Homer was well enough; but would he everHave written, think you, “The Backwoodsman”?Never!
Homer was well enough; but would he everHave written, think you, “The Backwoodsman”?Never!
Homer was well enough; but would he everHave written, think you, “The Backwoodsman”?Never!
Homer was well enough; but would he ever
Have written, think you, “The Backwoodsman”?
Never!
If these lines had fallen under the eye of Matthew Arnold we should have had another light-handed international amenity to contribute to the joy of both nations.
When Paulding tried to recall the atmosphere and tone of “Salmagundi” in 1819, it was soon evident that the “town” of the early Knickerbocker had merged into a larger community, and much of the wit went wide of the mark. Paulding, meanwhile, had entered public service and was living in Washington. In 1823 he published his first novel, “Koningsmarke,” a study of life among the Swedish settlers on the banks of the Delaware. But the satirical impulse was strong in him, and the title of his next book, “John Bull in America; or, the New Münchausen,” is sufficiently descriptive to make further comment unnecessary;while “The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham,” which appeared a year later, touched somewhat caustically the new social doctrine of Robert Dale Owen, the rising science of phrenology, and other matters of interest at the moment. His aptness for satire was braced in Paulding by a lively dislike for the heavy contemptuousness of manner of some Englishmen of the time, and the abundant material furnished by some of these candid friends led him again to enter the field with one of the keenest of his satires, “The Mirror for Travelers,” a burlesque guide-book and record of travel in this country, in a cleverly imitated British manner.
In this satiric view Paulding was a true child of the Knickerbocker spirit, and his next books, “Tales of the GoodWoman” and “Chronicles of the City of Gotham,” purported to be translations of legends of early New York. A Mrs. Grant, who had written pleasantly of the old Dutch settlers, furnished material for “The Dutchman’s Fireside”; a story which so greatly pleased the readers of the day that it went promptly through six editions and was republished in England, France, and Holland. In Washington, as in New York, Paulding was a thoroughgoing Knickerbocker; but he had an eye for manners and great zest for the pleasures of hospitality, and his account of Virginia was followed, the year after the appearance of the Dutch novel, by “Westward Ho!”, a story that, moving with the southern flow of emigration, began in Virginia and was worked out in Kentucky. Paulding was charmed by theplantation life, the generous hospitality, and the winning Southern temperament, and in 1836, when the tide of feeling in the country was rising, wrote an uncompromising defence of slavery, an institution with which he was not unfamiliar in his own State, where it was not abolished until 1799. In 1837 Paulding entered the cabinet of a Knickerbocker President, Van Buren, as Secretary of the Navy.
On retiring from office, Paulding found a delightful home overlooking the Hudson, not far from Poughkeepsie, within sight of many of the localities endeared by early associations and ancient Dutch traditions. There he practised the arts of agriculture and of writing with growing content. He was as busy within doors as without, and his penwas driven as regularly as his plough. A story of the Revolutionary period, and, later, a novel laid partly in this country and partly in England, and an American comedy, “The Bucktails; or, The Americans in England,” were fruits of this well-ordered leisure. Five years later he gave this very comfortable picture of his manner of life:
“I smoke a little, read a little, write a little, ruminate a little, grumble a little, and sleep a great deal. I was once great at pulling up weeds, to which I have a mortal antipathy, especially bull’s-eyes, wild carrots, and toad-flax,aliasbutter-and-eggs. But my working days are almost over. I find that carrying seventy-five years on my shoulders is pretty nearly equal to the same number of pounds; and instead of labouring myself,I sit in the shade watching the labours of others, which I find quite sufficient exercise.”
Sitting pipe in mouth on his veranda overlooking the river, watching the harvesters and the haze on the Catskills on those autumn afternoons when Rip Van Winkle’s slumbers were deepest, the old man delighted to recall the golden Knickerbocker age before the “town” had been lost in the metropolis, to tell the brave story of the youth of the Knickerbocker group, to draw the portraits of the great men he had seen in Washington, to castigate John Bull with passionate eloquence whenever occasion arose, and to chant the elegy of age on the good old times of the patriots and demigods. A sturdy man, of deep convictions and passionate feelings, Paulding shared Irving’s sense of humor,high spirits, and gift for satire; but, while Irving saw the Old World with sympathetic eyes and reknit the severed ties between the young and the old country, Paulding remained a provincial in experience and feeling; loyal, prejudiced, partisan; a man of a city, but not a man of the world.
