing were more
likely to start up memories of his early manhood than the mention of
the Bowery and the elder Booth, At the date given, the more stylish
and select theatre (prices, 50 cents pit, $1 boxes) was "The Park,"
a large and well-appointed house on Park Row, opposite the present
Post-office. English opera and the old comedies were often given in
capital style; the principal foreign stars appear'd here, with Italian
opera at wide intervals. The Park held a large part in my boyhood's
and young manhood's life. Here I heard the English actor, Anderson, in
"Charles de Moor," and in the fine part of "Gisippus." Here I heard
Fanny Kemble, Charlotte Cushman, the Seguins, Daddy Rice, Hackett
as Falstaff, Nimrod Wildfire, Rip Van Winkle, and in his Yankee
characters. (See pages 19, 20, "Specimen Days.") It was here (some
years later than the date in the headline) I also heard Mario many
times, and at his best. In such parts as Gennaro, in "Lucrezia
Borgia," he was inimitable--the sweetest of voices, a pure tenor, of
considerable compass and respectable power. His wife, Grisi, was with
him, no longer first-class or young--a fine Norma, though, to the
last.

Perhaps my dearest amusement reminiscences are those musical ones. I
doubt if ever the senses and emotions of the future will be thrill'd
as were the auditors of a generation ago by the deep passion of
Alboni's contralto (at the Broadway Theatre, south side, near Pearl
street)--or by the trumpet notes of Badiali's baritone, or Bettini's
pensive and incomparable tenor in Fernando in "Favorita," or Marini's
bass in "Faliero," among the Havana troupe, Castle Garden.

But getting back more specifically to the date and theme I started
from--the heavy tragedy business prevail'd more decidedly at the
Bowery Theatre, where Booth and Forrest were frequently to be heard.
Though Booth _pere,_ then in his prime, ranging in age from 40 to 44
years (he was born in 1796,) was the loyal child and continuer of the
traditions of orthodox English play-acting, he stood out "himself
alone" in many respects beyond any of his kind on record, and with
effects and ways that broke through all rules and all traditions. He
has been well describ'd as an actor "whose instant and tremendous
concentration of passion in his delineations overwhelm'd his audience,
and wrought into it such enthusiasm that it partook of the fever of
inspiration surging through his own veins." He seems to have been
of beautiful private character, very honorable, affectionate,
good-natured, no arrogance, glad to give the other actors the best
chances. He knew all stage points thoroughly, and curiously ignored
the mere dignities. I once talk'd with a man who had seen him do the
Second Actor in the mock play to Charles Kean's Hamlet in Baltimore.
He was a marvellous linguist. He play'd Shylock once in London,
giving the dialogue in Hebrew, and in New Orleans Oreste (Racine's
"Andromaque") in French. One trait of his habits, I have heard, was
strict vegetarianism. He was exceptionally kind to the brute creation.
Every once in a while he would make a break for solitude or wild
freedom, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for days. (He
illustrated Plato's rule that to the forming an artist of the very
highest rank a dash of insanity or what the world calls insanity is
indispensable.) He was a small-sized man--yet sharp observers noticed
that however crowded the stage might be in certain scenes, Booth
never seem'd overtopt or hidden. He was singularly spontaneous and
fluctuating; in the same part each rendering differ'd from any and
all others. He had no stereotyped positions and made no arbitrary
requirements on his fellow-performers.

As is well known to old play-goers, Booth's most effective part was
Richard III. Either that, or lago, or Shylock, or Pescara in "The
Apostate," was sure to draw a crowded house. (Remember heavy
pieces were much more in demand those days than now.) He was also
unapproachably grand in Sir Giles Overreach, in "A New Way to Pay Old
Debts," and the principal character in "The Iron Chest."

In any portraiture of Booth, those years, the Bowery Theatre, with its
leading lights, and the lessee and manager, Thomas Hamblin, cannot be
left out. It was at the Bowery I first saw Edwin Forrest (the play was
John Howard Payne's "Brutus, or the Fall of Tarquin," and it affected
me for weeks; or rather I might say permanently filter'd into my
whole nature,) then in the zenith of his fame and ability. Sometimes
(perhaps a veteran's benefit night,) the Bowery would group together
five or six of the first-class actors of those days--Booth, Forrest,
Cooper, Hamblin, and John R. Scott, for instance. At that time and
here George Jones ("Count Joannes") was a young, handsome actor, and
quite a favorite. I remember seeing him in the title role in "Julius
Caesar," and a capital performance it was.

