Open Letters From New York

I.

THE topography of New York is simple. The island is as near in plan to a “ leaf cake,” known to bakers and children of the old school, as may be; a good deal of perpendicularity, moderate width, and a graceful twist. You can stand upon a centre line and stretch out your hands towards the two flanking rivers and feel that none of it can get away and elude you, as cities constructed upon the radiating plan are in the habit of doing. It proceeds by layers instead of concentric rings. If you want any particular one of its leading activities, you have only to look a little further up or down the line for it.

If you are inclined to be figurative, you may call it a plant. Down in the first ward, from the Battery to Liberty Street, are the finances, the exchanges, insurance companies, the sub-treasury, Wall Street, which may be fairly spoken of as the roots. Then come substantial matters, — the municipal buildings, the markets, the great central post - office, Printing-House Square. A long stalk of heavy mercantile business follows. At Astor Place it begins to blossom out into the libraries, publishing houses, theatres, clubs, picture-galleries, and fashionable hotels with dazzling restaurants and titles borrowed from foreign royal dukes. Mingled with this and now clustering close about the Central Park, the bright particular sunflower of the whole, is a vast leafage of decorous and comfortable private residences. The fringe of docks and piers, which mounts only a certain way, may be looked upon as cilia sucking in sustenance for the shrub from foreign parts. This seems to me to be a very complete figure, to be relied upon by strangers and others as correct; but I shall not dwell upon it, since there are other matters of moment in the map that call for attention.

When you take a map of New York and fairly sit down over it, there is a moral to be drawn from no more than two of its streets, which leaves all the rest of the four hundred miles for future use. Note the relations of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. For a long distance the central thoroughfare pursues its way up town, beamed upon by the brightest smiles of fortune. Colossal, solid, roaring with trucks and stages, gay and bustling, nothing more prosperous could be imagined. All at once there is a change. Nobody follows it, — nobody cares for it. No more stately magazines of granite and iron; no more Wilton carpets, Worth’s costumes, decorated dinner sets, frames of actresses in diaphanous muslin; no more confectionery fresh every hour; no more perambulating banners with Gulmore’s bargains, and no more mothers of families rescued from sudden death by stoical policemen. It makes an excellent attempt, it is true, to keep up appearances for a few blocks further, but after Thirty-Fourth Street all is over. It staggers away, as one might say, to nobody knows where, — to Eleventh Avenue and One Hundred and Seventh Street, — and appears to be making for the bluff to hide its humiliation in the North River. What has happened? Simply it has diverged from Fifth Avenue. Up to this point, to Madison Square, as you will see, it has been making directly for it; the ideal which it proposed to itself was Fifth Avenue. But here it reaches and abandons it. Relying, doubtless, upon its acquired popularity, it believed it could carry its constituency with it whither it would. Like many a famous politician and public journal it had to learn the ephemeral nature of the most flattering popular sentiment. One may fancy it looking back from One Hundred and Seventh Street to this point in its career, and sighing, “ Ah, if I had only done differently then! ”

Thus, it seems to me, the end and aim of existence in the metropolis is indicated by the topography itself, if there were nothing further. While you are on the way to Fifth Avenue you are entirely commendable; when you abandon it you are out of the usual categories. It is difficult to keep account of you; nobody can say what you will come to, but most likely nothing good.

What then, I say, is this Fifth Avenue, so pointed out by the map and by social pressure as the sublimated reward of the species of virtue recognized as the highest in the commercial metropolis of the great commercial republic? Mr. Joaquin Miller has included in his latest issued volume a poem to Fifth Avenue. He speaks of it as “a calm contradiction,” a

an “ iron-faced sphinx,” which may have been suggested by the Egyptian reservoir at Forty-Second Street, abandoned as a reservoir and now puzzling the community as to the use to which it shall be put. He apostrophizes it further as “so grand as a sinner, so good as a saint,” and he asks, —

I would not care to say it is not this, nor to differ with the poet as to representations based upon something more than the very superficial acquaintance which is all I profess to have. The idea of writing poems to streets seems to me, in passing, a good one, and to enlarge a field that is becoming uncomfortably restricted. I believe feeling poems could be written to both Third and Sixth Avenues,—now being rapidly converted to the uses of the rapid transit roads, — which would appeal to every property owner. I should like to write a poem to the erectors of new buildings in Union Square, who have the right to make all New York walk a narrow plank, and shower down mortar and bits of brick upon it for months at a time.

