History of Oakland County, Michigan, with illustrations descriptive of its scenery, palatial residences, public buildings, fine blocks, and important manufactories, Part 22

Author: Durant, Samuel W
Publication date: 1877
Publisher: Philadelphia, L. H. Everts & co.
Number of Pages: 553

USA > Michigan > Oakland County > History of Oakland County, Michigan, with illustrations descriptive of its scenery, palatial residences, public buildings, fine blocks, and important manufactories > Part 22

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

ADDRESS DELIVERED BY HENRY M. LOOK AT THE DEDICATION OF CLINTON HALL, PONTIAC, AUGUST 6, 1867.

Our American civilization is not the achievement of a generation, but the de- velopment of centuries. It is not an indigenous growth, but a magnificent exotic, to which the influences of the New World have indeed added glory, and strength, and beauty, but never gave being. Its germ is as old as the ages, and its roots strike so deep into the mould of the past that they clutch the bones of the Pha- raohs, and twine about the stones of the altars of Isis. Its science, its philosophy, its literature, its art, its worship, are all " rich with the spoils of time," filled with the gatherings of all the nations.

I do not admit the doctrine of modern degeneracy. The world does not retro- grade. To progress is the great law of all true civilization, and improvement fol- lows in the path of that law, as flowers and fruitage follow in the path of the sunshine. Our civilization, compared with that of former centuries, is as much better as it is wiser, and as much wiser as it is older. In it are blended the ex- cellences of the ancient, the medieval, and the modern ages. It is imbued with the poetry and the arts of Greece, the wisdom and the eloquence of Rome, the romance and chivalry of the feudal nations, the thought, energy, and intelligence of our own republic, and glows with the light of the literature of all time.

HISTORY OF OAKLAND COUNTY, MICHIGAN.

A few centuries ago a spirit entered the forest solitudes of a new continent, and, as by some wonderful enchantment, changed them to gardens and to fruitful fields,

" and shed a charm Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone, Binding all things with beauty."

By the same mysterious agency a new nation was founded, based upon new principles, and, amid struggles and convulsions, launched forth upon the path of destiny. Time swept onward, and still the spirit lingered among its beautiful creations, as the long June days linger among their roses. By a gradual process of assimilation, it became blended with the new government, the new principles, the new land, and the new people, until all were united in a new social harmony. That spirit was the European civilization of the seventeenth century ; that new social harmony, the American civilization that blesses us to-night.

The enlightenment of Europe broke in upon America as upon a continent of darkness. It came suddenly, like the wave of an overflowing ocean. There was no lengthened and gradual breaking down of the barriers of barbarism, as in the Old World; they fell at once. The barbarism of America was innate and un- mixed ; it had no prestige of feudal domain or hereditary rule, and the first en- counter with its overmastering foe shattered it forever.

Just one hundred years ago expired the great chieftain whose name our city bears. Only a little more than a century since, he encamped here with his war- riors, and discussed in council his grand scheme of uniting all the northwestern nations against the whites. It took Europe twelve centuries to recover from the barbaric sway of Alaric and Attila. In one century Michigan has sprung from a deeper barbarism to a loftier enlightenment. Yet, as I have said, our civilization is not the achievement of a generation. Through all the dark centuries of the past the mighty task was being wrought by spirits as true and brave as ever battled for the right.

This night marks an era in our local history and our local advancement. I have spoken of the great chief Pontiac. With what a rage of bitter indignation would his savage breast heave could he now behold the edifice that rises upon the ruins of his rude empire ! How would he curse the beauties of its architecture, and what wrathful and defiant contempt would he pour upon the public spirit that celebrates its completion ! But the old warrior sleeps quietly on the banks of the Mississippi, and the children of the pale-faces whom he hated are rejoic- ing in the possession of his ancient domains; domains which, savage though he was, he defended with a Spartan courage and patriotism. His memory is en- shrined in the name of the pleasant city, but there is no other vestige of his power remaining. The mighty tide of civilization has overwhelmed him and his people forever. It has come with its science and its arts, its institutions and its manners, and has set up a kingdom that shall have no end.