To return specially to the manager. Thomas Hamblin made a first-rate
foil to Booth, and was frequently cast with him. He had a large,
shapely, imposing presence, and dark and flashing eyes. I remember
well his rendering of the main role in Maturin's "Bertram, or the
Castle of St. Aldobrand." But I thought Tom Hamblin's best acting was
in the comparatively minor part of Faulconbridge in "King John"--he
himself evidently revell'd in the part, and took away the house's
applause from young Kean (the King) and Ellen Tree (Constance,) and
everybody else on the stage--some time afterward at the Park. Some of
the Bowery actresses were remarkably good. I remember Mrs. Pritchard
in "Tour de Nesle," and Mrs. McClure in "Fatal Curiosity," and as
Millwood in "George Barnwell." (I wonder what old fellow reading these
lines will recall the fine comedietta of "The Youth That Never Saw a
Woman," and the jolly acting in it of Mrs. Herring and old Gates.)

The Bowery, now and then, was the place, too, for spectacular pieces,
such as "The Last Days of Pompeii," "The Lion-Doom'd" and the yet
undying "Mazeppa." At one time "Jonathan Bradford, or the Murder at
the Roadside Inn, "had a long and crowded run; John Sefton and his
brother William acted in it. I remember well the Frenchwoman Celeste,
a splendid pantomimist, and her emotional "Wept of the Wishton-Wish."
But certainly the main "reason for being" of the Bowery Theatre
those years was to furnish the public with Forrest's and Booth's
performances--the latter having a popularity and circles of
enthusiastic admirers and critics fully equal to the former--though
people were divided as always. For some reason or other, neither
Forrest nor Booth would accept engagements at the more fashionable
theatre, the Park. And it is a curious reminiscence, but a true one,
that both these great actors and their performances were taboo'd by
"polite society" in New York and Boston at the time--probably as being
too robustuous. But no such scruples affected the Bowery.

Recalling from that period the occasion of either Forrest or Booth,
any good night at the old Bowery, pack'd from ceiling to pit with
its audience mainly of alert, well-dress'd, full-blooded young and
middle-aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics--the
emotional nature of the whole mass arous'd by the power and magnetism
of as mighty mimes as ever trod the stage--the whole crowded
auditorium, and what seeth'd in it, and flush'd from its faces and
eyes, to me as much a part of the show as any--bursting forth in
one of those long-kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the
Bowery--no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle
from perhaps 2,000 full-sinew'd men--(the inimitable and chromatic
tempest of one of those ovations to Edwin Forrest, welcoming him back
after an absence, comes up to me this moment)--Such sounds and scenes
as here resumed will surely afford to many old New Yorkers some
fruitful recollections.

I can yet remember (for I always scann'd an audience as rigidly as
a play) the faces of the leading authors, poets, editors, of those
times--Fenimore Cooper, Bryant, Paulding, Irving, Charles King,
Watson Webb, N. P. Willis, Hoffman, Halleck, Mumford, Morris, Leggett,
L. G. Clarke, R. A. Locke and others, occasionally peering from the
first tier boxes; and even the great National Eminences, Presidents
Adams, Jackson, Van Buren and Tyler, all made short visits there on
their Eastern tours.

Awhile after 1840 the character of the Bowery as hitherto described
completely changed. Cheap prices and vulgar programmes came in. People
who of after years saw the pandemonium of the pit and the doings
on the boards must not gauge by them the times and characters I am
describing. Not but what there was more or less rankness in the crowd
even then. For types of sectional New York those days--the streets
East of the Bowery, that intersect Division, Grand, and up to Third
avenue--types that never found their Dickens, or Hogarth, or Balzac,
and have pass'd away unportraitured--the young ship-builders, cartmen,
butchers, firemen (the old-time "soap-lock" or exaggerated "Mose" or
"Sikesey," of Chanfrau's plays,) they, too, were always to be seen in
these audiences, racy of the East river and the Dry Dock. Slang, wit,
occasional shirt sleeves, and a picturesque freedom of looks and
manners, with a rude good-nature and restless movement, were generally
noticeable. Yet there never were audiences that paid a good actor or
an interesting play the compliment of more sustain'd attention or
quicker rapport. Then at times came the exceptionally decorous and
intellectual congregations I have hinted it; for the Bowery really
furnish'd plays and players you could get nowhere else. Notably, Booth
always drew the best hearers; and to a specimen of his acting I will
now attend in some detail.

