THE OLD BOWERY
_A Reminiscence of New York Plays and Acting Fifty Years Ago_
In an article not long since, "Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth," in "The
Nineteenth Century," after describing the bitter regretfulness to
mankind from the loss of those first-class poems, temples, pictures,
gone and vanish'd from any record of men, the writer (Fleeming Jenkin)
continues:
If this be our feeling as to the more durable works of art, what
shall we say of those triumphs which, by their very nature, la
no longer than the action which creates them--the triumphs of the
orator, the singer, or the actor? There is an anodyne in the words,
"must be so," "inevitable," and there is even some absurdity in
longing for the impossible. This anodyne and our sense of humor
temper the unhappiness we feel when, after hearing some great
performance, we leave the theatre and think, "Well, this great thing
has been, and all that is now left of it is the feeble print up
my brain, the little thrill which memory will send along my nerves,
mine and my neighbors; as we live longer the print and thrill must
be feebler, and when we pass away the impress of the great artist
will vanish from the world." The regret that a great art should in
its nature be transitory, explains the lively interest which many
feel in reading anecdotes or descriptions of a great actor.
All this is emphatically my own feeling and reminiscence about the
best dramatic and lyric artists I have seen in bygone days--for
instance, Marietta Alboni, the elder Booth, Forrest, the tenor
Bettini, the baritone Badiali, "old man Clarke"--(I could write
a whole paper on the latter's peerless rendering of the Ghost in
"Hamlet" at the Park, when I was a young fellow)--an actor named
Ranger, who appear'd in America forty years ago in _genre_ characters;
Henry Placide, and many others.
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