It is to the spirit of that civilization that we render our homage to-night. By our presence, we give public sanction and support to one of its most ancient, most noble, and best established institutions-the stage. This beautiful hall, embel- lished with an architecture worthy of the purpose to which it is devoted, we now dedicate to the genius of literature-to the histrionic, the oratoric, and the poetic muses-to thought, to passion, and to melody. Here, from night to night and from season to season, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello will appear; here Desde- mona and Juliet will weep; here Petruchio and the Wives of Windsor will laugh ; here Lady Teazle will be subdued, and here Miss Hardcastle will " stoop to conquer." Here, too, the eloquence of the nation's great orators will resound, and the harmonies of Handel, Beethoven, and Mozart will vibrate.

The stage has come to include, at the present day, something more than a mere play-house. Anciently its uses were purely theatrical. Now, not the actor alone appears in the proscenium, but the singer, the poet, and the orator, and the same audiences sit in the same seats before them all. Old prejudices have died out, old Puritanical notions have gradually yielded, ideas falsely called religious have been overcome, until now the stage is sanctioned and patronized by all classes of American society, except the very insignificant few whose literary tastes can never get the better of their asceticism. Abraham Lincoln, who is almost deified by a portion of the public, met his fate in a theatre; thus testifying that he re- alized and courted the powerful influences of the stage.

Yet it was by slow degrees, and through centuries of the most arduous and constant warfare, that the drama finally won its great victory. I say the drama ; for it was the legitimate drama, pure and unmixed, that alone went through the great struggle, and alone achieved the ultimate triumph. All of its more dazzling accompaniments, its scenic effects, and its spectacular appliances, have been added since the tide of the battle turned.

It is proper, upon an occasion like this, that we glance over the dramatic record, and trace the Thespian muse through some of the more noticeable passages in her changeful career. The history is in itself a drama, with ever-changing scenes

and an ever-evolving plot. A mere " bill of the play" is all that can be given in a single evening.

The origin of the drama is wrapped in mystery ; but among the earliest traditions of that most ancient of peoples, the Chinese, the theatre holds a conspicuous place, and to this day it leads all the public amusements of the Celestials.

It was during the ten years that Pisistratus was in power that the drama first appeared at Athens. It formed a portion of the religion of state, and the profession of the actor was regarded with peculiar respect by the people. The lyric element existed before the age of Thespis and Pisistratus, but the spoken tragedy dates from this period, about five centuries before the Christian era; and the new theatre found its first hearty hater in the law-making Solon, who directed, with- out avail, all the terrors of his edicts against it. He saw in the drama that won- derful influence over popular sentiment which it has always possessed, and it be- came an offense to him, as it has to every tyrant since. But the populace, with that natural and passionate devotion always manifested for the stage, rallied to its defense, and from morn till dewy eve the open and roofless theatres, capable of containing from fifteen to twenty thousand persons, were filled from the ground to the topmost seats, in the sweet spring-time, which was the sole theatrical season of the Greeks.

In Rome the profession was well requited, but despised. Disgrace and dis- franchisement were the penalties laid upon the professional Roman actor. Never- theless, the calling had in Italy something of a religious character, for one of the early writers speaks of a company of Etruscan actors,-a kind of ballet-panto- mimists,-who were employed to avert the anger of the gods during a raging pesti- lence. These Etruscans seem to have been the originators of the drama in Italy. It consisted at first of a song, then a song and dance, and a little later the inter- woven story. The first actual Latin theatre dates from the period of about 240 before the Christian era, the literature of which became extinct about the time of Julius Caesar, when the mimes-actors of an inferior grade, who performed a class of satirical burlesques-took possession of the stage. The legitimate drama never rose again in Italy. The licentiousness and barbarism of the Roman people in the days of the emperors conquered it utterly. The noble spirit of genuine and refined tragedy could find no home amidst the bloody and shameful spec- tacles of the Circus Maximus. It was against the Roman stage, thus exclusively given up to those scandalous exhibitions to which I have alluded, that the early Christian fathers leveled their denunciations. Those fathers would have approved a " well-trod stage," as Milton did, but they had only anathemas for those hor- rible scenes where men were torn by wild beasts, and where danced and postured Bathyllus, Pylades, and the nude though graceful Paris. The most eminent of the Greeks were actors ; the nobles of Rome were only spectators, and looked with contempt upon that profession, the Attic dignity of which had been de- graded by the Roman manners to such base and scandalous uses.