I happen'd to see what has been reckon'd by experts one of the most
marvellous pieces of histrionism ever known. It must have been about
1834 or '35. A favorite comedian and actress at the Bowery, Thomas
Flynn and his wife, were to have a joint benefit, and, securing Booth
for Richard, advertised the fact many days beforehand. The house
fill'd early from top to bottom. There was some uneasiness behind the
scenes, for the afternoon arrived, and Booth had not come from down
in Maryland, where he lived. However, a few minutes before ringing-up
time he made his appearance in lively condition.

After a one-act farce over, as contrast and prelude, the curtain
rising for the tragedy, I can, from my good seat in the pit, pretty
well front, see again Booth's quiet entrance from the side, as, with
head bent, he slowly and in silence, (amid the tempest of boisterous
hand-clapping,) walks down the stage to the footlights with that
peculiar and abstracted gesture, musingly kicking his sword, which he
holds off from him by its sash. Though fifty years have pass'd since
then, I can hear the clank, and feel the perfect following hush of
perhaps three thousand people waiting. (I never saw an actor who
could make more of the said hush or wait, and hold the audience in
an indescribable, half-delicious, half-irritating suspense.) And so
throughout the entire play, all parts, voice, atmosphere, magnetism,
from

"Now is the winter of our discontent,"

to the closing death fight with Richmond, were of the finest and
grandest. The latter character was play'd by a stalwart young fellow
named Ingersoll. Indeed, all the renderings were wonderfully good.
But the great spell cast upon the mass of hearers came from Booth.
Especially was the dream scene very impressive. A shudder went through
every nervous system in the audience; it certainly did through mine.

Without question Booth was royal heir and legitimate representative of
the Garrick-Kemble-Siddons dramatic traditions; but he vitalized and
gave an unnamable _race_ to those traditions with his own electric
personal idiosyncrasy. (As in all art-utterance it was the subtle and
powerful something _special to the individual_ that really conquer'd.)

To me, too, Booth stands for much else besides theatricals. I consider
that my seeing the man those years glimps'd for me, beyond all else,
that inner spirit and form--the unquestionable charm and vivacity, but
intrinsic sophistication and artificiality--crystallizing rapidly upon
the English stage and literature at and after Shakspere's time, and
coming on accumulatively through the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to the beginning, fifty or forty years ago, of those
disintegrating, decomposing processes now authoritatively going on.
Yes; although Booth must be class'd in that antique, almost extinct
school, inflated, stagy, rendering Shakspere (perhaps inevitably,
appropriately) from the growth of arbitrary and often cockney
conventions, his genius was to me one of the grandest revelations of
my life, a lesson of artistic expression. The words fire, energy,
_abandon_, found in him unprecedented meanings. I never heard a
speaker or actor who could give such a sting to hauteur or the taunt.
I never heard from any other the charm of unswervingly perfect
vocalization without trenching at all on mere melody, the province of
music.

So much for a Thespian temple of New York fifty years since, where
"sceptred tragedy went trailing by" under the gaze of the Dry Dock
youth, and both players and auditors were of a character and like we
shall never see again. And so much for the grandest histrion of modern
times, as near as I can deliberately judge (and the phrenologists put
my "caution" at 7)--grander, I believe, than Kean in the expression
of electric passion, the prime eligibility of the tragic artist.
For though those brilliant years had many fine and even magnificent
actors, undoubtedly at Booth's death (in 1852) went the last and by
far the noblest Roman of them all.

