My Unknown Chum: "Aguecheek"

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THEATRE ALLEY

We are all associationists. There is no man who does not believe in association in some degree. For myself, I am firm in the faith. Let me not be misunderstood, however; I do not mean that principle of association which the late Mr. Fourier advocated in France, and Mr. Brisbane in America. I do not believe in the utopian schemes which have been ground out of the brains of philosophers who mistake vagueness and impracticability for sublimity, and which they have misnamed association. The principle of association to which I pay homage is one which finds a home in every human heart. It is that principle of our nature which, when the bereaved Queen Constance was mourning for her absent child, "stuffed out his vacant garments with his form." It is that principle which makes a man love the scenes of his boyhood, and which brings tears to the eyes of the traveller in a foreign land, when he hears a familiar strain from a hand organ, however harsh and out of tune. Even the brute creation seems to share in it; the cat is sure to be found in her favourite place at the fireside, while the tea kettle makes music on the hob; the dog, too, (let Hercules himself do what he may,) will not only have his day, but will have his chosen corner for repose, and will stick to it, however tempting you may make other places by a superabundance of door mats and other canine furniture. And the tired cart horse, when his day's labour is over, and he finds himself once more in the familiar stall, with his provender before him – do you not suppose that the associations of equine comfort by which he is surrounded are dearer to him than any hopes of the luxury and splendour of Her Britannic Majesty's stables at Windsor could be? Ask him if he would leave his present peck of oats for the chances of royal service, and a red-waistcoated, white-top-booted groom to wait upon him, and I will warrant you that he will answer nay!

There is no nation nor people that is free from this bondage of association. We treasure General Jackson's garments with respectful care in a glass case in the Patent Office at Washington; in the Louvre, you shall find preserved the crown of Charlemagne and the old gray coat of the first Napoleon; and at Westminster Abbey, (if you have the money to pay your admission fee,) you may see the plain old oaken chair in which the crowned monarchs of a thousand years have sat. Go to Rome, and stand "at the base of Pompey's statua," and association shall carry you back in imagination to the time when the mighty Julius fell. Stand upon the grassy mounds of Tusculum, and you will find yourself glowing with enthusiasm for Cicero, and wonder how you could have grown so sleepy over Quousque tandem, &c., in your schoolboy days. Climb up the Trasteverine steep to where the convent of San Onofrio suns itself in the bright blue air of Rome, and while the monks are singing the divine office where the bones of Tasso repose, you may fill your mind with memories of the bard of the crusades, in the chamber where his weary soul found the release it craved. Go to that fair capital which seems to have hidden itself among the fertile hills of Tuscany; walk through its pleasant old streets, and you shall find yourself the slave of many pleasing associations. The very place where Dante was wont to stand and gaze at that wondrous dome which Michel Angelo said he was unwilling to copy and unable to excel, is marked by an inscription in the pavement. Every street has its associations that appeal to your love of the beautiful or the heroic. Walk out into the lively streets of that city which stands at the head of the world's civilization, and you are overwhelmed with historic associations. You seem to hear the clatter of armed heels in some of those queer old alleys, and the vision of Godfrey or St. Louis, armed for the holy war, would not astonish you. The dim and stately halls of the palaces are eloquent of power, and you almost expect to see the thin, pale, thoughtful face of the great Richelieu at every corner. Over whole districts, rebellion, and anarchy, and infidelity, once wrote the history of their sway in blood, and even now, the names of the streets, as you read them, seem to fill you with terrible mementoes.

But to us, Americans, connected as we are with England in our civilization and our literature, how full of thrilling associations is London! From Whitehall, where Puritanism damned itself by the murder of a king, to Eastcheap, where Mistress Quickly served Sir John with his sherris-sack; from St. Saviour's Church, where Massinger and Fletcher lie in one grave, to Milton's tomb in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, there is hardly a street, or court, or lane, or alley, which does not appeal by some association to the student of English history or literature. He perambulates the Temple Gardens with Chaucer; he hears the partisans of the houses of York and Lancaster, as they profane the silence of that scholastic spot; he walks Fleet Street, and disputes in Bolt Court with Dr. Johnson; he smokes in the coffee-houses of Covent Garden with Dryden and Pope, and the wits of their day; he makes morning calls in Leicester Square and its neighbourhood, on Sir Philip Sidney, Hogarth, Reynolds, and Newton; he buys gloves and stockings at Defoe's shop in Cornhill; and makes excursions with Dicky Steele out to Kensington, to see Mr. Addison. Drury Lane, despite its gin, and vice, and squalour, has its associations. The old theatre is filled with them. They show you, in the smoky green-room, the chairs which once were occupied by Siddons and Kemble; the seat of Byron by the fireside in the days of his trusteeship; the mirrors in which so many dramatic worthies viewed themselves, before they were called to achieve their greatest triumphs.