Sitting ... overlooking the river ... the old man delighted to recall the golden Knickerbocker age
* * * * *
Whose distinction was invariably expressed in a green or common, a Congregational spire
Thelast stages of the Knickerbocker age began when Fitz-Greene Halleck appeared on the scene. He was not to the manner born; he came from Guilford, Connecticut; but he felt the Knickerbocker spirit and shared its achievements. Born in one of the loveliest of the old New England villages, whose distinction was invariably expressed in a green or common, a Congregational spire, an academy, and rowsof graceful elms, Halleck brought to New York, in 1811, a good school training and skill in bookkeeping gained in that forerunner of the modern department store, the country store. The laughter which greeted the appearance of the “Salmagundi” papers was a thing of the past, and the anger which met Diedrich Knickerbocker’s story of his ancestors had lost its heat; the merry youths who gathered at Cockloft Hall had blown the foam off the wine of life, though they had not lost their zest in the mere act of living; Irving was boarding on lower Broadway with Brevoort as a roommate, and there was plenty of good talk but very little work done.
Halleck made a very quiet entrance into the city which was later to honor him with one of the few statues commemorative of its Men of Letters. Hewas a born accountant, and during his long residence in New York he served two men in this capacity—Mr. Jacob Barker and Mr. John Jacob Astor. Mr. Astor, at his death in 1848, left him an annuity large enough in those days of moderate prices to enable him to retire to his native town and enjoy ease of condition and industrious leisure in a fine old colonial house which had some associations with Shelley’s adventurous grandfather.
Halleck did not find his way into the Knickerbocker group at the start, but he early made acquaintance with Joseph Rodman Drake and the two became ardent friends. Drake was a young man of captivating personality; variously gifted and brilliant; a thoroughbred in his sense of honor and a certain gallant rectitude and courage; a man of charmingfancy, who, at the age of five, was writing clever verse. By descent he was an American of the Americans, if we accept the dictum of Richard Grant White that to be an American one must have come of ancestors who arrived in this country before the War of the Revolution. Drake had an ancestor in the Plymouth Company, and his father held a colonelcy in Washington’s army. His mother was equally well-born in the true sense of the word. His childhood was overshadowed by the death of both his parents and the bitterness of poverty; but the boy was of a chivalrous spirit and faced hard conditions with a resolution which was an assurance of success. His active fancy opened a door of escape from these conditions, and he played many romantic parts in the drama of his bleak boyhood. He wasan omnivorous reader, his memory let nothing escape, and despite his lack of opportunity he became exceptionally well informed. His facility in verse-writing, so early developed, grew with his years; and his endeavor to make a man of business of himself failed utterly.
Drake was eighteen and Halleck twenty-three when, on a sailing party in the bay, they met James De Kay, a young medical student. The day was genial, youth was at the prow and also at the helm, and Halleck remarked that “it would be heaven to lounge upon the rainbow and read Tom Campbell.” It requires some effort of the imagination to recall Campbell’s popularity at that time and to revive the state of mind which could see in him a possible relation with the rainbow; but in youth andfair weather all things tremble on the verge of poetry. Literature was still in the future for the ardent youths, but life was within easy reach, and especially the pleasant social life of a small city. In this same year Irving was beginning to look upon the quiet pleasures of New York with the jaundiced eye of a veteran man of the world upon whom the weight of twenty-nine years bore heavily. Writing of a certain vivacious young woman who played “the sparkler,” he said: “God defend me from such vivacity as hers in future—such smart speeches without meaning; such bubble-and-squeak nonsense. I’d as lieve stand by a frying-pan for an hour and listen to the cooking of apple fritters”; and he reports that when he was out of the house he did not stop running for a mile. He speaks irreverently of the “divinitiesand blossoms” of the hour, of “rascally little tea parties,” and protests that he is weary of the “tedious commonplaces of fashionable society.”
The two young poets, hidden in an obscurity which they found very pleasant, were probably in great awe of the brilliant young Knickerbocker who had dared to ridicule the town, and who, in the glory of his local fame, was eager for fresh fields and a wider horizon. They found very excellent company and much pleasant talk in the city, and they hunted the joys of youth together. Halleck described Drake at this time as “perhaps the handsomest man in New York—a face like an angel, a form like an Apollo.” Music was one of the accomplishments of Drake, and he played the flute at a time when that instrument and the harp were the symbols of socialcultivation. One of their hostesses was Mrs. Peter Stuyvesant, whose spacious house, not far from the square which bears her name, with its gardens and lawn stretching to the East River, was a centre of social activity. The city ended at Canal Street, and a visit in the vicinity of old St. Mark’s was like going to Tarrytown or Trenton in these swift-footed days. Mrs. Stuyvesant declared, when First Avenue was laid out and this earliest intrusion into the privacy of a great colonial estate made, that her heart was broken. A pear-tree which stood long at the corner of Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street was for many decades the only surviving relic of this hospitable home.