Fifth Avenue takes the centre of the island, where Broadway leaves it, and continues straight on — with only the interruption of the ambitious hillock of Mount Morris Park, at One Hundred and Twentieth Street, under which it appears to dive — as long as it has any dry land to go upon. In spite of its distinctively residence character, a prophetic soul might seem to see the interrupted march of trade follow this line, so convenient for distributing its supplies on either hand. There are already invasions, always of the most insinuating character, - a store front of rare jewelry and bronzes, a confectioner whose place might have been taken bodily out of the Champs Élysées, a quiet family bank,—but still invasions. As trade advances, private life flees before it. It escapes in two directions: towards the upper end of the island, to the limit to which the lack of transit facilities permits it to be endurable, and up into the air in the new French flats. Outside of the provisions beginning to be made for them in these, I learn that the middle class are hardly expected to stay on the island at all. They spread out into the country by rail, and form vast settlements of ornamental cottages, while New York itself is given up to the rich and poor. The average “ brown stone front ” in the good locations will cost fifty thousand dollars; on the avenue, it will cost nearer one hundred thousand dollars.

The leading aspect of this favored section is an elegant gravity. It is a vast area of sombre brown stone, brightened by the flash of squares of immaculate plate glass. There is an echo of it in the Back Bay district of Boston. As things are, I am in favor of this dark tone. In lighter material I fear its ornamental details would be less passable than they actually are. The facades differ in degree rather than in kind. The style is a kind of builder’s Renaissance, varying by stages from plain architraves over the windows to the full magnificence of triangular and circular pediments, and detached porches with Corinthian columns. Monumental flights of steps, giving access to narrow fronts, are the most conspicuous feature, typical, perhaps, of the excessive difficulty of attaining to fortune, and its comparative unsatisfactoriness when you get there. The building lots grow more scant as you ascend, the price of land having apparently increased out of proportion to the increase of fortunes, in the desire to crowd as many people as possible on to the avenue. In everything except proximity to their business, — and there is not so much difference even here, — it seems to me the suburban people, in their spacious houses, designed often by the best professional skill, and affording in their interiors light for works of art and room for the varied activities of a refined life, have the best of it. I cannot but think that a depressing influence upon pictures in particular must be exerted by the contracted apartments of these barrack-like structures, which could accommodate but few of them even if funds remained from the original investment wherewith to purchase.

But little as its architectural details are a theme for enthusiasm, to one strolling there on a sunshiny day in autumn — when I like it best — the sober, unattractively treated avenue may be genially gay. Its long stretches of broken facades fall into agreeable masses, as if in the imperative order of nature harmony could not but result even from a multiplicity of mistakes. The shadows he broadly across the roadway; bars of white light come down the side streets and divide them. The striped awnings are not all taken in. A soft sky mingles its blue with the latent red in the dark stone. A procession of church steeples, like a more colossal system of telegraph poles, marches down till the last is lower in its far perspective than the steps of that near at hand.

The quiet of your walk is little disturbed. There may be a group of strangers looking up with wrinkled foreheads at the gairish white marble palace of Stewart at Thirty-Fourth Street, a well-dressed young man walking briskly with a light stick grasped exactly in the centre, a French nurse going of an errand, a boarding-school of girls looking very slight and young in the wide empty spaces. Then, if it he late afternoon, the street is filled all at once from gutter to gutter with a torrent of equipages, returning from the races or the park: broughams, landaus, clarences, phaetons, their varnish and mountings twinkling back to the polished windows, equestrians in boots and corduroys, slim-waisted equestriennes with blue veils floating from tall silk hats. In the midst, heralded by a bugle, a ponderous coach supplies the salient mass, corresponding to the turreted elephant and the triumphal car in the processions upon the Appian Way, which we are fond of studying in art and elsewhere to the exclusion of such sights as this, which it seems to me are quite as worthy of attention.

