OF THE OLD FASHION
Speaking appreciatively a few nights ago at the club, concerning a recent magazine article on “Prescott, the Man,” I was reminded by a youthful university graduate of only twenty-five years standing, that “Prescott is an old-fashioned historian.”
There is much that is amusing in the attitude of the self-sufficient present towards the things of the past and there is also an element of the pathetic. I am often called an “old fogy,” an epithet whose origin and derivation are uncertain, but whose meaning is reasonably plain. Nobody who ever had the name applied to him was oppressed by any doubt about its signification. Some authorities tell us that it comes from the Swedishfogde—one who has charge of a garrison,—but I question it despite the confident assertion of theCentury Dictionary. It is not altogether inappropriate, because old fogies are compelled to hold the fort against all manner of abominations. They are the brakes on the electric cars of modern pseudo-progress. Thackeray speaks of “old Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney the East India director, old Cutler the surgeon,—that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners sound and round and dine for the mere purpose of guttling.”
So the term is always associated with the stupid and the ridiculous, used with regard to “elderly persons who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the young.” Nobody ever refers to a youngfogy, although most of us know many exceedingly dull-witted young people who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the aged or even of the middle-aged. One class is no more worthy of contempt than the other. The adolescents who find their highest form of entertainment in “bridge” are at least as deserving of pity as the semi-centenarian who prefers to pass his evenings among his books and his pictures or to devote them to Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There are some delights about the library fireside which compare favorably with those of the corridors of our most popular hostelry.
Certain kindly critics have insisted that my own literary tastes were acquired in the year 1850. I am not sure that the despised tastes formed in those commonplace, mid-century days are to be esteemed more highly than the tastes of our own self-satisfied times, but a good deal may be said in their favor. Perhaps the past is not always inferior to the present. There are varying opinions on the subject, from the familiar saying of Alfonso of Aragon, quoted by Melchior, immortalized by Bacon, and paraphrased by Goldsmith—that saying about old wood, old wine, old friends, and old authors—to the dogmatic declaration of Whittier that “still the new transcends the old.” It may occur to antiquated minds that there are some elements of excellence about old plays compared with the dramatic works of this careless,insoucianttime; that Wordsworth has some merits which are superior to those of the worthy gentleman who now fills the office of Laureate, and that possibly the poetry of the last few years is not entitled to boast itself greatly beside that of the early nineteenth century—the poetry of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley and of Keats. But we have the telephone and the trolley-car,the automobile, the aeroplane, and the operation for appendicitis; and we admire our progress, the wonderful growth of the material, the mechanical, and the million-airy, while a few may pause to ask whether good taste and good manners have grown as greatly. Some of our older buildings for example are assuredly far better to look at than the lofty structures of steel which tower in lower New York and make of our streets darksome canons where the light of day scarcely penetrates and where the winds of winter roar wildly about our devoted heads as we struggle, hat-clutching, to our office doorways. May we not cite the City Hall and the Assay Office as honorable specimens of dignified architecture? There was something impressive too about the old “Tombs,”—replaced not long ago by a monstrosity;—a structure which a lady recently told me was once referred to by an English friend who had never been in New York, as “the Westminster Abbey of America.”
It is delightful to be young and to indulge in the illusions of youth—a truism which it is safe to utter, for nobody will dispute it. “Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret,” said the strange, semi-oriental personage, an enigma in politics and a problem in literature, Benjamin Disraeli. Everybody knows the rude saying of old George Chapman, which it is almost an impertinence to quote, but every one does not remember whence it came—that young men think the old men are fools but old men know young men are fools. It is certain that we have cherished that idea in our minds for many centuries. Pope, in his epigrammatic way, remarked that “in youth and beauty wisdom is but rare,” but we cannot give him credit for originality in the utterance. We will go on with our regrets, our reproofs and our hesitancies, and in the course oftime those who sneer at us now as cumbersome relics,laudatores temporis acti, mere maunderers enamored of an effete past, will take their turn, fill our places, and endure the pitying and condescending smiles of the succeeding generation. There is nothing new under the sun, and the man of to-day may well pause in his arrogant career to remember that he will quickly pass into the category of the obsolete.