The country house of Mr. Henry Eckford was a kind of second home to the young poets, though its distancefrom the city was a test of their enjoyment of its hospitality. It stood in a pine grove on Love Lane where Twenty-first Street crosses Sixth Avenue! New York was surrounded by spacious country places, not only on the upper part of the island, but across the three rivers. Among these sylvan homes was that of the well-known Hunt family, on the Long Island shore almost opposite West Farms, to which Halleck and Drake made their way by stage and small boat, and where they often found delightful companionship over Sunday. On these occasions Halleck gave himself up to the pleasures of “female society,” but Drake went a-fishing in his old clothes. In the evening the two friends appeared in different rôles: Halleck told stories and recited verse, and Drake sang.
Drake had studied medicine and embarked in the business of selling drugs at one of the corners of Park Row, and there is a tradition that in this building, which was both a dwelling and a shop, the second series of satirical papers on the town, “The Croakers,” was conceived and brought forth. These lively satires, which took the town by storm, were in verse of varying degrees of wit and melody. They were clever skits on men and manners, many of them burlesques, and appeared first in the columns of the “Evening Post,” over the signature “Croakers,” adapted from “The Good-Natured Man.” This was in March, 1819, and thenceforth “Croakers” appeared at short intervals and speedily became the topic of the town. The poets and Coleman, the editor of the “Evening Post,” adroitly concealedthe authorship of the poems, and great was the speculation on that subject. So great was the wincing and shrinking at “The Croakers,” that every person was on tenterhooks; “neither knavery nor folly has slept quietly since our first commencement,” wrote one of the two poets in a mood of pardonable elation. Poor Coleman was almost submerged by the flood of imitations called out by the brilliant success of the series. Conceived in the spirit of mischief, these facile and fetching rhymes have preserved the humors of the hour, and, with “Salmagundi,” are entertaining chapters in the history of the decade between 1819 and 1829.
General Wilson recalls a remark of Drake’s which explains the lightness and fun of these satirical and burlesque pieces. The young poet had just correctedthe proof of some lines he had recently written, when he turned a glowing face to his collaborator and cried out: “Oh, Halleck, isn’t this happiness!” Halleck may be pardoned for writing to his sister: “We have tasted all the pleasures and many of the pains of literary fame and notoriety under the assumed name of ‘The Croakers’; we have had the consolation of seeing and hearing ourselves praised, puffed, eulogized, execrated, and threatened as much, I believe I can say with truth, as any writers since the days of Junius. The whole town has talked of nothing else for three weeks past, and every newspaper has done us the honour to mention us in some way, either of praise or censure, but all uniting in owning our talents and genius.”
The poets, meanwhile, were workingindividually as well as collectively. In 1819, while the town was still talking about “The Croakers,” “The Culprit Fay,” written in August, 1816, was gaining a wide reputation for Drake, and there were many who hailed him as the coming poet. It was a charming flight of fancy, delicately poised in mid-air, and kept aloft with that ease which is born of native gift and skill in versification. The story runs that Cooper and Halleck, in a warm discussion of the romantic associations of the Scotch lakes and streams and their rich contributions to poetry, declared that American rivers offered no such material to the poet. Drake not only ardently espoused the cause of the American rivers, but in three days’ time re-enforced his argument by writing “The Culprit Fay,” with the Highlands of the Hudsonas a background, but bringing in impressions received on the shore of Long Island Sound; frankly confessing his departure from poetic realism in an ingeniously worded note: “The reader will find some of the inhabitants of salt water a little further up the Hudson than they usually travel, but not too far for the purposes of poetry.”
In May, 1819, Drake wrote his popular song, “The American Flag,” which appeared first in the columns of the “Evening Post,” with very warm commendation from the editor: “Sir Philip Sidney said, as Addison tells us, that he could never read the old ballad of ‘Chevy Chase’ without feeling his heart beat within him as at the sound of a trumpet. The following lines, which are to be ranked among the highest inspirations of the Muse, will suggestsimilar associations in the breast of the gallant American officer.” The praise was a little too ardent, but what the song lacked in poetic quality it made up in the ardor of its patriotism, and it has passed, through the school-books, into the minds of many generations of American boys, and has been proudly declaimed on many platforms. It ought to be remembered that Halleck wrote the closing lines:
Forever float that standard sheet!Where breathes the foe but falls before us,With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet,And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us.
Forever float that standard sheet!Where breathes the foe but falls before us,With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet,And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us.
Forever float that standard sheet!Where breathes the foe but falls before us,With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet,And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us.
Forever float that standard sheet!
Where breathes the foe but falls before us,
With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet,
And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us.
One of the prominent preachers of the town at that time was the Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox, a Presbyterian of unadulterated Calvinistic views and the author of the well-known hymn beginning:
We are living, we are dwellingIn a grand and awful time,In an age on ages telling,To be living is sublime.
We are living, we are dwellingIn a grand and awful time,In an age on ages telling,To be living is sublime.
We are living, we are dwellingIn a grand and awful time,In an age on ages telling,To be living is sublime.
We are living, we are dwelling
In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime.