But the readers of a Boston magazine must be already asking their consciences whether it is right to be interested in these exterior matters, and wondering when I am coming to the pictures, the drama, and music, in New York.

If there were an exhibition in progress, my comment on the first of these matters would be simplified. The old winter exhibition at the Academy of Design has been abandoned for some years. It was found that the receipts from two exhibitions were rather less, if anything, than from one. I am assured that if the Academy were to be kept open all the year round there would probably be a further reduction. The sentiment for pictures is still largely at the “ positively for one night only “ point. There is a rush to see them when they are invested with the attractions of novelty and rarity, and all the enjoyment is sucked out of them at once, so that a second visit would be as tame as to the twoheaded calf or the tattooed man. While there is so little disposition to return and study at leisure these carefully prepared works which belong to one as fully for the time being as if he had paid for them a hundred times over, it is not strange that the expenditure of several thousand dollars for a single one, to be kept permanently at home, should be looked upon as an eccentricity. I suppose a good picture ought to give time after time the same feeling of refreshment and pleasure afforded by the repetition of a fine musical composition. It ought to have an attention corresponding in some degree to its durability. This durability, on the other hand, ought to impress a sense of responsibility upon the artist, who has no business to give us mere tricks and flippancies in a form rather more enduring than monumental brass.

As there is no exhibition, I naturally frequent the shops of the dealers; there are five or six of them at least who always have some meritorious works. Their displays, either in tastefully arranged windows, to the crowds who are always lingering there for a moment in their hurried passage on the streets, or in their galleries, to the more leisurely, whom they good-naturedly admit, knowing most of them not to have the remotest intention to buy, seem to constitute the important and permanent influence at work for the education of the public.

If one is to judge from the collections of the dealers there is no American art at all. Everything is foreign. Where, then, are American pictures to be seen? A few may be found at a bric-à-brac establishment in Union Square. The rest are at the studios of their authors. It is etiquette, I believe, to knock at an artist’s door and walk in if you like, but it is rather a formidable undertaking. He may be engaged with a model; he may be cool, as to a mere idler, of whose appreciation he knows nothing; or he may fill you with compunctions by taking you for an intelligent patron from whom a lucrative commission is probable. There is no adequate provision for the stranger who wants nothing of him except to establish his rank. It would not be unappreciated by the floating population, nor without distinct influence nor perhaps financial returns, if there were some head - quarters where a good specimen of the work of each of the local painters were accessible.

The market of the resident artists seems to be made chiefly by private acquaintance. The clubs of late offer a resource in receiving works, which they are glad to place before small but select audiences at their art receptions, held by some as often as once a month. This question of better exhibition facilities is just now a leading one, though it is hardly a secret that it connects itself with something else quite as important. You do not have to be here long to find that the guild of artists is divided into the younger men who have lately studied abroad and acquired a decided foreign manner, and the Academicians of the old school. The first have within a very recent period collected their forces, and are now represented by a brand new art association, which has secured the Kurtz Gallery for an exhibition in March. Prominent among them are Shirlaw, a recent acquisition from Munich, and Wyatt Eaton, a pupil of Jules Breton, both making a marked impression in the community apart from their works, one as the director of the Students’ Art League, the other of the classes at the Cooper Institute. Saint Gaudens, a rising young sculptor, is another. La Farge, with whom he is associated in the novel work of the decoration in progress at Saint Thomas’s Church, is one of a small number of regular Academicians who give the enterprise their sympathy and countenance. It disclaims the idea of opposition to the Academy of Design, — and, indeed, it would be a pity to detract from the efficiency of an institution which has never been too strong, — yet it decidedly means to do something apart from it, and, if successful, to show that the Academy in some respects is making a mistake. A committee in Paris will select and forward works submitted by our students across the water. There are a great many of them, and they do quite striking things, often in a wonderfully short time after they have set out from home. There is an instance of two pleasing German landscapes, depicting nature in the full bloom of summer, coming back in time for the spring exhibition, though their author had only sailed in July, with scarcely any previous knowledge of painting.

