Every New-Yorker supposes, of course, that there must be in a large and wealthy city one pre-eminent and illustrious street like his own Fifth Avenue, where he is wont either to survey mankind from a club window, or, as mankind, be surveyed. There is no such street in Cincinnati, and for a reason which becomes apparent during the first long walk. When the stranger has panted up the slope on which the city is built, to a point one mile from the river, he sees looming up before him an almost precipitous hill, four hundred and sixty-two feet high, which has been dug into, and pared down, until it has about as much beauty as an immense heap of gravel. Around the base of this unsightly mountain are slaughter-houses and breweries, incensing it with black smoke, and extensive pens filled with the living material of barrelled pork. The traveller, who has already, as he thinks, done a fair share of climbing for one day, naturally regards this hill as the end of all things in Cincinnati; but upon coming up to it he discovers the zigzag road to which allusion has before been made, and which leads by an easy ascent to the summit.
Behold the Fifth Avenue of Cincinnati! It is not merely the pleasant street of villas and gardens along the brow of the hill, though that is part of it. Mount to the cupola of the Mount Auburn Young Ladies' School, which stands near the highest point, and look out over a sea of beautifully formed, umbrageous hills, steep enough to be picturesque, but not too steep to be convenient, and observe that upon each summit, as far as the eye can reach, is an elegant cottage or mansion, or cluster of tasteful villas, surrounded by groves, gardens, and lawns. This is Cincinnati's Fifth Avenue. Here reside the families enriched by the industry of the low, smoky town. Here, upon these enchanting hills, and in these inviting valleys, will finally gather the greater part of the population, leaving the city to its smoke and heat when the labors of the day are done. As far as we have seen or read, no inland city in the world surpasses Cincinnati in the beauty of its environs. They present as perfect a combination of the picturesque and the accessible as can anywhere be found; and there are still the primeval forests, and the virgin soil, to favor the plans of the artist in "capabilities." The Duke of Newcastle's party, one of whom was the Prince of Wales, were not flattering their entertainers when they pronounced the suburbs of Cincinnati the finest they had anywhere seen.
The groups of villas, each upon its little hill, are the cities before mentioned, five of which are within sight of the young ladies who attend the liberally conducted seminary of Mount Auburn. The stranger is continually astonished at the magnitude and costliness of these residences. Our impression was, that they are not inferior, either in number or in elegance, to those of Staten Island or Jamaica Plain; while a few of them, we presume, are unequalled in America. The residence of Mr. Probasco is the most famous of these. Externally, it is a rather plain-looking stone house, something between a cottage and a mansion; but the interior is highly interesting, as showing how much money to the square inch can be spent in the decoration of a house, provided the proprietor has unlimited resources and gives himself up to the work. For seven long years, we were informed, the owner of this house toiled at his experiment. Every room was a separate study. All the walls are wainscoted with oak, most exquisitely carved and polished, and the ceilings were painted by artists brought from Italy. It is impossible to conceive an interior more inviting, elegant, and harmonious than this. Thirty years ago the proprietor of this beautiful abode was an errand-boy in the establishment of which he was afterwards the head; and when we had the impudence to look into his house, he was absent in Europe in quest of health! The moral is obvious even here at the end of this poor paragraph, but it was staggering upon the spot. How absurd to be sick, owning such a house! How ridiculous the idea of dying in it!
In this enchanting region is Lane Theological Seminary, of which Dr. Lyman Beecher was once President, and in which Henry Ward Beecher spent three years in acquiring the knowledge it cost him so much trouble to forget. Coming to this seat of theology from the beautiful city of Clifton, of which Mr. Probasco's house is an ornament, and which consists of a few other mansions of similar elegance, the Seminary buildings looked rather dismal, though they are better than the old barracks in which the students of Yale and Harvard reside. Thirty cheerful and athletic young gentlemen, and half a dozen polite and learned professors, constitute at present the theological family. The room in which Mr. Beecher lived is still about fifteen feet by ten, but it does not present the bare and forlorn appearance it did when he inhabited it. It is carpeted now, and has more furniture than the pine table and arm-chair which, tradition informs us, contented him, and which were the only articles he could contribute towards the furnishing of his first establishment.