NOTES TO LATE ENGLISH BOOKS

PREFACE TO THE READER IN THE BRITISH ISLANDS--"_Specimen Days in
America"

London Edition, June 1887_ If you will only take the following pages,
as you do some long and gossippy letter written for you by a relative
or friend travelling through distant scenes and incidents and jotting
them down lazily and informally, but ever veraciously (with occasional
diversion of critical thought about sombody or something,) it might
remove all formal or literary impediments at once, and bring you and
me closer together in the spirt in which the jottings were collated to
be read. You have had, and have, plenty of public events and facts and
general statistics of America;--in the following book is a common
individual New World _private life_, its birth and growth, its
struggles for a living, its goings and comings and observations (or
representative portions of them) amid the United States of America the
last thirty or forty years, with their varied war and peace, their
local coloring, the unavoidable egotism, and the lights and shades and
sights and joys and pains and sympathies common to humanity. Further
introductory light may be found in the paragraph, "A Happy Hour's
Command," and the bottom note belonging to it at the beginning of the
book. I have said in the text that if I were required to give good
reason-for-being of "Specimen Days," I should be unable to do so. Let
me fondly hope that it has at least the reason and excuse of such
off-hand gossippy letter as just alluded to, portraying American
life-sights and incidents as they actually occurred--their
presentation, making additions as far as it goes, to the simple
experience and association of your soul, from a comrade soul;--and
that also, in the volume, as below any page of mine, anywhere, ever
remains, for seen or unseen basis-phrase, GOOD-WILL BETWEEN THE COMMON
PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONS.

ADDITIONAL NOTE, 1887

_To English Edition "Specimen Days"_

As I write these lines I still continue living in Camden, New Jersey,
America. Coming this way from Washington city, on my road to the
sea-shore (and a temporary rest, as I supposed) in the early summer
of 1873, I broke down disabled, and have dwelt here, as my central
residence, all the time since--almost 14 years. In the preceding pages
I have described how, during those years, I partially recuperated (in
1876) from my worst paralysis by going down to Timber creek, living
close to Nature, and domiciling with my dear friends George and Susan
Stafford. From 1877 or '8 to '83 or '4 I was well enough to travel
around, considerably--journey'd westward to Kansas, leisurely
exploring the Prairies, and on to Denver and the Rocky Mountains;
another time north to Canada, where I spent most of the summer with
my friend Dr. Bucke, and jaunted along the great lakes, and the St.
Lawrence and Saguenay rivers; another time to Boston, to properly
print the final edition of my poems (I was there over two months, and
had a "good time.") I have so brought out the completed "Leaves
of Grass" during this period; also "Specimen Days," of which the
foregoing is a transcript; collected and re-edited the "Democratic
Vistas" cluster (see companion volume to the present)--commemorated
Abraham Lincoln's death, on the successive anniversaries of its
occurrence, by delivering my lecture on it ten or twelve times; and
"put in," through many a month and season, the aimless and resultless
ways of most human lives.

Thus the last 14 years have pass'd. At present (end-days of March,
1887--I am nigh entering my 69th year) I find myself continuing on
here, quite dilapidated and even wreck'd bodily from the paralysis,
&c.--but in _good heart_ (to use a Long Island country phrase,) and
with about the same mentality as ever. The worst of it is, I have
been growing feebler quite rapidly for a year, and now can't walk
around--hardly from one room to the next. I am forced to stay in-doors
and in my big chair nearly all the time. We have had a sharp, dreary
winter too, and it has pinch'd me. I am alone most of the time; every
week, indeed almost every day, write some--reminiscences, essays,
sketches, for the magazines; and read, or rather I should say dawdle
over books and papers a good deal--spend half the day at that.

Nor can I finish this note without putting on record--wafting over sea
from hence--my deepest thanks to certain friends and helpers (I would
specify them all and each by name, but imperative reasons, outside of
my own wishes, forbid,) in the British Islands, as well as in America.
Dear, even in the abstract, is such flattering unction always no doubt
to the soul! Nigher still, if possible, I myself have been, and
am to-day indebted to such help for my very sustenance, clothing,
shelter, and continuity. And I would not go to the grave without
briefly, but plainly, as I here do, acknowledging--may I not say even
glorying in it?