Yet even in Rome it appears that the talents of the histrionic artist sometimes freed him from the disgrace which attached to his vocation, for Roscius, the great comedian, who was contemporary with Cicero, was elevated to the equestrian dig- nity ; and Asopus, the tragedian, was the friend and associate of Cicero himself. But these were notable exceptions from the general character of the profession at Rome. The comparative merits of the Greek and Roman actors were well repre- sented by the laurel wreath and monumental marble which rewarded the one, and the extravagant largesses that corrupted and debauched the other.

As the Greek drama was obscured by the licentiousness of the Roman manners, so the Italian spectacles went down at last in the night of barbarism. With the fall of the Western Empire even the corrupt semblance of the drama disappeared. The plays of the mimes ceased, the games of the arena were forgotten, and the grand amphitheatre of Vespasian, at the dedication of which, through one hun- dred days, five thousand victims bled, was defaced by the axes of the hosts of Alaric. During the long night of the Middle Ages the muse of the drama slept, as did the sister arts of poetry, eloquence, painting, and sculpture.

But it was in England, after the revival of letters and the invention of printing had broken the prestige of the feudal institutions, that the drama was to arise in more than its original splendor, and attain at length that purity and perfection which have finally won for it the high rank it now hold, as one of the noblest and best established institutions of modern civilization.

The English mind and heart have always been open to dramatic impressions. The Druidical rites contained the elements of dramatic spectacle. When the period of Christianity succeeded, its teachers took from the pagan epoch what best suited their purposes. They dramatized the lives of the saints, and even the life of Him who was greater than the saints; and thus rendered intelligible and pleasing what would have been dull and incomprehensible to the idle rabble if otherwise presented. In castle and in hall, before farm-house fires and in the market-places, the men who best united the offices of missionary and actor were at once the most popular preachers and players of the day. The legend informs

HISTORY OF OAKLAND COUNTY, MICHIGAN.

us that St. Adhelm, the greatest of them all, when his audience grew weary of serious matters, would take his harp from under his robe and strike up a song that would render his hearers hilarious. This mixture of the sacred and secular in the early English drama prevailed for a long period. It is a singular fact that one of the first English theatres, that erected at Dunstable, had a monk for its manager. After descending, through a long series of these sacred and legendary theatricals, these serio-comic mixtures of sermon, song, and comedy, known to history as the " miracle-plays," we arrive, in the thirteenth century, at legitimate tragedy and comedy-in short, the true drama. Until this time the church had as regularly employed the stage for religious ends, as did the old heathen magistrates. As early as the accession of Richard III., in 1483, the religious plays were nearly superseded by what was the prelude to the Shakspearean drama. Richard him- self, when Duke of Gloucester, kept a company of actors attached to his house- hold. The fashion thus set by the prince was soon followed by the nobility, and led finally to the formal and legal recognition of the dramatic profession by the royal license of 1572, whereby the actors were authorized to play throughout the realm, and were protected from interruption. Richard having thus ennobled the art, the aristocracy and the gentlemen of the inns of court soon took it up, and kings and queens, lords and ladies, vied in applause of the captivating scenes.

No sooner was the stage thus divorced from the church than the anathemas of the holy fathers began to thunder against it. The tragic mask was sacred while sup- ported by a monk, but an abomination when worn by the profane. Still the royal favor was upon the drama, and steadily it gained upon the affections of the people. In 1576, when the good Queen Elizabeth was on the throne, the monastery of Blackfriars was converted into a theatre. Elizabeth loved and fostered all true literature, and hence loved and fostered the drama, which found in her not only a generous patroness, but a just censor. Her afternoons at Windsor Castle were made pleasant to her and to her court by her players, and even when the magnifi- cent success of Shakspeare's "Richard II." aroused her jealousy, her glorious dramatic passion overcame her petulance, and she was a constant auditor at the old Globe theatre. The drama became as popular at the two universities as at court, and entered all the public schools. Not only were the Blackfriars and Globe theatres crowded, but on every closing-day the mimic stage was set in array by every pedagogue throughout the land, in spite of the denunciatory thunders of the pulpit.