Cincinnati justly boasts of its Spring Grove Cemetery, which now encloses five hundred acres of this beautiful, undulating land. The present superintendent has introduced a very simple improvement, which enhances the beauty of the ground tenfold, and might well be universally imitated. He has caused the fences around the lots to be removed, and the boundaries to be marked by sunken stone posts, one at each corner, which just suffice for the purpose, but do not disfigure the scene. This change has given to the ground the harmony and pleasantness of a park. The monuments, too, are remarkable for their variety, moderation, and good taste. There is very little, if any, of that hideous ostentation, that mere expenditure of money, which renders Greenwood so melancholy a place, exciting far more compassion for the folly of the living, than sorrow for the dead who have escaped their society. We would earnestly recommend the managers of other cemeteries not to pass within a hundred miles of Cincinnati without stepping aside to see for themselves how much the beauty of a burial-ground is increased by the mere removal of the fences round the lots. It took the superintendent of Spring Grove several years to induce the proprietors to consent to the removal of costly fences; but one after another they yielded, and each removal exhibited more clearly the propriety of the change, and made converts to the new system. In the same taste he recommends the levelling of the mounds over the graves, and his advice has been generally followed.
It is very pleasant for the rich people of Cincinnati to live in the lovely country over the hill, away from the heat and smoke of the town; but it has its inconveniences also. It is partly because the rich people are so far away that the public entertainments of the city are so low in quality and so unfrequent. We made the tour of the theatres and shows one evening,—glad to escape the gloom and dinginess of the hotel, once the pride of the city, but now its reproach. Surely there is no other city of two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants that is so miserably provided with the means of public amusement as Cincinnati. At the first theatre we stumbled into, where Mr. Owens was performing in the Bourcicault version of "The Cricket on the Hearth," there was a large audience, composed chiefly of men. It was the very dirtiest theatre we ever saw. The hands of the ticket-taker were not grimy,—they were black. The matting on the floor, the paint, and all the interior, were thoroughly unclean; and not a person in the audience seemed to have thought it necessary to show respect to the place, or to the presence of a thousand of his fellow-citizens, by making any change in his dress. The ventilation was bad, of course. No fresh air could be admitted without exposing some of the audience to draughts. The band consisted of seven musicians. The play, which is very pleasing and simple, was disfigured in every scene by the interpolation of what the actors call "gags,"—that is, vulgar and stupid additions to the text by the actors themselves,—in which we were sorry to hear the "star" of the occasion setting a bad example. Actors ought to know that when Charles Dickens and Dion Bourcicault unite their admirable talents in the production of a play, no one else can add a line without marring the work. They might at least be aware that Western colloquialisms, amusing as they are, do not harmonize with the conversation of an English cottage. Yet this Cincinnati audience was delighted with the play, in spite of all these drawbacks, so exquisitely adapted is the drama to move and entertain human beings.
At the West, along with much reckless and defiant unbelief in everything high and good, there is also a great deal of that terror-stricken pietism which refuses to attend the theatre unless it is very bad indeed, and is called "Museum." This limits the business of the theatre; and, as a good theatre is necessarily a very expensive institution, it improves very slowly, although the Western people are in precisely that stage of development and culture to which the drama is best adapted and is most beneficial. We should naturally expect to find the human mind, in the broad, magnificent West, rising superior to the prejudices originating in the little sects of little lands. So it will rise in due time. So it has risen, in some degree. But mere grandeur of nature has no educating effect upon the soul of man; else, Switzerland would not have supplied Paris with footmen, and the hackmen of Niagara would spare the tourist. It is only a human mind that can instruct a human mind. There is a man in Cincinnati, of small stature, and living in a small house of a street not easy to find, who is doing more to raise, inform, and ennoble Cincinnati than all her lovely hills and dales. It is the truly Reverend A. D. Mayo, minister of the Unitarian Church of the Redeemer. His walls are not wainscoted, and there is about his house no umbrageous park nor verdant lawn. It has only pleased Heaven, so far, to endow him with a fine understanding, a noble heart, and an eloquent tongue. It is he, and half a dozen such as he, who constitute in great degree the civilizing force of Cincinnati.