The conservative Academicians say: “ This is all very fine, but ive must move slowly. We see here the influence of the master, perhaps even his original sketches worked over. Let us wait till these young men have been at home a while, and see what they can do on their own account, before we crowd our pictures off ‘the line’ and over the tops of doors for their accommodation. We have traveled and studied abroad in our time ourselves. Are we not entitled to some consideration, too? ” This view was embodied in a resolution that each Academician should be entitled to at least six feet on the line in the annual exhibitions, which passed, but was rescinded in consequence of a lively hubbub which followed its announcement. Its occasion was understood to be the too unstinted liberality of the last hanging committee, who gave the foreigners about all the desirable positions. It was withdrawn, and the action of the innovators cannot be said to be dictated by any unfair treatment. There may be a slight fear of it, but at bottom it is a consciousness of not being sufficiently appreciated. There are new ideas afloat, — dash, breadth, freedom, originality, —to which old fogyism, by constitution and for self-protection, is naturally averse. They propose, perhaps, to lay the difference fairly before the public and have it passed upon.

From a disinterested stand-point this slight jar in the family is not unpleasing. Anything is better than stagnation. It will act as a stimulus to both sides to the production of their best work. Each will endeavor to show that it is the only original and all others are spurious, while the public can come forward and adjudicate upon a financial basis. Only, it, would appear that the sympathies of the public are likely to be already enlisted and the old school considerably handicapped by the prevailing influences. Upon the surface these are all foreign. If the new men do things in the way we are every day taught to believe the best and most fashionable, shall we not give them the preference? You can have now, if you choose, a scene on the Delaware, which you would take for the Loire, by Daubigny; or a view of farm life on Long Island difficult to distinguish from rural Brittany. Here is Goupil’s, the leading picture establishment and one of the standing attractions of the town. Let us step in. Here you may learn both what is fashionable and what is a good investment. For there is a practical side to this refined pursuit; there are even collectors of pictures who have no further interest in them than is involved in one of these considerations. If Vibert or Tissot is “the thing,” the votary of fashion in this department cannot afford to be without one. Or again, some keen-scented connoisseur fancies he detects symptoms of a rise in Duprés or Diazes, and then a Dupré or a Diaz is got, to be held until the corner in Duprés, as one might say, is worked. The trade has its seasons of activity and dullness, like dry goods and pork. The season centres about the period of cutting off of coupons for the January interest. It is inaugurated at Goupil’s towards the last part of November, by the rearrangement of the pleasant little gallery and the presentation of the latest novelties on a stated “ opening day. “

Previous to this, and familiar to strangers during a considerable part of the autumn, the position of honor was held by a large Lesrel, with its number as a contribution to the Paris Salon still upon it. It is a group of chess-players, in the costume of Louis XIII., about a goldcloth-covered table. The light promulgates itself vividly, but without glare, upon the figures, which start out of an atmosphere of tones of amber brown, like the shadows in the bottom of a brook. There is expression, archæological correctness with spirit, breadth with plenty of detail. The composition is full of art: a double pyramid above the table; a hat and stick and rumpled rug breaking the perspective lines of the floor; here an agreeable complexity, — a head painted against another or against a doublet, wherever it happens to come, — there the contrast of a bold, uninterrupted outline. It seems to have about everything such a subject could have. I do not care, myself, very much about the period of Louis XIII., nor particularly about chess, but if anybody did I should think he ought to be satisfied here. I suppose there are fifty or a hundred contributors to the same exhibition who can do as well as Lesrel; he is young and not an exceptional genius. Hence this picture is fairly typical, in its line, both of what is going on over there and of the kind of models that will continue to be presented for our inspection. If there are native artists who expect to enter into competition in this branch, they will always have just as stiff work cut out for them.

