nhalation. I see the Ravels, French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists,
as representing, for our culture, pure grace and charm and civility; so
that one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt to
a race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal and
grateful a relation with them. They must have been, with their
offshoots of Martinettis and others, of three or four generations,
besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had our
particular friends and favourites among them; we seemed to follow them
through every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering steps
along the tight-rope as very small children kept in equilibrium by very
big balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in case of falls;) to
greet them as Madame Axel, of robust maturity and in a Spanish costume,
bounding on the same tense cord more heavily but more assuredly; and
finally to know the climax of the art with them in Raoul or the
Night-Owl and Jocko or the Brazilian Ape--and all this in the course of
our own brief infancy. My impression of them bristles so with memories
that we seem to have rallied to their different productions with much
the same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections;
and they were so much our property and our pride that they supported us
handsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional Albany
cousins. I remember how when one of these visitors, wound up, in honour
of New York, to the very fever of perception, broke out one evening
while we waited for the curtain to rise, "Oh don't you hear the cries?
They're _beating_ them, I'm sure they are; can't it be stopped?" we
resented the charge as a slur on our very honour; for what our romantic
relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from
behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some
acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible such
horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a
temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its
_abords_ of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side," must
have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What
more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate of
wondrous Martinetti Jocko, who, after befriending a hapless French
family wrecked on the coast of Brazil and bringing back to life a small
boy rescued f