Every where you find men acknowledging in their actions their allegiance to this great natural law. Our own city, too, has its associations. Who can pass by that venerable building in Union Street, which, like a deaf and dumb beggar, wears a tablet of its age upon its unsightly front, without recalling some of the events that have taken place, some of the scenes which that venerable edifice has looked down upon, since its solid timbers were jointed in the year of salvation 1685? Who can enter Faneuil Hall without a quickening of his pulse? Who can walk by the old Hancock House, and not look up at it as if he expected to see old John (the best writer on the subject of American independence) standing at the door in his shad-bellied coat, knee-breeches, and powdered wig? Who can look at the Old South Church without thinking of the part it played in the revolution, and of the time when it was obliged to yield its unwilling horsepitality to the British cavalry? Boston is by no means deficient in associations. Go to Brattle Street, to Copp's Hill, to Mount Washington, to Deer Island, – though it must be acknowledged, the only association connected with the last-named place is the Provident Association.

If there be a fault in the Yankee character, I fear it is a lack of sufficient respect for the memory of the past. Nature will have her way with us, however we may try to resist her and trample old recollections under foot. We worship prosperity too much; and the wide, straight streets of western cities, with the telegraph posts standing like sentinels on the edge of the sidewalks, and a general odour of pork-packing and new houses pervading the atmosphere, seem to our acquisitive sense more beautiful than the sculptured arch, the moss-grown tower, the quaint gable, and all the summer fragrance of the gardens of the Tuileries or the Unterdenlinden. I am afraid that we almost deserve to be classed with those who (as Mr. Thackeray says) "have no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for any thing but success."

Many are kindled into enthusiasm by meditating upon the future of this our country, – "the newest born of nations, the latest hope of mankind," – but for myself I love better to dwell on the sure and unalterable past, than to speculate upon the glories of the coming years. While I was young, I liked, when at sea, to stand on the top-gallant forecastle, and see the proud ship cut her way through the waves that playfully covered me with spray; but of late years my pleasure has been to lean over the taffrail and muse upon the subsiding foam of the vessel's wake. The recollection even of storms and dangers is to me more grateful than the most joyful anticipation of a fair wind and the expected port. With these feelings, I cannot help being moved when I see so many who try to deaden their natural sensibility to old associations. When the old Province House passed into the hands of the estimable Mr. Ordway, I congratulated him on his success, but I mourned over the dark fate of that ancient mansion. I respected it even in its fallen state as an inn, – for it retained much of its old dignity, and the ghosts of Andros and his predecessors seemed to brush by you in its high wainscoted passages and on its broad staircases; but it did seem the very ecstasy of sacrilege to transform it into a concert-room. I rejoiced, however, a few years since, when the birthplace of B. Franklin, in Milk Street, was distinguished by an inscription to that effect in letters of enduring stone. That was a concession to the historic associations of that locality which the most sanguine could hardly have expected from the satinetters of Milk Street.

But I am forgetting my subject, and using up my time and ink in the prolegomena. My philosophy of association received a severe blow last week. It was a pleasant day, and I hobbled out on my gouty timbers for a walk. I wandered into Franklin Place, but it was not the Franklin Place of my youth. The rude hand of public improvement had not been kept even from that row of houses which, when I was a boy, was thought an ornament to our city, and was dignified with the name of the Tontine Buildings. Franklin Place looked as if two or three of its front teeth had been knocked out. I walked on, and my sorrow and dismay were increased to find that the last vestige of Theatre Alley had disappeared. It was bad enough when the old theatre and the residence of the Catholic bishops of Boston were swept away: I still clung to the old alley, and hoped that it would not pass away in my time – that before the old locality should be improved into what the profane vulgar call sightliness and respectability, I should (to use the common expressions of one of our greatest orators, who, in almost every speech and oration that he has made for some years past, has given a sort of obituary notice of himself before closing) have been "resting in peace beneath the green sods of Mount Auburn," or should have "gone down to the silent tomb."

Do not laugh, beloved reader, at the tenderness of my affection for that old place. There is a great deal of romance of a quiet and genial kind about Theatre Alley. As I first remember it, commerce had not encroached upon its precincts; no tall warehouses shut out the light from its narrow footway, and its planks were unencumbered by any intrusive bales or boxes. Old Dearborn's scale factory was the only thing to remind one of traffic in that neighbourhood, which struck a balance with fate by becoming more scaley than before, when Dearborn and his factory passed away. The stage door of the theatre was in the alley, and the walk from thence, through Devonshire Street, to the Exchange Coffee House, which was the great hotel of Boston at that time, was once well known to many whose names are now part of the history of the drama. How often was I repaid for walking through the alley by the satisfaction of meeting George Frederick Cooke, the elder Kean, Finn, Macready, Booth, Cooper, Incledon, old Mathews, or the tall, dignified Conway – or some of that goodly company that made Old Drury classical to the play-goers of forty years ago.

The two posts which used to adorn and obstruct the entrance to the alley from Franklin Street, when they were first placed there, were an occasion of indignation to a portion of the public, and of anxiety and vexation to Mr. Powell, the old manager. That estimable gentleman had often been a witness to the terror of the children and of those of the weaker sex (I hope that I shall be forgiven by the "Rev. Antoinette Brown" for using such an adjective) who sometimes met a stray horse or cow in the alley; so he placed two wooden posts just beyond the theatre, to shut out the dreaded bovine intruders. But the devout Hibernians who used to worship at the church in Franklin Street could not brook the placing of any such obstacles in their way to the performance of their religious duties; and they used to cut the posts down as often as Mr. Powell set them up, until he took refuge in the resources of science, and covered and bound them with the iron bands which imprisoned them up to a very recent period.