Near by was a Schreyer, — Russian travelers pursued by wolves in a forest, in a snow-storm as wild as the foam of breakers on a reef. There was a SwordDancer, by Gérome; an Egyptian cellar, with a ray of sunlight striking across it so naturally that I have seen people look to see if it came from the sky-light; a beautiful, broad Van Marcke, showing cattle coming towards you in a vaporish Dutch landscape, an epitome of Taine’s Art in the Netherlands; small female heads, with milk-like complexions, by Toulmouche and Leider; a seraglio, by Richter, pinkish and pretty as a fashion plate.

The landscapes are not many, the preference of patrons in landscape being for something American, — something they can recognize. There is always a stock of German domestic subjects in the Dusseldorf style, sold largely at the West, and not so much in home demand: down-stairs, water-colors and pen drawings by Detaille, De Neuville, Vibert, Berne-Bellcour; up-stairs, in the private room, Bouguereau, Cabanel, Corot, Coomans, Compte, Calix — one has only to go through a salon catalogue alphabetically. They are all there.

A few doors below, in the Kohn collection, the same names; at Schaus’s, again the same, with here a rather more German and Flemish cast,—Diffenbach; Tiddeman; Robie’s flower pieces; Willems’s sheen of creamy-white satin; a lovely, odd marine, fishing boats in a Holland canal, by Clays.

This is the regular thing, every-day fare. On an opening day provision is made for epicures. Looking now at the reconstructed gallery, what is the change in the mode? It is only one of quality. There are more and better Schreyers; figures on a large scale, by Prion and Sorbi; a garden wedding reception in modern French society, by Delort, — a crowd of high-bred figures like the best of Du Maurier’s in Punch, photographic in accuracy, but also photographic in rigid sharpness; an interior, by Muncacsy, in which he applies to a simple subject of domestic luxury the power and seriousness of his greater works.

In particular there are numerous examples of the Roman-Spanish school,— the Egusquizas, Boldinis, Terrassas, Alvarezes, Madrazas, — of which I have not spoken before, conspicuous as it everywhere is, because I wished to say a word about it by itself. I have heard these pictures denounced as rank communism. There is no dignity or sentiment in them, no chiaroscuro, no system of color, — nothing but patchwork and chaos. Here is a notable specimen, a last century street scene in Seville, by Jimenez y Aranda, — thirty or forty figures, close by, gossiping in groups. The expressions are as finished and realistic as the signs over the door-ways and the bits of old play-bills upon the wall, whose pinks, lavenders, greens, and yellows are an echo of the costumes; yet the effect is not in the least photographic like the Delort. Distances are expressed by linear and not at all by atmospheric perspective.

It may be communism, but these works impress you, if you are one of the kind who can endure them, piquantly and quaintly. They connect themselves with dainty porcelain. They are as glowing with cheerful colors as a bit of Persian rug. They are flat and almost without shadow. The figures are for the most part small, and nothing is sacrificed to them. They depend upon their intrinsic importance, and take their chance with the accessories, like details of a mosaic. Perhaps I get more out of them than they have to give, but it seems as if there was something fatalistic in this, with all their coquettish brightness, — a recognition of the real relation of man to his surroundings. The light is not focused upon an ordinary person, nor the furniture mistily gradated into insignificance, while he stands about in dramatic attitudes. A man is not so imposing as a book-case, and the first omnibus runs over him with ease.

It is impossible to be about New York without recognizing in it a very pervading æsthetic interest. It is not long since Sypher’s omnium gatherum of secondhand furniture was the only establishment in the bric-à-brac line. Now they abound, even in the minor streets, and are presided over by discriminating connoisseurs. Establishments for artistic furniture and decorations are numerous. At every turn you encounter an auction sale of Oriental rugs and potteries, or general faïence, or old arms and armor, like the well-known Cogniat collection. If people find nothing better than the trash from the dollar stores for their holiday presents this year, it will be their own fault.

