From the Easy Chair, Volume 1

by George William Curtis

After many years the opportunity to hear him came again; and although the experiment was dangerous the Chair did not hesitate to try it. The hall was pretty and not too large, and the audience was the best that the country could furnish. Every one came solely to hear the speaker, for it was one lecture in a course of his only. It was pleasant to look around and mark the famous men and the accomplished women gathering quietly in the same city where they used to gather to hear him a quarter of a century before. How much the man who was presently to speak had done for their lives, and their children's, and the country! The power of one man is not easily traced in its channels and details, but it is marked upon the whole. The word "transcendentalism" has long passed by. It has not, perhaps, even yet gone out of fashion to smile at wisdom as visionary, but this particular wise man had been acquitted of being understood by my daughters, and there were rows of "hardheads," "practical people," curious and interesting to contemplate in the audience.

The tall figure entered at a side door, and sat down upon a sofa behind the desk. Age seemed not to have touched him since the evenings in the country Sunday-school room. As he stood at the desk the posture, the figure, the movement, were all unchanged. There was the same rapt introverted glance as he began in a low voice, and for an hour the older tree shook off a ceaseless shower of riper, fairer fruit. The topic was "Table-Talk, or Conversation;" and the lecture was its own most perfect illustration. It was not a sermon, nor an oration, nor an argument; it was the perfection of talk; the talk of a poet, of a philosopher, of a scholar. Its wit was a rapier, smooth, sharp, incisive, delicate, exquisite. The blade was pure as an icicle. You would have sworn that the hilt was diamond. The criticism was humane, lofty, wise, sparkling; the anecdote so choice and apt, and trickling from so many sources, that we seemed to be hearing the best things of the wittiest people. It was altogether delightful, and the audience sat glowing with satisfaction. There was no rhetoric, no gesture, no grimace, no dramatic familiarity and action; but the manner was self-respectful and courteous to the audience, and the tone supremely just and sincere. "He is easily king of us all," whispered an orator.

Yet it was not oratory either in its substance or purpose. It was a statement of what this wise man believed conversation ought to be. Its inevitable influence--the moral of the lecture, dear Lady Flora--was a purification of daily talk, and the general good influence of incisive truth-telling. If we have ever had a greater preacher of that gospel who is he?

[SHOPS AND SHOPPING.]

If the stranger in New York, on any pleasant day, finds himself near Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage he will be in the midst of a very pretty scene. Perhaps as he reads these words and asks the question where that romantic cot may be found, he is comfortably seated in it, with his feet placidly reposing upon its window-sills. It is, indeed, in a new form. It no longer looks as it did to the early citizen of fifty years ago, driving out before breakfast upon the Bloomingdale Road, and surveying the calm river from the seclusion of Stryker's Bay. It had an indefinable road-side English air in those far-off mornings. The early citizen would not have been surprised had he heard the horn of the guard merrily winding, and beheld the mail-coach of old England bowling up to the door. There were fields and open spaces about it, for it was on the edge of the city that was already reaching out upon the island. Bloomingdale! Twas a lovely name, and 'tis a great pity that the chief association with it is that of a very dusty road.

Meanwhile, if you will contemplate the Fifth Avenue Hotel you will see Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage in its present form. But what a busy, brilliant neighborhood it is now! There are shops that recall the prettiest upon the boulevards in Paris; and the people are greatly to be pitied who are too fine to stop and look into them. To be too fine is to lose much. Yet what scion of the golden youth of this moment would dare to walk by the site of Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage eating an apple at three o'clock in the afternoon?

There was a grave and well-dressed gentleman who stopped recently at the stand of Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan, which is just in the midst of the gay promenade, to transact some business in peanut candy. The interest of the public in that operation was inconceivable. If he had been Mr. Vanderbilt buying out Mr. Astor--if he had been a lunatic astray from the asylum, or a clown escaped from the circus--he could hardly have excited more attention. The passengers stared in amazement. Some young gentlemen, escorting certain young ladies from school, cracked excellent jokes upon the honest buyer of peanut candy; and if his daughter or any friend had chanced to pass and had seen him, she would probably have been seriously troubled and half ashamed.

Now peanut candy is very good, and at Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan's stand it is very cheap. Nobody is ashamed of liking it, nor of eating it. If the grave gentleman had stepped into Caswell's brilliant shop, let us suppose--where, perhaps, it is also sold--and had called for that particular sweet, nobody would have stared nor made a joke nor felt that it was extraordinary. Yet, how many of the brave generals in the war, who charged in the very face of flaming batteries, would dare to stop at Mrs. O'Finnigan's and buy ten cents' worth of peanut candy if they saw Mrs. Sweller's carriage approaching, or Miss Dasher just coming upon the walk? And as for the Misses Spanker, who daily drive in that superb open wagon with yellow wheels, and who resemble nothing so much as the figures in a Parisian doll-carriage, if they saw an admirer of theirs bargaining for peanut candy at a street stand they would not know him--they would no more bow to a man so lost to all the finer sense of the comme il faut than they would nod to a street-sweeper. It is astonishing what an effect is produced upon some human beings of the tender sex by clothing them in silks cut in a certain form, and seating them in a high wooden box on yellow wheels.

And upon us, also. When the Easy Chair beholds the silken Misses Spanker rolling by, superior, upon those yellow wheels, it is with difficulty that it recalls the cheese and sausage from which all that splendor springs. To-morrow it will be Mrs. O'Finnigan's grandchildren who will look down from their yellow wheels at the peanut and apple stands, and wonder how persons can be so vulgar as to buy candy in the streets. It is a whim of Mrs. Grundy's, who is all whimsey. She will not let us buy a piece of simple candy at the corner, but she will allow us to drag a silk dress over the garbage of the pavement. 'Tis a whimsical sovereign. But we are so carefully trained that it is not easy to disobey her. If to prove your independence you should stop to buy the candy, would the pleasure of asserting yourself balance the unpleasant consciousness that you were wondered at and laughed at?

But the text was shops, and we have drifted into this episode because Mrs. O'Finnigan sells peanut candy in her shop upon the sidewalk near the site of Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage, in the midst of the gay spectacle of a summer day. And within a stone's-toss of her stand how many fine houses you will see, and how many other fascinating shops! Our English ancestors were called a shopkeeping nation by Napoleon; but it is his own Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who have the true secret of shopkeeping. They make shops fascinating. They have made shopkeeping a fine art. The other day the Easy Chair stepped into a shop in Maiden Lane, prepared to spend a very pretty sum of money, for a very proper purpose. But if it had invaded the shopkeeper's house, which is his castle, or threatened his hat, which is his crown, it could not have been received more coolly. The disdainful indifference with which its question was answered was exquisitely comical; and the shopkeeper proceeded to look for what was required with a superb carelessness, and an air of utter weariness and disgust of this incessant doing of favors to the most undeserving and insignificant people. It was plainly an act of pure grace that the Easy Chair was not instantly shot into the street as rubbish, or given in charge to the police as a common vagabond.