Some of us who are beginning to descend that downward slope of life which soon becomes sadly precipitous, but who retain a vivid recollection of the long ago, are fond of recalling a period of New York which in this era of lavish expenditures, indiscriminating profuseness, and careless prodigality seems strangely simple. Those were the days when in sedate Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Square were the homes of dignified wealth, whose owners rather looked down upon Fifth Avenue asparvenu; and Forty-second Street was almost an outpost of civilization. We revelled in the delights of the ancient Philharmonic concerts and believed that Carl Bergmann was the last evolution of a conductor; later we recognized Theodore Thomas as the man who did more to develop a taste for good orchestral music in this country than any other one man who ever lived. We thronged the stalls of old Wallack’s, with its most excellent of stock-companies—something which has wholly disappeared—and we rejoiced in Dion Boucicault and Agnes Robertson. A little later we haunted the upper gallery of the Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street,—at leastIdid, because of a confirmed stringency in the money market,—and cheered the magical top-notes of the ponderous but melodious Wachtel and the generous tones of that most inspiring of singers, the splendid Parepa-Rosa. We hailed withloud acclaims the manly and dignified Santley—more in his element in oratorio than in opera—and the royal contralto, Adelaide Phillips, long since forgotten except by the Old Guard who afterwards transferred their allegiance to Annie Louise Cary. It may have been a provincial time, but we did not think so; it was a good time, and we enjoyed it.
It seems but yesterday when all over the land flashed the news of Lincoln’s death, and the black draperies suddenly shrouded the streets while the triumphant note of Easter Sunday died away in a cry of lamentation. I was in old St. Bartholomew’s in Lafayette Place that Sunday, and the recollection of it will never be lost. Nor shall I forget the grief and alarm of a small band of Southerners, secessionists of the strongest type, domiciled in the same house with me, as they lamented that in the death of Abraham Lincoln the South had been deprived of its best friend, the man who would have made reconstruction a blessing instead of an affliction. They had been rebels, it is true, but they were conscious of the loftiness of the soul of that noble citizen who, with faults which are often the accompaniments of greatness, stood for all that was just and magnanimous in our national life.
Some of us have a clear recollection of the camping of soldiers in City Hall Park, the cheering of the multitude as the regiments of volunteers swung down Broadway on their march to Virginia, when we were striving to preserve the republic and the horror of civil war was present with us every hour. We were less cynical, less ambitious, less strenuous in those days, and I think we were more serene and sincere. We had serious imperfections, but we did not carry ourselves quite as mightily, and on the whole we had some creditable characteristics.There is no good reason why we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Were we so very stupid in the fifties? Was there not some true and honorable life in our social and literary world of that generation? Surely our newspapers were as worthy of respect as some of our contemporary journals with their blazing capitals, their columns of crime, their pages of the sensational, and their provoking condensed headlines which exasperate me by their airy flippancy. I sometimes wonder that nobody except myself utters a protest against those dreadful headlines. They reduce almost everything to vulgarity, and the affection of condensation is distinctly irritating. Most objectionable of all are the headlines followed by interrogation points, because they are misleading. If, for example, they say in capitals “Mr. Smith strikes his mother?” the average reader—and there is more of that sort than of any other—glancing over the pages misses the query and goes to his grave with the firm conviction that poor Smith was the most unmanly of brutes. I am not sure that the interrogation mark protects the proprietors against a libel suit.
It is true that in the fifties our art may have been of the tame and tidy sort, timorously clinging to the conventional; our financial enterprises were conducted on so small a scale that a million was a sum which made the banker’s heart palpitate with apprehensive emotion; our politics were concerned chiefly with the colored man and his relations to the State; in architecture our awful brown stone fronts were oppressing in a domineering way all the town in and above Fourteenth Street. But there was a certain dignity about it all, an absence of tawdriness, a savor of respectability.