An event quite out of proportion in significance to its scale was the quiet exhibition at Collamore’s of a tableful of ware called the “Bennett faïence.” It is probably the stepping-stone to an American keramic industry. Bennett, an Englishman, late of the Doulton works at Lambeth, has established himself in Lexington Avenue and begun this manufacture in a small way with pupils whom he is training to the work upon the system pursued at Lambeth. His results are admirable, and if they can be popularized would leave little to desire. There are vases and bottles of simple shapes decorated in pale greens and lapis lazuli blues, with a rich mottled texture, and strewn with white blossoms, which Lambeth has never surpassed. It is time that the caricature “ art pottery ” of the day should he succeeded by something worthy of the name. In the favorable temper of the public mind towards these subjects, it can hardly be doubted that an American faïence of a high order of merit would be profitable.

Another notable event is the establishment of the sales-room of the Society of Decorative Art, for the disposal of such artistic wares as are within the scope of production of the feminine sex. It will not only afford the contributors of really good work in such lines as embroideries, carvings, and tile painting the encouragement of pecuniary returns, but will furnish in its classes and in the exhibited examples an influence which cannot fail to have a considerable effect in a department of activity whose achievements at present, it is painful to say, are mainly worse than useless.

Still another, — for I have the fortune to drop into quite an epidemic of novelties,—an innovation upon the traditions of Protestant worship only sanctioned, I believe, on this side of the water by the example of the new Trinity Church in Boston, from the same hand, is the mural decoration of the chancel of Saint Thomas by La Fargo. It is too early to speak of it except in its conception, as a relief from the costly calico work which, until now, it has been thought evangelical church decoration must necessarily be. The circumstances are unfavorable. It is not probable that the work can ever appear to its full advantage at the morning service, owing to the dazzle of the stained glass above it, nor from the body of the church on account of the pentagonal shape of the apse on the walls of which it is being placed. Two of the sides are parallel to the aisles. One half of the mural painting by La Farge is finished. It is a Resurrection, showing that capacity for a high and serious art of which this artist has elsewhere given proofs. The centre compartment is occupied by sculpture, a hierarchy of angels by Saint Gaudens. The figures are of a single type. They breathe a pleasing sentiment and are freely modeled in high relief. They are colored by still another artist, Mr. Noe, in strange metallic greenish tints, upon which the light touches with a sort of moonlight effect.

But enough for the present of pictures. There are other fine arts, symphony concerts at Steinway Hall, and the dramas without end.

The discussion aroused by the ingenious Mr. Boucicault will serve to retain for his play of Marriage, at Wallaek’s, the prestige of the leading theatrical event of the season. Marriage is not the coming American play, and not American at all, as many were disappointed to find, but has the local coloring of the residence of its author among us. The controversy which ensued concerning it is unique. Its public usefulness was spoiled by the favorable opportunity opened for facetiousness, but no doubt it led to considerable private lucubrations of value. It came about in this way. The critics took an unfavorable view of the piece. Mr. Boucicault naturally differed with them. But instead of sulking in offended dignity, he came forward with a hardihood that cannot be too much admired, and, though having no print of his own, joined battle with them.

They were used, he claimed, to fustian, or at best broad-cloth; his fabric was lace-work. The discussion widened out from this to a more general matter.

“ Come, now,” said he, “ you say my comedy is so and so. Does one of you, in either hemisphere, know what a comedy is? Let us put it upon that ground. Define me a comedy; then I will treat with you.”

Then began an era of definitions of comedy. You observe the opening. One said it was a French play and a pair of scissors; another that it was the spectacle of Boucicault trying to buck the bull off the bridge; another that it was Boucicault beating the newspapers out of unlimited free advertising. One could fancy them with hands joined in a circle, whooping tantalizingly about the unfortunate dramatist, like the Canotiers of the Seine around Papavert at the French theatre. Criticism of the piece became a minor consideration in the greater contest, and people went to see it from so many motives as to give it a very successful run.