The free poetic temperament of the two poets revolted at the rigid doctrines powerfully and dogmatically expounded by Dr. Cox, and they amused themselves by delivering sermons of a very different theology to a very small but highly appreciative audience of two intimate friends. Unfortunately, these productions, which would have made a highly original contribution to sermonic literature, have not been preserved.
The friendship of Halleck and Drake, compounded of love and laughter, of work and wit, was severed by the death of Drake in September, 1820. There is no more winning and unworldly chapter in the story of New York than the generousand loyal comradeship of these two young men, who, like Irving and Paulding, conspired against the dullness of the town and made it smile at its own follies. Neither poet had genius, but both had talent; and Drake, like Hamilton, belongs to the group of men of brilliancy and personal charm whose presence has given distinction to New York in every decade since it was founded.
Halleck had written “Fanny” in 1819, a satirical poem which dealt with contemporary manners and men with a freedom that stopped short of impertinence, but afforded much amusement to all save the solemn-minded. The poem passed through several editions and carried Halleck’s reputation to distant parts of the country. A visit in Europe gave the young poet themes like“Burns” and “Alnwick Castle” and “Marco Bozzaris,” which he treated with spirit and metrical effectiveness. Few boys have grown up in America since 1827 who have not heard of the Turk who dreamed in his guarded tent of the hour when Greece, “her knee in suppliance bent, should tremble at his power.” Perhaps no song written in this country has had wider currency than this spirited lyric, born at a time when the Greek struggle for independence appealed to the imagination of the world. In 1848, when his service in the office of John Jacob Astor was terminated by the death of that adventurous capitalist, with whom Irving had also had very pleasant relations, Halleck went back to Guilford and spent nineteen peaceful years in a house which bore the impress of colonial taste in itsdignity and spaciousness. He had comfortable means and the leisure so dear to a man of literary taste and habit; but he never lost his love for the city which had given him such wealth of friendship. “I shall never cease to ‘hail,’ as the sailors say, from your good city of New York, of which a residence of more than fifty years made me a citizen,” he wrote to an admirer who wished to reproduce a view of his home in Guilford. “There I always considered myself at home, and elsewhere but a visitor. If, therefore, you wish to embellish my poem (‘Fanny’) with a view of my country-seat (it was literally mine every Sunday for years), let it be taken from the top of Weehawk Hill, overlooking New York, to whose scenes and associations the poem is almost exclusively devoted.”
Halleck died at Guilford, November 19, 1867, and has been commemorated by substantial memorials both there and in New York. A granite pillar was dedicated to his memory in his native town, in the presence of a great multitude, Bayard Taylor delivering the address and Dr. Holmes contributing one of his happy occasional poems. In May, 1877, a bronze statue of Halleck was unveiled in Central Park by the President of the United States. Bryant, the head of the guild of American poets, and William Allen Butler, the accomplished and versatile author of “Nothing to Wear,” delivered addresses, and a poem by Whittier was read.
Poets of far greater genius than Halleck have been far less adequately honored than he; for he was the poet of a half-century and of a city, not of anage and a nation. But he lived in a fortunate time; he was singularly happy in his associations; and he was a delightful companion, genial and witty, scornful and satirical only in dealing with impostors and pretenders.
Let it be taken from the top of Weehawk Hill, overlooking New York
* * * * *
In the back room of Wiley’s shop ... Dana met Cooper, Halleck, Brevoort
Thatlight-handed, urbane, and successful editor and poet, Nathaniel Parker Willis, long an active and entertaining figure in the New York of the Thirties and Forties, barely touches the Knickerbocker town of the Twenties. In the spring of 1829 he started the “American Monthly Magazine” in Boston—a periodical described at a later day by that well-known wit, “Tom” Appleton, as “a slim monthly,written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Willis had been less than two years out of college and was without means or experience, and his enterprise had a fine air of audacity. Events showed that as a venture it was magnificent, but it was not war! At the end of two years the magazine was moved to New York and merged in “The Mirror,” a journal founded in 1823 by George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth; was published every Saturday; and had a long and vigorous life under a succession of names. Woodworth, who wrote a song which was sung at supper-tables many years afterward—“The Old Oaken Bucket”—inspired, it is said, by a eulogy on spring water pronounced at a wine party at Mallory’s, a popular hotel of the time,—had withdrawn from “TheMirror” before Willis joined its editorial staff; but Willis and Morris remained partners and devoted friends to the end. They both became immensely popular—Willis through his versatility and sentiment, Morris through a series of songs which went to the hearts of a host of people: “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” “Near the Lake where droops the Lily,” and “My Mother’s Bible.” He was one of the earliest collators of literature for general reading, and his “Song Writers of America” and “The Prose and Poetry of America”—the latter edited in collaboration with Willis—were eminently useful compilations. He had the rare good luck to write a successful play founded on Revolutionary events, and a libretto for an opera; but his talent and fortune lay in his skill in giving popular sentiment expressionin songs. General Wilson records, as the most impressive evidence of his popularity, that he could at any time exchange an unread song for a check for fifty dollars. Genial in manner and with an agreeable address, Morris was also a shrewd man of affairs.
