But most of New York's romantic places get their glory not by plan, but by the accident of design. You turn the corner from a sombre street lined by tall concrete and steel structures that obviously are of your own period and come suddenly upon a mellow bit of New Amsterdam. You would not be surprised to see old Peter Stuyvesant stump down Coenties Slip and drop in for his morning's Hollands at "22½," across the way. There are streets and squares and alleys in downtown New York that look now exactly as they did when Times Square was a cow pasture and the Bowery really bowery. But these places were not romantic to the citizens of that time; they would not be romantic to us if by some strange backward transmigration of souls we should inhabit a vanished century.
No, we are fortunate to live when Battery Place and Coenties Slip have acquired romance's glamour. Incongruity is the soul of romance. And these quaint time-hallowed places have the loveliest sort of incongruity—the magical incongruity of archaisms.
IN MEMORIAM: JOHN BUNNY
THERE was a clown named Joseph Grimaldi. And when his agile limbs and mobile features were stilled by death there lingered in the minds of the thousands who had laughed at him in Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden only the memory of their mirth.
There was a clown named John Bunny. Now he is dead. But we still may see, and our children's children may see, the gestures and grimaces that made him a welcome visitor in every quarter of the globe. For by grace of the motion-picture camera, John Bunny's art endures.
It is art, this power of conveying ideas without the use of words, of exciting laughter by actually being, instead of saying, a joke. It is the difficult and venerable art of the clown, the art of the shaven-headed mime in variegated robes whose antics drove care from Cæsar's furrowed brow, the art of Garrick's harlequin friend, John Rich, and of the mirth-compelling Pinkethman, whose "frolic gestures" won the praise of Alexander Pope.
Of course, John Bunny could play in speaking parts. Before he found his real vocation, before the motion pictures claimed him as their great comedian, he trod the boards of the "legitimate" stage, and with no small success. He ran the theatrical gamut from minstrelsy to Shakespeare. Annie Russell, Maude Adams, Weber and Fields—these are a few of the stars whose radiance he augmented during the first twenty-five years of his professional life. But to-day the regular drama offers little opportunity to the true clown, and it was not until he appeared on the screen that John Bunny reach his own public—that is, the world.
The word clown has fallen of late years into unmerited disrepute. Impressionistic critics of the drama attempt to disparage a comedian by calling him a "mere clown." They might as well call Mr. Sargent a "mere painter," or M. Rodin a "mere sculptor." What they mean is that the comedian of their discontent is not a clown at all. For the grotesquely clad men, with whitened, expressionless faces, who tumble about the circus ring, have no right to the exclusive possession of their title. Indeed, few of them are genuine clowns in the best sense of the word, for most of them cause laughter by obvious horseplay, not by the true clown methods of elaborate pantomime and striking facial contortions.
The greatest comedians have been the greatest clowns. Even the most brilliant lines, spoken most winningly, fail of their effect upon the audience unless the speaker has a clown's power to act with his features. And if a clown be great enough he may safely dispense with words—as John Bunny did.