The definition business was really a mammoth side-show. A correct feeling of what something is, or ought to be, exists extensively without accurate facility in words. No doubt the newspaper critics, though al of their definitions might not do credit to Webster or Worcester, understand with the community in general that the substance of comedy is life apart from the emotions connected with death or prolonged or violent suffering. It deals with the smaller miseries alone, and its legitimate alliance is with the Smile rather than the sigh.

This opens an immense field and leaves the critics quite enough to do without dialectics. The whole matter of subject, treatment, and quality remains. There is high comedy, low comedy, and farce. There is the judicial faculty to be exercised in separating the merits of the case from the ability of its special pleaders, that is to say from the talent of the actors.

You may imagine that I have not failed to be among the audience at Wallack’s, to be impressed, if possible, by this home-made piece of lace-work. Is it lace-work ? To estimate something in terms of lace-work is like estimating size in pieces of chalk. It is a variable standard. There is cotton lace and then again there is lace of excellent material, but tangled in the execution and an unfair representative of its kind. I should say that Marriage was of the latter sort.

The material is unexceptionable; the scenes and emotions clustering around marriage are matter not merely for an episode, of the kind constituting the great bulk of plays, literature, and pictures, but for something typical and of universal interest. So far, Mr. Boucicault chose a basis on which it would be possible to make not only a good comedy but a great comedy. Marriage is used not simply as the conventional closing up of a series of adventures, but as the body and texture of the piece, as is divorce in another to which it gives its title. Indeed, our American playwrights, not now speaking of Boucicault, teem to me particularly happy in their choice of a subject. Where they fail is not here, but in the important two thirds of plot and dialogue. If you will notice, almost every one of these attempts aims at something typical, the presentation of national characteristics, as in The Mighty Dollar and The Gilded Age, or of states of society, including a large constituency, as in Saratoga, and Surf, Ah Sin, and The Danites. Most of these were objected to, I recollect, some years ago, conceptions and all, by our leading critical journal, which took the extraordinary position that Rip Van Winkle — certainly a mere episode without any claim on general interest, if there ever was one — was the only truly American subject and play.

Mr. Boucicault has a subject and many charming details. The manners and customs, if correctly displayed, are not so unlike our own, except for the legal settlements and the ward in chancery, that the whole might not have taken place here. There are four married couples, so differing as to display the subject from as many points of view: Walter and Rosalie, a run-away pair; Meek — an unfortunate name for a very good fellow — and Fannie, who marry in the regular society way; Persimmons and Virginia, an oldish couple whose union has been postponed long beyond the usual age; and the Constant Tiffes, already married, whose quarrels serve as a sarcastic commentary upon the ardor of the people newly entering upon the happy state. The preliminary drill of the wedding procession by the fashionable mother, in Act II. — a scene in its dresses and mountings like a French genre picture — is a most amusing and legitimate piece of light satire. There is a poetic element in the freshness and simplicity of the youngest bride and principal figure. She nestles by her husband, and shows a romantic girlish ideal, based, no doubt, upon reminiscences of sentimental literature, but also upon a capacity for something generous and devoted, in asking him if there is not some dark secret he can impart for her to forgive, so that the bond between them may be closer. There is an element of pathos in the singular dread of Auldjo that Walter, who appears to be his son but is in reality only adopted will, if he finds out the truth, cease to return his tender affection. The dialogue has many capital things, and there is one mot, “ Nothing is so deceptive as proofs,” worthy to become a standing aphorism.

With all this, and the capital acting, when the curtain falls over an apartment furnished in flowered cretonne, with the sea, broken by a single shining wave, showing through the wide windows as if from a drawing-room at Newport, you can feel that you go away from a profitably amused evening. But that will not blind you to the defects of considerable character drawing, which is farce instead of comedy, and especially of a plot in which there is the complication of three secret marriages, and longlost brothers, wives and daughters to the point of distraction.

Raymond Westbrook.