Fourteenth Street! It must be difficult for the NewYorkers of to-day who have not passed the half-century mark to realize that only fifty years ago it was really “up-town.” It is easier to imagine the present Thomas Street as it was in 1815, a spot to be reached only after a bucolic journey through country lanes which my grandfather used to traverse on his way to the New York Hospital where he studied medicine. We think of that condition of things in about the same state of mind as that in which we contemplate the Roman Forum or the stony avenues of Pompeii. It amuses me to recall the period of the fifties and early sixties when the Hudson River Railroad had its terminus in Thirtieth Street near Tenth Avenue, but sent its cars, horse-drawn, to Chambers Streets and College Place just opposite old Ridley’s, whose pictures were on those familiar inverted cones of never-to-be-forgotten candies, the virtues whereof have been proclaimed sonorously on railway trains from time immemorial, and that Chambers Street station will always live in the memory of old-fashioned people who used to “go to town” from rural neighborhoods. My aforesaid grandfather took me often, much to my joy, to visit his son in West Nineteenth Street, and the conservative old gentleman, who served as a surgeon under Commodore Charles Stewart on the good ship “Franklin,” always went to Chambers Street and thence by the Sixth Avenue horse-railway to Nineteenth Street, which caused the pilgrimage to be unduly protracted, but we always reached our destination sooner or later—generally later. I remember that an idiotic notion possessed me that we were confined to traveling on West Broadway because country people were not allowed to encumber the real, the glorious Broadway, of whose omnibus-crowded splendors I caught but furtive glimpses by peering up the cross-streets. Another gentlemanof the old school, whom I loved sincerely, invariably proceeded from Thirtieth Street—and after the genesis of the Grand Central Station, from Forty-second Street—to the Astor House, from which venerable house of cheer he wended his way serenely to Union Square, or to Madison Square, or to any quarter where his business or his pleasure led him, however remote it might be from City Hall Park. To him the Astor House was practically the hub of the metropolis. These details may seem to be trivial, but they are characteristic of the old-fashioned men of half a century ago who still clung to the swallow-tailed coat as a garment to be worn by daylight. It never occurred to them to “take a cab,” possibly because there was no cab which a decent person would willingly occupy unless it had been ordered in advance from a livery stable. There are many reasons why this land of freedom—modified freedom—is preferable to any other land; but when we come to cabs, we must, in all fairness, admit the superiority of the London hansom over a New York “growler,” the hansoms now vanishing, we learn, before the all-conquering horde of motor-cars.
The old-fashioned magazines—how few ever turn their pages now, and yet how much in them is of interest, even to a casual reader. Far be it from me to whisper the slightest word of disparagement about our gorgeous and innumerable “monthlies,” with their pomp and pride of illustration, extending from text to the copious advertisements, those soul-stirring and lucrative adjuncts to a magazine of the present. Do not tell me that a man who buys the thick, paper-covered book does not read the advertisements; he pretends that he does not, but he does. According to my experience he follows them from soap to steam-yachts, from refrigeratorsto railway routes, but he would rather die than confess it. Much as I admire these products of our later civilization, I nevertheless maintain that there is more charm in an ancient number of any worthy periodical than is to be found in the latest issue. Time seems to add a mellow flavor to the good things of the past. There is not much to say in praise of the solemnWhig Reviewor of O’Sullivan’s portentousDemocratic Review, but take from the shelf a shabbily bound volume ofGraham’s Magazine of Literature and Art, published in the forties, and there will be discovered a wilderness of delights. The fashion-plates alone are dreams of comical beauty, and the steel plates of “The Shepherd’s Love,” “The Proffered Kiss,” and “Lace Pattern with Embossed View” far surpass—in a sense—the boasted work of Pyle and of Abbey. What soul will decline to be thrilled at the lovely skit entitled “Born to Love Pigs and Chickens” by that butterfly of literature, Nathaniel Parker Willis, which you will find in the number of February, 1843. Consider the portrait of Charles Fenno Hoffman, with his exquisite coatlet, his wonderful legs attired in what appear to be tights, and his mild but intellectual countenance beaming upon us as he sits, bare-headed, upon a convenient stage rock, holding in one hand an object which may be a pie, a boxing-glove or a hat, according to the imagination of the beholder. Contemplate the list of contributors, including Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, and “Edgar A. Poe, Esq.,” the “Esq.” adding a delicious dignity to each of the illustrious names. It was only “sixty years since,” but can any magazine of to-day rival that catalogue? Almost every one knows that Poe was editor ofGrahamfor a year and thatThe Murders in the Rue Morgueas well as Longfellow’sSpanish Studentfirst appeared in that magazine. Coming to a later day, recall theHarperof the fifties. No pleasure of the present can equal that which we felt when we revelled in Abbott’s Napoleon, which turned us lads into enthusiastic admirers of the great Emperor; or when we enjoyed the jovial Porte Crayon, whose drawing was consistently as bad as Thackeray’s, but whose fascinating humor had a quality peculiarly its own. Not long ago Mr. Janvier, to the gratification of the surviving members of the brotherhood of earlyHarperreaders, gave to Strother the tribute of his judicious praise.