A vigorous, burly man, often met on the streets in the second decade, was on his way to become one of the most widely known Americans, whose name is now familiar throughout Europe. “The Spy” appeared in 1821, and a few months later passed into a second edition and was dramatized. In the following year it was published in England, and the English newspapers began to speak of its author as a “distinguished American novelist.” The story speedily became the foundation for a world-wide literary reputation which has suffered little atthe hands of time; the boys in small German towns still organize themselves into tribes of “Cooper Indians” and perform heroic feats after the manner of the “Leather-Stocking Tales,” which confirmed and broadened the fame established by “The Spy.”
James Fenimore Cooper was not born in New York and did not share the Knickerbocker tradition, but between 1822, when he became a resident of the metropolis, and 1826, when he went to Europe for a stay of seven years, he wrote three of the most notable of his novels. “The Pioneers” was published in 1823, “The Pilot” in 1824, “The Last of the Mohicans” in 1826. “Lionel Lincoln,” which saw the light in 1825, is negligible, from the point of view of literature. In 1823 Cooper was living in Beach Street; after his returnfrom Europe in 1833, he spent a few winters in the city, but his home was in Cooperstown.
Cooper’s reputation, vigorous intellect, and courage of speech made for him warm friends as well as bitter enemies, though the latter were of the period after his return from Europe, when his sharp criticism of American manners and his impatience with provincial standards involved him in long-continued and unhappy controversy. “The Bread and Cheese Club,” of which he was the founder, included in its membership men of more than local reputation: Kent, Bryant, Morse, Halleck.
A few days before he sailed for Europe in 1826, the Club gave Cooper a dinner at the City Hotel, at which Chancellor Kent presided, and speeches were made by Governor Clinton, GeneralScott, and other well-known men, who spoke in enthusiastic terms of the distinction he had brought to the country and the city. Chancellor Kent hailed his “genius, which has rendered our native soil classic ground, and given to our early history the enchantment of fiction.”
The high regard in which Cooper was held by the men of Letters in New York, and the relative positions of the American poets of the day in the order of merit, are reflected in Halleck’s remark to General Wilson: “Cooper is colonel of the literary regiment; Irving, lieutenant-colonel; Bryant, the major; while Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Dana, and myself may be considered captains.” In popular reputation the place assigned to Cooper was not too high, although Halleck put himself toocomplacently in the rank of Holmes and Whittier. After his return from Europe in 1833, Cooper spent only a few winters in New York; but the city in which his reputation was born, so to speak, and in which his literary friendships were formed was the scene of the most impressive commemoration of his life and fame. A few months after his death a memorial meeting brought together probably the most distinguished group of men who had appeared at one time in the history of the city. Webster presided with his accustomed dignity, but spoke without his occasional inspiration; while Bryant rose easily to the highest reach of his theme in an address of great beauty and feeling.
William Cullen Bryant came to the city in 1825 still thinking of himself as a lawyer with a strong bent towardliterature, but not yet fully committed to a change of profession. A year earlier he had made a flying visit to the city and been warmly welcomed by Cooper, Halleck, the Sedgwicks, and other well-known people. The appearance of “Thanatopsis” in 1817, and of the memorable “Lines to a Waterfowl” a year later, had put his reputation as a poet on a basis so solid that, while it was greatly broadened as time went on, it did not need to be strengthened. In June, 1825, his name appeared as editor on the title-page of the “New York Review and Athenæum Magazine.” Later in the year he read four lectures before the Athenæum Society; and two years later, under the auspices of the recently established National Academy of Design, he talked so well about certain phases of Mythology that he was askedto repeat the course several successive years. In 1826 he became the New York editor of a periodical which bore the portentous name of “The New York Literary Gazette or American Athenæum,” at a salary of five hundred dollars a year. His financial position was precarious and had become desperate when he was invited to join the editorial staff of the “New York Evening Post,” a journal always intimately connected with the literary history of the city. As a by-product of his industry, Bryant contributed editorial suggestion and writing to the “Talisman,” one of those old-fashioned annuals which grew like mushrooms during the decade which ended in 1830. In the closing year of that decade, having acquired an interest in the “Evening Post,” he wrote to R. H. Dana that he had made sure of acomfortable livelihood: “I do not like politics any better than you do; but they get only my mornings, and you know politics and a bellyful are better than poetry and starvation.” Long after the Knickerbocker era had become a tradition, Bryant was reaping the double reward of the poet and journalist, and enjoying well-earned prosperity of hand and heart.
