What is the excitement occasioned by the Ellsler or Miss Lind compared to that which attended the advent of the elder Kean? What crowds used to beset the box office in the ten-footer next to the theatre, from the earliest dawn until the opening! I often think, when I meet some of our gravest and grayest citizens in their daily walks, what a figure they cut now compared with the days when they were fighting their way into the box office of the old theatre! Talk of enthusiasm! What are all our political campaigns and public commemorations compared with that evening during the last war with Great Britain, when Commodore Bainbridge came into Boston Bay after his victory over the Java! That admirable actor, the late Mr. Cooper, was playing Macbeth, and interrupted his performance to announce the victory.
But, pardon me, I did not sit down here to lose myself in the reminiscences of half a century ago. Let me try to govern this truant pen, and keep it more closely to my chosen theme. Do you remember, beloved reader, your second visit to the theatre? If you do, cherish it; let it not depart from you, for in the days that are in store for you, when age and infirmity shall stand guard over you, and you are obliged to find all your pleasures by your fireside, the memory of your second play will be very precious to you. You will find, on looking back to it through a vista of sixty years or more, that all the pleasure you then enjoyed was placed on the credit side of your account, and has been increasing by a sort of moral compound interest during the long years that you have devoted to delights less innocent, perhaps, and certainly less satisfactory, or to the pursuit of objects far more fleeting and unreal than those which then fascinated your youthful mind. I say your "second play," for the first dramatic performance that the child witnesses is too astonishing to afford him its full measure of gratification. It is only after he has told his playmates all about it, and imitated the wonderful hero who rescued the beautiful lady in white satin, and dreamed of the splendour of the last great scene, when all the persons of the drama stood in a semicircle, and the king, with a crown of solid gold upon his head, addressed to the magnanimous hero the thrilling words,—
"It is enough: the princess is thine own!"—
and all the characters struck impressive attitudes, and the curtain descended upon a tableau lighted up by coloured fires of ineffable brilliancy,—it is only after all these things have sunk deep into the young mind, and he has resolved to write a play himself, and never to rest satisfied until he can bring down the house with the best of the actors he has seen, that he fully appreciates the entertainment which has been vouchsafed to him.
What a charm invests the place where we made our first acquaintance with the drama! It becomes an enchanted spot for us, and I doubt if the greatest possible familiarity in after life can ever breed contempt for it in our hearts. For my own part, I regarded the destruction of the old theatre in Federal Street, and the erection of warehouses on its hallowed site, as a positive sacrilege. And I cannot pass that spot, even at this late day, without mentally recurring to the joys I once tasted there. Perhaps some who read this may cherish similar sentiments about the old Tremont Theatre, a place for which I had as great a fondness as one can have for a theatre in which he did not see his first play. The very mention of it calls up its beautiful interior in my mind's eye,—its graceful proscenium, its chandeliers around the front of the boxes, its comfortable pit, where I enjoyed so much good acting, and all the host of worthies who graced that spacious stage. Mr. Gilbert was not so fat in those days as he is now, nor Mr. Barry so gray. What a picturesque hero was old Brough in the time when the Woods were in their golden prime, and the appearance of the Count Rodolpho on the distant bridge was the signal for a tempest of applause! Who can forget how Mr. Ostinelli's bald head used to shine, as he presided over that excellent orchestra, or how funny old Gear's serious face looked, as he peered at the house through those heavy, silver-bowed spectacles? Perhaps for some of my younger readers the stage of the Museum possesses similar charms, and they will find themselves, years hence, looking back to the happy times when Mr. Angier received their glittering quarters, and they hastened up stairs, to forget the wanderings of Æneas and the perplexities of arithmetic in the inimitable fun of that prince-regent among comedians, Mr. William Warren.