And what wonder that it was so? A new era was dawning. The mighty genius of Shakspeare was rising upon the world. That wonderful pen that was to electrify the universe had begun to move, and all the opposing alliances of earth could not check for a moment its tremendous influence. Doran has beautifully said, " The great poet came into the world when England was deafened by the thunder of Archbishop Grindal, who flung his bolts at the profession which the child in his cradle at Stratford was about to ennoble forever." Ah, that " child in his cradle at Stratford !" What millions have wept and laughed and trembled at his creations ! Every chord of the human heart has he touched, and at every touch has awakened emotions as uncontrollable as the swell of the ocean. As well might the English clergy have tried to preach down a raging tempest as to combat the genius of William Shakespeare. The man who alone of all the world could create a Richard, a Hamlet, and an Imogen was invincible.

The war of the clergy waxed warm as Shakspeare waxed great ; but each new play of the mighty dramatist was a bomb-shell in the ecclesiastical camp, and they soon fell so thick that the assailants gladly abandoned the contest. The face of Elizabeth still shone upon the players, and the Blackfriars and the Globe were crowded nightly. Shakspeare, in the short space of twenty years, gave to the English drama a literature which the world of letters, by a unanimous verdict, has declared the grandest of all time. He raised the stage in a single generation from the coarseness of the old miracle-plays to a degree of grandeur and refine- ment that challenged at once the attention and admiration of the British public and of Continental Europe. It was on the stage of the old Blackfriars theatre, London, in which he was then a shareholder, about the year 1590, that he first assumed the buskin. He played the Ghost in his own immortal tragedy of " Hamlet." For an uncertain number of years he was both player and author ; but he who could shake the world with a single line was only respectable as an actor. He retired from the stage and from literature at about the same time, and quietly passed the evening of his days amidst the early splendors of a fame that has only grown brighter with the friction of time.

The drama continued to flourish through King James' reign. In dramatic literature Shakspeare was ably succeeded by Ben Jonson, and the stage soon boasted the most brilliant department in the field of letters. But the terrible political troubles of the seventeenth century came on, and the merry arts of the stage declined. England was to lay aside the mock tragedy for the real. Kings were no longer to be beheaded in jest, but in earnest. During the fiery contests of the Tories and Roundheads, and the Cromwellian protectorate, the vocation of

the players well-nigh ceased. But with the restoration of Charles II. came peace. The gentler arts revived, and the drama, firmly rooted in the Shak- spearean literature, rose at once to its former dignity and influence. The voca- tion of the actor became again an established profession, and old Drury Lane became the classic ground of the English drama after the restoration, as Black- friars and the Globe had been before. Dramatic authorship increased. Davenant, Dryden, Tate, Brady, Lee, Otway, Wycherley, Congreve, Cibber, and Vanbrugh devoted their pens to the literature of the stage.

The English stage of 1580 needed two things for its perfection-a noble litera- ture and woman. Shakspeare and Ben Jonson gave the first, with the revival of the drama after the restoration came the second. Formerly the female characters had been assumed by the fairest and most effeminate youths that could be pro- cured; now woman herself stepped upon the stage, and lent to the creations of the dramatic poets the charm of her own grace, beauty, and naturalness. The first lady who trod the English stage was Anne Marshall, who appeared in the character of Desdemona, at Killigrew's theatre, in 1661. She afterwards played Juliet, with the great Thomas Betterton as Romeo. No wonder the public were enraptured ! Who but a woman could ever play Desdemona or Juliet ?

The English drama has had its four grand eras : the abandonment of the old miracle-plays for the true drama, that of the Shakspearean literature, the appear- ance of woman as an actress, and we now reach the fourth era, when the great actor adds the glory of his art to the grand conceptions of the dramatic authors.

The age of Elizabeth had perfected a glorious literature, but the actors, pre- vious to the restoration, were mediocre. It was in 1661, the year after the acces- sion of Charles II., that a character appeared upon the London stage upon whom, for fifty years, the attention of the world was fixed. Every lover of the literature of the stage knows that I allude to Thomas Betterton. Let me touch upon his entrance and his exit.