One may not gossip lightly about theAtlantic, but theKnickerbockeris distinctly old-fashioned. Longfellow’sPsalm of Lifefirst saw the light in its pages; immortal, even if Barrett Wendell does truthfully say that it is full not only of outworn metaphor but of superficial literary allusion. Old New York, adds Professor Wendell, expressed itself in our first school of renascent writing, which withered away with theKnickerbocker Magazine. But there was a Knickerbocker school, and the brothers Willis and Gaylord Clark helped to sustain its glories. The magazine began in 1832, faded in 1857 and died in 1864; and out of it sprang many of the authors whose names are inseparably associated with a golden period of our literature.
It was only a short time ago that one of the men of those by-gone times departed this life, and the scanty mention of him in the public press compelled a sad recognition of the familiar truth that in order to retain popular attraction one must pose perpetually under the lime-light. Parke Godwin, who belonged to the order of scholarly, high-minded Americans, had outlived his fame, except among the Centurions of West Forty-thirdStreet and a few old people of the same class. Perhaps he did not concentrate his powers sufficiently. Editor, writer of political essays, author ofVala, a Mythological Tale, biographer of his father-in-law, William Cullen Bryant, and by virtue of hisHistory of France, historian,—but he published only one volume more than forty years ago and then abandoned the task—he had that broad culture which sometimes disperses itself and fails to win for its possessor the highest place in the literary hierarchy. He was a delightful example of what we now regard as the old-fashioned, and his address on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Century Club is a mine of good things for one who is interested in the past of New York. “I have stood once more” said he “beside the easel of Cole as he poured his ideal visions of the Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire in gorgeous colors upon the canvas. I have seen the boyish Kensett trying to infuse his own refinement and sweetness into the wild woods of the wold. I have watched the stately Gifford as he brought the City of the Sea out of its waters, in a style that Cavaletto and Ziem would envy and with a brilliancy of color that outshone even its native Italian skies. I have stood beside the burly Leutze as he portrayed our Washington among the ice of the Delaware, or depicted the multitudinous tramp of immigrants making their western way through the wilderness to the shores of the Oregon, that ‘hears no sound save its own dashings.’ All have come back for a moment, but they are gone, oh whither? Into the silent land, says Von Salis; yet how silent it is! We speak to them, but they answer us not again.” He brought back to us the beginning of things, when he told us of the incipient conditions of the Academy of Design. “They took a room—was it suggestive?—in theold Alms House in the Park, and they worked under a wick dipped in whale-oil which gave out more smoke than light.” He spoke of Halleck, of Gulian Verplanck, of Bryant, of Charles Fenno Hoffman, of Robert C. Sands, and of old Tristam Burges, “who had swallowed Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary;” and he closed with a brief flight of eloquence such as in these days of new-fashioned chilliness it is seldom vouchsafed to us to hear.
Of the same order was William Allen Butler, the friend of Halleck and of Duyckinck, of Andrew Jackson and of Martin Van Buren, who knew Samuel Rogers and visited him in London. He was nine years the junior of Godwin. He might have won the highest eminence in the world of books if he had not made the law his chief occupation and literature only his recreation. The bar does not among its rewards number that of enduring fame, unless occasionally some great political or criminal trial perpetuates the name of the advocate chiefly concerned in it. Of course, Mr. Butler’s early essay in verse, “Nothing to Wear,” will never be entirely forgotten. A humorous skit as it was, its enduring merit is shown by the fact that in spite of the old-fashioned terms descriptive of woman’s dress and of the fashionable life of fifty years ago, in its general tone it is curiously contemporaneous. Scarcely less witty and amusing were his poems, “General Average” and “The Sexton and the Thermometer,” the former being more highly esteemed by many than its popular predecessor. I suppose that he left it out of the later collection of his poems because, with his gentle and kindly nature, he feared that a few of its passages might give offense to some of his friends of the Jewish faith whom he esteemed and respected. His translations ofUhland are marked by graceful and poetic fervor, and his prose style was lucidity itself. His humor, always attractive and appropriate, lightened even his most serious work, from an address on Statutory Law to an argument in the Supreme Court in Washington City. It was well said of him by a jurist now living, that “no man of his time, either in England or America, held an equally high rank both as a lawyer and a literary man.”