But wherever we may have commenced our dramatic experience, and whatever that experience may have been, we have all, I am sure, felt the influence of that mysterious charm which hangs over the stage. We have all felt that keen curiosity to penetrate to the source of so much enjoyment. Who has not had a desire to enter that mysterious door which conducts the "sons of harmony" from the orchestra to the unknown depths below the stage? It looks dark and forbidding, but we feel instinctively that it is not so, when we see our venerated uncle Tom Comer carrying his honest and sunshiny face through it so often. That green curtain, which is the only veil between us and a world of heroes and demigods,—how enviously do we look at its dusty folds! With what curiosity do we inspect the shoes of varied make and colour that figure in the little space between it and the stage! How do we long to follow the hero who has strutted his hour upon the stage into the invisible recesses of P. S. and O. P., and to know what takes the place of the full audience and the glittering row of footlights in his eyes when he makes his exit at the "upper entrance, left," or through the "door in flat" which always moves so noiselessly on its hinges! I think that the performance of the "Forty Thieves" awakened this curiosity in my mind more than almost any other play. I longed to inspect more closely those noble steeds that came with such a jerky gait over the distant mountains, and to know what produced the fearful noise that attended the opening of the robbers' cave. I believed in the untold wealth that was said to be heaped up in those subterranean depths, but still I wished to look at the "cavern goblet," and see how it compared with those that adorned the cases of my excellent friends, Messrs. Davis and Brown. I can never forget the thrill that shot through me when Morgiana lifted the cover of the oil jar, and the terrible question, "Is it time?" issued from it, nor my admiration for the fearlessness of that self-possessed maiden when she answered with those eloquent and memorable words, "Not yet, but presently." I believed that the compound which Morgiana administered so freely to the concealed banditti was just as certain death to every mother's son of them as M. Fousel's Pabulum Vitæ is renewed life to the consumptives of the present day; and, years after I had supposed my recollections of the "Forty Thieves" to have become very misty and shapeless, I found myself startled in an oriental city by coming upon several oil jars of the orthodox model, and I astonished the malignant and turbaned Turk who owned them, and amused the companion of my walks about Smyrna, by lifting the lid of one of them, and quoting the words of Morgiana. My superstitions concerning that pleasant old melodrama of course passed away when I became familiar with the theatre by daylight, and was accustomed to exchange the compliments of the morning with the estimable gentleman who played Hassarac; but the illusion of its first performance has never been entirely blotted from my mind.
Some years ago it was my privilege to visit a place which is classical to every lover of the drama and its literature. Drury Lane Theatre, now that its ancient rival, Covent Garden, has passed away, and been replaced by a house exclusively devoted to the lyric muse, is the only theatre of London which is associated in every mind with that host of geniuses who have illustrated dramatic art from the times of Garrick to our own. That gifted and versatile actor, Mr. Davenport, who stands as high in the favour of the English as of the American public, conducted me through that immense establishment. We entered the door, which I had often looked at with curiosity as I passed through the long colonnade of the theatre, encountering several of those clean-shaven personages in clothes that would be much refreshed if they were allowed to take a nap, and, after traversing two or three dark corridors, found ourselves upon the stage. The scene of so many triumphs as have there been achieved is not without its attractions, even though it may look differently en déshabille from what it does in the glitter of gaslight. The stage which has been trod by the Kembles, the Keans, Siddons, Macready, Young, Palmer Dowton, Elliston, Munden, Liston, and Farren, is by no means an ordinary combination of planks. We know, for Campbell has told us, that
"——by the mighty actor brought,
Illusion's perfect triumphs come;
Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And sculpture to be dumb."
Yet what a shadowy, intangible thing the reputation of a great actor would seem to be! We simply know of him that in certain characters his genius held the crowded theatre in willing thraldom, and made the hearts of hundreds of spectators throb like that of one man. Those who felt his wondrous power have passed away like himself; and all that remains of him who once filled so large a space in the public eye is an ill-written biography or a few hastily penned sentences in an encyclopædia.
I was too full of wonder at the extent of that vast stage, however, to think much of its ancient associations. Those lumbering stacks of scenery that filled a large building at the rear of the stage, and ran over into every available corner, told the story of the scenic efforts of Old Drury during nearly half a century. How many dramas, produced "without the slightest regard to expense," and "on a scale of unparalleled splendour," must have contributed to the building up of those mighty piles! The labyrinthine passages, the rough brick walls, darkened by time and the un-Penelope-like spiders of Drury Lane, were in striking contrast to the stage of that theatre as it appears from the auditorium. The green-room had been placed in mourning for the "goodlie companie" that once filled it, by the all-pervading, omnipresent smoke of London. Up stairs the sight was still more wonderful. The space above the stage was crowded full of draperies, and borders, and dusty ropes, and wheels, and pulleys. Davenport enjoyed my amazement, and led me through a darksome, foot-wide passage above the stage, through that wilderness of cordage to the machinists' gallery. Take all the rope-walks that you have ever visited, dear reader, and add to them the running gear of several first-class ships, and you may obtain something of an idea of the sight that then met my view. I have often heard an impatient audience hiss at some trifling delay in the shifting of a scene. If they could see the complicated machinery which must be set in motion to produce the effects they desire, their impatience would be changed to wonder at the skill and care which are so constantly exerted and make so few mistakes. A glance into two or three of the dressing-rooms, and a hasty visit to the dark maze of machinery beneath the stage for working the trapdoors, completed my survey of Old Drury, and I left its ancient walls with an increased respect for them, and a feeling of self-gratulation that I was neither an actor nor a manager.