Among the men who found a convenient meeting-place in the shop of Charles Wiley, a well-known publisher of the Knickerbocker period, at the corner of Wall and New Streets, was Richard Henry Dana, whose “Two Years Before the Mast” has been thumbed by many generations of American boys. A Cambridge man, with a Harvard education, Dana breathed another air than that of the metropolis; but for manyyears his was a familiar figure in the places where men of literary habit gathered in New York. In the back room of Wiley’s shop, familiarly known as the “Den,” Dana met Cooper, Halleck, Brevoort, and a genial company who found pleasure in Cooper’s somewhat pessimistic talk. It was on Broadway, General Wilson tells us, that the modest author of “The Idle Man” was almost assaulted by an enthusiastic admirer who cried, “Are you the immortal Dana?” lifted the astonished man in his arms, rushed across the street with him, and placed him triumphantly on his own threshold; the author meantime calling out, “Release me from this maniac!” Such lively demonstrations of admiration for men of Letters are no longer seen on Broadway!
Local self-consciousness was alreadypronounced in the foremost towns of the country in the third decade of the Nineteenth Century. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, were in the race for the intellectual primacy of the New World, and Richmond and Charleston were not unmindful of their claims upon the homage of the nation. Nearly every State cherished the belief that it contained within its borders a modern Athens which could bravely invite comparison with the ancient capital of Attica. In 1824 Boston was spoken of as “The Literary Emporium,” a description which had, unhappily, a suggestion of trade associations. Three years later, Philadelphia, according to a magazine prospectus, had “within herself a larger fund of talent, erudition, and science—larger perhaps than any other city can boast.” New York wasnot lacking in the audacity which is born of self-confidence. In 1820 an attempt was made to establish in the Knickerbocker town an “American Academy of Languages and Belles-Lettres,” which boldly set out to protect the language from “local and foreign corruptions,” and to establish a “standard of writing and pronunciation, correct, fixed, and uniform, throughout our extensive territory.” To allay the apprehensions of the Old World, it was announced that no effort would be made “to form an American language.” It is painful to record the fact that this modest effort to guard the mother tongue aroused local jealousy and perished at birth. Boston derided it!
But if New York failed to make itself the seat of an academy, it did not fail to foster the infant industry of journalism.Professor Cairns enumerates no less than thirty periodicals of various kinds established in the city between 1816 and 1833. These were all modest enterprises, and of brief and varied careers. The scale of expenditure must fill the editors of magazines to-day with bitter regret for the conditions of the good old times. In 1822 the publishers of the “Atlantic Magazine,” issued in New York, paid its editor five hundred dollars a year, and authorized an expenditure of the same amount for the conduct of the magazine!
There were many lesser writers and men of cultivated taste in literature and art in the closing years of the Knickerbocker period, who formed a congenial society in the growing city, and, in some cases, made important contributions to the scholarship of their timeand secured local reputation and influence.
Gulian Crommelin Verplanck was a fine type of the old-time gentleman of colonial descent. After his graduation from Columbia College he studied law, made the “grand tour,” which was not only a part of a liberal education in those days but an enterprise of an adventurous character, returned to become a dignified professor in what is now the General Theological Seminary, spent eight years in Congress, and for nearly fifty years was Vice-Chancellor of the State University. He had a happy faculty of dignified address on public occasions, was a contributor to the “Talisman” with Bryant, edited an illustrated edition of Shakespeare, and appears to have been regarded by the gay spirits of Cockloft Hall as a personnot quite of their kind. Older men, however, held him in great esteem, Bryant reports, as “an example of steady, studious, and spotless youth.” His protest against Irving’s presentation of the founders of Manhattan would seem to indicate that his sense of humor was not always keen.
Frederick S. Cozzens, whose “Sparrowgrass Papers” later achieved a brilliant local reputation, has left a characterization of Dr. John Wakefield Francis, a physician of considerable professional distinction, strong literary interests, and much given to hospitality, which stands in no need of amplification: “The Doctor is one of our old Knickerbockers. His big, bushy head is as familiar as the City Hall. He belongs to the ‘God bless you, my dear young friend’ school. He is as full ofknowledge as an egg is full of meat. He knows more about China than the Emperor of the Celestial Empire.”