Another of the old-fashioned literary men, who was, however, considerably the senior of both Godwin and Butler, was George Perkins Morris, who died in 1864. He was at once a general of militia, an editor, a favorite song-writer, and the composer of an opera libretto. His title to immortality rests mainly upon the sentimental verses known as “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” which had a flavor about them very dear to our grandparents. To look at his manly countenance in the portrait engraved by Hollyer (who at the present writing is still extant and vigorous) after the Elliott painting, we can scarcely imagine him as the author of such lines as “Near the Lake Where Drooped the Willow,” “We Were Boys Together,” “Land-Ho,” “Long Time Ago” and “Whip-poor-will.” But James Grant Wilson says that for above a score of years he could, any day, exchange one of his songs unread for a fifty dollar cheque, when some ofliteratiof New York (possibly Poe) could not sell anything for the one-fifth part of that sum. In the presence of Morris, I confess I cannot quite give myself up to adoring admiration of the taste of our predecessors. This stanza indicates his ordinary quality:
The star of love now shines above,Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;Among the leaves, the wind-harp weavesIts serenade for thee.
The star of love now shines above,Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;Among the leaves, the wind-harp weavesIts serenade for thee.
The star of love now shines above,Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;Among the leaves, the wind-harp weavesIts serenade for thee.
The star of love now shines above,
Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;
Among the leaves, the wind-harp weaves
Its serenade for thee.
Notwithstanding this rather trifling vein, admirably satirized by Orpheus C. Kerr, and a certain tone of commonplace, Morris had a genuine lyrical quality in his verse, although it was devoid of startling bursts of inspiration, and English literature affords many examples of less deserving poesy. Morris was an industrious editor, appreciative of others, and he had a personal charm which endeared him to those who had the good fortune to come within the pale of his friendship, and particularly to those who were permitted to enjoy the generous hospitality of his sweet and dignified home at Undercliff opposite West Point. Smile as we may at his little conceits and his obvious rhymes, we must recognize the sincere and genial nature of the kindly General, so long conspicuous in the social and literary life of old New York.
These men, it may be said, do not prove the permanent value of the literature of the fifties. Godwin and Morris were editors and Butler a busy lawyer, none of them able to give their undivided attention to authorship. I suppose that Irving and Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne and Bayard Taylor were more distinctly the ornaments of the time, and there are other names which more judicious and discriminating men might substitute for some of those I have chosen. Bayard Taylor’s greatest work was done in later years, but he had already won his first fame—not a giant, but a poet with “the spontaneity of a born singer,” as Stedman said. Irving, the most charming and amiable of writers, had not the most forceful intellect, but he was calm and graceful, with a gentle and bewitching humor and a strong appreciation of the beautiful—a good man, beloved and honored at home and abroad. His fame is paler now than it was forty years gone by, buthe has the immortality of a classic. Emerson had a powerful influence over the minds of men, but, viewed in the perspective of time, he does not loom so largely now. I am not competent to venture far into the territory of criticism, having only the equipment of a general reader who timidly expresses his personal feelings and leaves to trained and experienced judges the task of scientific analysis; but we general readers are the jury, after all.
As time slips by there is a tendency to merge the decades of the past, and to the young people of 1909 the period of 1850–1860 is every bit as remote as the period of 1830–1840. The university undergraduate does not differentiate between the alumnus of 1870 and him of 1855, as I know by experience. A melancholy illustration of this well-known fact was afforded of late in a popular play, the scene of which was laid in a time supposed to be exceedingly far distant, and the programme announced it as “the early eighties.” The representation was enlivened by such antiquated melodies as “Old Zip Coon,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Old Dan Tucker,” as well as “Pretty as a Picture,” “Ye Merry Birds,” and “How Fair Art Thou,” all as appropriate to the early eighties as Dr. Arne’s “Where the Bee Sucks” and “Rule Britannia.” It was almost as abominably anachronistic as the naive declaration of a pseudo-Princetonian who asserted a membership in the Class of 1879 and assured me that he had been, while in college, a devoted disciple of Doctor Eliphalet Nott. If I have mingled my old-fashioned decades unduly, it has been because of that tendency to merger which no Sherman Act can suppress.
Few there are who cling with affection to the memory of the old-fashioned. Most of us prefer to spin with theworld down the ringing grooves of change, to borrow the shadow of a phrase which has itself become old-fashioned. The flaming sword of the Civil War severed the latest century of America in two unequal parts, and its fiery blade divided the old and the new as surely and as cleanly as the guillotine cleft apart the France of the old monarchy from the France of modern days. To stray back in recollection to the land of fifty years ago is almost like treading the streets of some mediæval town. But for some of us there is a melancholy pleasure in the retrospect and a lingering fondness for the life which we thought so earnest and so vigorous then, but which now seems so placid and so drowsy.