Upon leaving the theatre, we were attracted by a loud beating of drums to a building calling itself the "Sacred Museum." Such establishments are usually content with the word "moral"; but this one was "sacred." From a balcony in front, two bass-drums and one bugle were filling all that part of the town with horrid noise, and in the entrance, behind the ticket-office, a huge negro was grinding out discord from an organ as big as an upright piano. We defy creation to produce another exhibition so entirely and profoundly atrocious as this. It consisted chiefly of wax figures of most appalling ugliness. There were Webster, Clay, General Scott, and another, sitting bolt upright at a card-table, staring hideously; the birth of Christ; the trial of Christ; Abraham Lincoln, dead and ghastly, upon a bier; and other groups, all revolting beyond description. The only decently executed thing in this Sacred Museum was highly indecent; it was a young lady in wax, who, before lying down, had forgotten to put on her night-gown. There was a most miserable Happy Family; one or two monkeys, still and dejected; a dismal, tired rooster, who wanted to go to roost, but could not in that glare of gas, and stood motionless on the bottom of the cage; three or four common white rabbits; and a mangy cat. Such was the Sacred Museum. Such are the exhibitions to which well-intentioned parents will take their children, while shrinking in affright from the theatre! It is strange that this lucrative business of providing amusement for children and country visitors should have been so long abandoned to the most ignorant of the community. Every large town needs a place of amusement to which children can be occasionally taken, and it would not be difficult to arrange an establishment that would afford them great delight and do them no harm. How monstrous to lure boys to such a place as this "Sacred Museum,"—or to the "Museum" in New York, where a great creature, in the form of a woman, performs, in flesh-colored tights, the part of Mazeppa!
In all the large Western cities there is a place of evening entertainment called the "Varieties Theatre," which ladies never attend, and in which three pleasures may be enjoyed at once,—smoking, drinking lager-bier, and witnessing a performance upon the stage. The chief patrons of these establishments are gentlemen connected with navigation, and very young men who, for the price of a ticket, a cigar, and a glass of beer, purchase the flattering delusion that they are "seeing life," and "going it with a perfect looseness." The performances consist of Ethiopian minstrelsy, comic songs, farces, and the dancing of "beauteous Terpsichorean nymphs"; and these succeed one another with not a minute's intermission for three or four hours. At St. Louis, where gentlemen connected with navigation are numerous, the Varieties Theatre is large, highly decorated, conducted at great expense, and yields a very large revenue. To witness the performance, and to observe the rapture expressed upon the shaggy and good-humored countenances of the boatmen, was interesting, as showing what kind of banquet will delight a human soul starved from its birth. It likes a comic song very much, if the song refers to fashionable articles of ladies' costume, or holds up to ridicule members of Congress, policemen, or dandies. It is not averse to a sentimental song, in which "Mother, dear," is frequently apostrophized. It delights in a farce from which most of the dialogue has been cut away, while all the action is retained,—in which people are continually knocked down, or run against one another with great violence. It takes much pleasure in seeing Horace Greeley play a part in a negro farce, and become the victim of designing colored brethren. But what joy, when the beauteous Terpsichorean nymph bounds upon the scene, rosy with paint, glistening with spangles, robust with cotton and cork, and bewildering with a cloud of gauzy skirts! What a vision of beauty to a man who has seen nothing for days and nights but the hold of a steamboat and the dull shores of the Mississippi!
The Varieties Theatre of St. Louis, therefore, is a highly flourishing establishment, and the proprietor knows his business well enough to be aware that indecency never pays expenses in the United States,—as all will finally discover who try it. At Cincinnati there is also a Varieties Theatre, but such a theatre! A vast and dirty barn, with whitewashed walls and no ceiling, in which a minstrel band of five men and two beauteous nymphs exerted themselves slightly to entertain an audience of thirty men and boys. As the performers entered the building in view of the spectators, we are able to state that beauteous Terpsichorean nymphs go about the world disguised in dingy calico, and only appear in their true colors upon the stage.