A fleeting figure in the Knickerbocker town was the author of “Home, Sweet Home,” a song of such popularity that Foster’s songs are its only rivals. It was one of the ironies of life that John Howard Payne should spend his days in exile and die beyond the seas. He was born at No. 33 Pearl Street in 1791, became a clerk in a counting-room at fourteen, and a semi-professional editor while in his teens; though his connection with the “Thespian Mirror,” a local journal devoted to the drama, was kept secret. He spent two terms in Union College, but the stage was calling him, and in 1809—a year memorable for the extraordinary number of men of genius it brought to birth—heplayed the once popular part ofYoung Norvalon the boards of the Park Theatre. Three years later he was playing with moderate success in English theatres, and a little later adapting and writing plays in Paris, drawing his material chiefly from French sources. The song which was to give him a world-wide reputation was written in a room in the Palais Royal for his play, “Clari; or, The Maid of Milan.” He died at Tunis in 1852, and thirty years later “Home, Sweet Home” was sung by a host of people gathered in Washington about the grave in which his body was reinterred. Payne had talents of an uncommon order; men of the quality and distinction of Talma, Coleridge, and Lamb were warmly attached to him; his work was rewarded with generous returns in money; but he was always infinancial straits and seems to have lacked the happy faculty of making himself at home in the world.
Other men less fugitive than Payne, though of purely local fame, contributed to the good-fellowship of the later Knickerbocker period. Charles P. Clinch wrote plays, poems, and criticisms; held public office; and became the devoted friend of Halleck and Drake. “The Spy,” “The First of May,” “The Expelled Collegians,” and an address prepared for the opening of the Park Theatre, testify to his industry, but failed to give his reputation more than local and passing importance.
The informal fellowship of the early Knickerbockers gave way to the earliest literary and artistic clubs. Of one of the earliest of these Robert Charles Sands was a member. The “Sketch Club”included Bryant, Halleck, Verplanck, Cole, Ingham, Durand, Weir, and other practitioners of the arts. The “Century Association,” which has been intimately associated with the literary, artistic, and professional life of New York, was organized at a meeting of the “Sketch Club” in 1847. Sands was a poet and journalist, a warm-hearted, kindly humorist. A more vigorous personality was William Leggett, who began his professional life in the navy, while still a young man published a volume of poems in New York, wrote with great ardor for the periodicals of the day, and finally became one of the editors of the “Evening Post.” He was a man of the old-time belligerent type, and fought a duel of much local notoriety at Weehawken, where the most famous and tragic duel ever fought onAmerican soil had taken place in 1804.
The most popular member of the later Knickerbocker group was Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had a happy faculty of song and verse writing. The lasting popularity of “Sparkling and Bright” needs no explanation; while the verses on the battle of Monterey have a ring of genuine emotion and a force of spirited action which carry them in spite of awkward lines:
We were not many—we who stoodBefore the iron sleet that day;Yet many a gallant spirit wouldGive half his years if but he couldHave been with us at Monterey.
We were not many—we who stoodBefore the iron sleet that day;Yet many a gallant spirit wouldGive half his years if but he couldHave been with us at Monterey.
We were not many—we who stoodBefore the iron sleet that day;Yet many a gallant spirit wouldGive half his years if but he couldHave been with us at Monterey.
We were not many—we who stood
Before the iron sleet that day;
Yet many a gallant spirit would
Give half his years if but he could
Have been with us at Monterey.
Hoffman was connected editorially with the “New York American” and was one of the founders of the “Knickerbocker Magazine,” which was born in the afterglowof the Knickerbocker period and continued the Knickerbocker tradition, though its scope gave it national importance. His editorial duties left Hoffman an ample margin of time for lyrical work, and his short poems of singing quality, “The Myrtle and Steel,” “Room, Boys, Room,” “’Tis Hard to Share her Smiles with Many,” were sung, hummed, and whistled in many parts of the country. His “Winter in the West,” made up of a series of letters, was one of the early reports of adventure and incident on the frontier.
Albany was, after New York, the chief centre of the Dutch tradition, and had a very hospitable and delightful society intimately connected with its kin city at the mouth of the Hudson. From Albany, at short intervals, came Alfred Billings Street. He was always welcomein New York, where his somewhat prolific verse was held in great esteem. He was a devout student of Nature, and had a happy command of the descriptive phrase, and his contemporaries among the American poets were generous in their estimates of the excellence of his poetry. Longfellow gave him the first place as a reporter of forest scenery, and Bryant was “impressed with the fidelity and vividness of the images newly drawn from Nature.”
Among the scholarly writers of the later time was Henry Theodore Tuckerman, whose name has a colonial flavor in the mind of the New Yorker of to-day. He brought the name here from Boston in the afterglow of the Knickerbocker age, spent many years in Europe, and became the most accomplished of the early American writers in the field ofart. He was a man of wide reading, with a charm of manner which won him an enviable popularity in the social life of New York and Newport, and with the catholicity of interests and tastes which mark the cosmopolitan temper. Evert Augustus Duyckinck, on the other hand, was a son of the soil and an inheritor of the tradition, though he was born too late to be counted among the Knickerbocker writers. In 1830, when the Knickerbocker age reached its end and the mid-century writers began to appear, Duyckinck was preparing for Columbia College, and it was not until 1840, on his return from an extended visit in Europe, that he began a long and industrious career as an editor and writer. His chief claim on the attention of lovers of old New York rests on his service as a literary historian. His“Cyclopædia of American Literature,” his text for the “National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans,” and his “Memorial of Fitz-Greene Halleck” are valuable records of the early men of Letters in this country, with many of whom he was personally associated.