PREFACE TO "DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" WITH OTHER PAPERS--_English Edition_

Mainly I think I should base the request to weigh the following pages
on the assumption that they present, however indirectly, some views of
the West and Modern, or of a distinctly western and modern (American)
tendency, about certain matters. Then, too, the pages include (by
attempting to illustrate it,) a theory herein immediately mentioned.
For another and different point of the issue, the Enlightenment,
Democracy and Fair-show of the bulk, the common people of America
(from sources representing not only the British Islands, but all the
world,) means, at least, eligibility to Enlightenment, Democracy and
Fair-show for the bulk, the common people of all civilized nations.

That positively "the dry land has appeared," at any rate, is an
important fact.

America is really the great test or trial case for all the problems
and promises and speculations of humanity, and of the past and
present.

I say, too, we[41] are not to look so much to changes, ameliorations,
and adaptations in Politics as to those of Literature and (thence)
domestic Sociology. I have accordingly in the following melange
introduced many themes besides political ones.

Several of the pieces are ostensibly in explanation of my own
writings; but in that very process they best include and set forth
their side of principles and generalities pressing vehemently for
consideration our age.

Upon the whole, it is on the atmosphere they are born in, and, (I
hope) give out, more than any specific piece or trait, I would care to
rest.

I think Literature--a new, superb, democratic literature--is to be
the medicine and lever, and (with Art) the chief influence in modern
civilization. I have myself not so much made a dead set at this
theory, or attempted to present it directly, as admitted it to color
and sometimes dominate what I had to say. In both Europe and America
we have serried phalanxes who promulge and defend the political claims:
I go for an equal force to uphold the other.

WALT WHITMAN,

CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, _April, 1888_.

Note:

[41] We who, in many departments, ways, make _the building up of the
masses,_ by _building up grand individuals_, our shibboleth: and in
brief that is the marrow of this book.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Glad am I to give--were anything better lacking--even the most brief
and shorn testimony of Abraham Lincoln. Everything I heard about him
authentically, and every time I saw him (and it was my fortune through
1862 to '65 to see, or pass a word with, or watch him, personally,
perhaps twenty or thirty times,) added to and anneal'd my respect and
love at the moment. And as I dwell on what I myself heard or saw of
the mighty Westerner, and blend it with the history and literature of
my age, and of what I can get of all ages, and conclude it with
his death, it seems like some tragic play, superior to all else I
know--vaster and fierier and more convulsionary, for this America of
ours, than Eschylus or Shakspere ever drew for Athens or for England.
And then the Moral permeating, underlying all! the Lesson that none
so remote--none so illiterate--no age, no class--but may directly or
indirectly read!

Abraham Lincoln's was really one of those characters, the best of
which is the result of long trains of cause and effect--needing a
certain spaciousness of time, and perhaps even remoteness, to properly
enclose them--having unequal'd influence on the shaping of this
Republic (and therefore the world) as to-day, and then far more
important in the future. Thus the time has by no means yet come for a
thorough measurement of him. Nevertheless, we who live in his era--who
have seen him, and heard him, face to face, and are in the midst of,
or just parting from, the strong and strange events which he and we
have had to do with--can in some respects bear valuable, perhaps
indispensable testimony concerning him.

I should first like to give a very fair and characteristic likeness of
Lincoln, as I saw him and watch'd him one afternoon in Washington, for
nearly half an hour, not long before his death. It was as he stood on
the balcony of the National Hotel, Pennsylvania avenue, making a short
speech to the crowd in front, on the occasion either of a set of new
colors presented to a famous Illinois regiment, or of the daring
capture, by the Western men, of some flags from "the enemy," (which
latter phrase, by the by, was not used by him at all in his remarks.)
How the picture happen'd to be made I do not know, but I bought it a
few days afterward in Washington, and it was endors'd by every one
to whom I show'd it. Though hundreds of portraits have been made, by
painters and photographers, (many to pass on, by copies, to future
times,) I have never seen one yet that in my opinion deserv'd to be
called a perfectly _good likeness_; nor do I believe there is really
such a one in existence. May I not say too, that, as there is no
entirely competent and emblematic likeness of Abraham Lincoln in
picture or statue, there is not--perhaps cannot be--any fully
appropriate literary statement or summing-up of him yet in existence?