In turning over the annals of the stage I find that on a night in December, 1661, there was a crowded house at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Every seat was filled, from the orchestra to the topmost tier. The ladies and gentlemen of the court, the judges and the members of the learned professions, and the students from the university were there, and the votaries of fashion crowded the boxes, to show how empty heads looked under fine feathers. The play was " Ham- let," in which Mr. Betterton took the part of the Dane. He had been on the stage but two years, yet his fame was whispered in the court circles, in the uni- versities, and at the bar. The audience were listless through the opening scenes. At Hamlet's first address to his mother a murmur and a thrill went round, but at the close of his first interview with the ghost the house was conquered, and there was a perfect hurricane of applause. Doran has painted him well. He says, " How grand the head, how lofty the bearing, what eloquence and fire in the eye, how firm the mouth, how manly the sum of all ! How is the whole audience subdued almost to tears at the mingled love and awe which he displays in the presence of the spirit of his father !" Cibber says of him, " Sit in a full theatre and you will think you see so many lines, drawn from the circumference of so many ears, while the actor is the centre."

Look upon him fifty years later. It was his benefit night, and he played Me- lantius, in " The Maid's Tragedy." Time had marked him, but he was still the chief glory of the English stage, as he was in the second year of King Charles. The scene opened, and Betterton appeared. The whole house rose spontaneously, and those plaudits that had never died out through the entire half-century greeted the ear of the old actor. He played under an almost continuous roll of applause, and when, at length, looking full in the faces of his audience, he said,-

" That little word was worth all the sounds That ever I shall hear again,"

their tears fell like the April rain. The curtain went down amid thundering peals of approbation, and the last play of Betterton was closed. Perhaps he had a pre- sentiment that those were indeed the " last sounds that ever he should hear" from the public that had so loved to honor him, for forty-eight hours afterwards Thomas Betterton lived only in the history of the stage to which his talents had given such lustre.

I have said thus much of Betterton, not because he was the greatest of Eng- lish actors, for such he probably was not, but because his appearance marks an era in the history of the English drama. He was followed by a galaxy of stars equally well worthy of mention, but your patience would be overtaxed were I to speak of them all.

The splendor which the genius of Betterton gave to the histrionic art was nobly sustained, among actors, by Booth, Quin, Wilks, Garrick, Cibber, Barry, Foote, Macklin, Kemble, and Kean ; among actresses, by Mrs. Oldfield, Mrs. Sid- dons, Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Cibber, Anne Barry, and Kitty Clive; greatest among whom were David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and Edmund Kean.

HISTORY OF OAKLAND COUNTY, MICHIGAN.

To notice these three as they deserve would require as many separate lectures; yet it would be almost sacrilege to pass them in utter silence.

The name of David Garrick stands higher, probably, than that of any other actor in history. He was in the drama what the Earl of Chatham was in gov- ernment-an absolute monarch, who ruled by the power of his own superior mind. He was a man of the highest culture, a thorough gentleman, and great in the true sense of the term. He made his last appearance in June, 1776, as Don Felix, in the play of " Wonder." Instead of joining in the closing scene of the comedy, he stepped forward in front of the splendid audience that greeted him, and in a few touching words bade adieu to the scenic world where he had won a fame so honorable.

Sarah Siddons, the most brilliant female name in all the annals of the stage, was as pure in her character as she was great in her acting ; and the pious Han- nah More as heartily applauded the one as the other. "She was," says the histo- rian. " not only a great artist but a thorough lady, a true, honest, exquisite woman, -one of the bravest and most willing of the noble army of workers." Her last appearance was in Lady Randolph, in 1819. She died in June, 1831, leaving a name second to none in theatrical history.

The last mentioned of the great actors, Edmund Kean, during his later years dishonored his profession by his excesses. He closed his career on the night of the 25th of March, 1833, at Covent Garden, where he played Othello; his son, Charles Kean, playing Iago. " He had scarcely strength," says his biographer, " to pass over him the dress of the Moor; so shattered in nerve was he, that he dreaded some disaster." He went through the part, until, after giving the cele- brated farewell, ending with " Othello's occupation's gone," he attempted to utter the next sentence, when he fell upon the shoulder of his son and whispered, " I am dying-speak to them for me!" and the curtain descended upon him forever. Fitting indeed was it that the prince of tragedy should die beneath Othello's mantle.

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

History of Oakland County, Michigan, with illustrations descriptive of its scenery, palatial residences, public buildings, fine blocks, and important manufactories, Part 22

Author: Durant, Samuel W Publication date: 1877 Publisher: Philadelphia, L. H. Everts & co. Number of Pages: 553

Author: Durant, Samuel W
Publication date: 1877
Publisher: Philadelphia, L. H. Everts & co.
Number of Pages: 553