Edgar Allan Poe came to New York in the later Thirties, and made and lost friends as in every place where he tried, with pathetic hopefulness, to find anchorage. His attitude toward the Knickerbocker group was one of mingled condescension and contempt. In any society he would have been a detached and lonely figure, and the lasting memorial of his ill-starred genius and broken career in New York is the cottage at Fordham in which Virginia Poe died.
These variously gifted men found theremuneration of literary work far too meagre for “human nature’s daily food,” and took refuge in business occupations of various kinds. Halleck was an expert accountant fortunate in his connection with Mr. Astor, while Drake studied medicine and, after the custom of many old-time physicians, had an interest in a drug-store. Clinch was in the employment of a ship-builder, and for nearly two generations was Deputy Collector of the Port of New York; Payne began his career as a clerk; and Sprague was a bank cashier. Irving and Cooper were amply rewarded by a public to which they offered the novelty of original American literature; Bryant found ease and a comfortable fortune in journalism. In 1822, Professor Cairns reminds us, he set a price on his shorter poems which could hardlybe regarded as exorbitant—two dollars each. George P. Morris was more fortunate so far as income was concerned, and reached such an altitude of popularity that he could sell a song unread for fifty dollars, while a very unimportant drama from his hand brought him thirty-five hundred dollars. Then, as now, journalism was a refuge from the inadequate rewards of literature; though it must be frankly conceded that, while much of the work of the lesser Knickerbocker writing had a pleasant humor, a delightful gaiety of mood or lightness of style, it was neither vital nor original, and its appeal was limited to a small group of readers.
In the later years of his life, Irving was in the habit of speaking of “Salmagundi” as light and trivial; an overflow of youthful fun and audacity. Mr.Barrett Wendell is of opinion that the “literature of Brockden Brown, of Irving, of Cooper, and of Poe is only a literature of pleasure, possessing, so far as it has excellence at all, only the excellence of conscientious refinement”; and that nothing in it “touched seriously on either God’s eternities, or the practical conduct of life in the United States.” This is an incidentally happy characterization of the Knickerbocker literature: it was a literature of pleasure, and it was delightfully free from the didactic and sermonic note at a time when, Lowell declared, all New England was a pulpit. Its touch on morals and manners was light, satiric, and amusing; in its way it had the tone of the world of society rather than of theology or reform. Its preaching, like that of Addison and Steele, was lightly wingedand phrased in the language of an easy, cordial society; tolerant in opinion, hospitable to differences of religion and political habit, concerned chiefly to make itself agreeable and the time of its sojourn in the vale of tears pleasantly profitable. New York was not indifferent to the religious side of life, but its preaching was reserved for churches; its literature, though somewhat provincial in time and manner, was kept well within the ancient province of art.
In 1858 the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of “The Knickerbocker Magazine” was commemorated by the publication of “The Knickerbocker Gallery,” a volume of portentous size and effusive elegance, made up of articles written by contributors to the magazine. Fifty-four men are represented in the collection, of whom onlyfour belonged to the early and characteristic Knickerbocker period. Irving drew upon a commonplace-book of a date thirty-five years earlier for a few notes; Bryant and Halleck were among the poets of the collection; John W. Francis and Alfred B. Street were familiar names to the old New Yorkers of that day. A new generation was in possession of the stage, however; and the Old Town, with its Dutch traditions, was slowly losing its outlines in the neighborly city of the years between 1830 and 1880, as that in turn is fast being obliterated by the cosmopolitan city of to-day.
The old places have vanished, and the old faces are remembered to-day only by the aid of a few portraits. The names of the streets in the lower section of the modern city recall men and womenwhose genial hospitality set a fashion which has never gone out in New York, though the guests of the city have become so many that hotels of imposing size and oppressive splendor are taxed to provide them shelter. But behind the tumult of the great tides of life which flow through the thoroughfares there is a silent New York, which is unspoiled by the possession of wealth, and which hears the appeals of the unfortunate within its borders, and gives time and work and money with tireless generosity of heart and hand.
There was a charm about the Old Town which depended largely on neighborliness and the narrower interests which thrive in a small and homogeneous community; the charm of ease and of leisure and a certain contentment with life; of the ripeness of temper and ofmind which is the fine flowering of an education based on the humanities; of room for work and pleasure large enough for fame, but not too large for the nearer satisfactions of local celebrity. It was the good fortune of the early Knickerbocker writers, by temperament and taste, instinctively to adapt their gifts to their time and Town; and it was the good fortune of the Town to be the birthplace of American literature, and the home of two writers who were first to give that literature a place in the interest of the world.