I
On the principle that nothing interests a man--or a woman--so much as
shop, I had no sooner begun to write than I saw Philadelphia divided not
between the people who could and could not go to the Assembly and the
Dancing Class, but between the people who could and could not write;
and, after I began to write for illustration, between the people who
could and could not paint and draw. It had never before occurred to me
to look for art and literature in Philadelphia.
[Illustration: CARPENTER'S HALL INTERIOR]
At that time, you had, literally, to look for the literature to find it.
Philadelphia, with its usual reticence and conscientiousness in
preventing any Philadelphian from becoming a prophet in Philadelphia,
had hidden its literary, with its innumerable other, lights under a
bushel, content itself to know they were there, if nobody else did. As
towns, like men, are apt to be accepted at their own valuation, most
Americans would then have thought it about as useful to look for snakes
in Ireland as for literature in Philadelphia. I am not sure that the
Philadelphian did not agree with them. Recently, I have heard him, in
his new zeal for Philadelphia, talk as if it were the biggest literary
thing on earth, the headquarters of letters in the United States, a
boast which I am told Indianapolis also makes and, as far as I am
concerned, can keep on making undisputed, for I do not believe in
measuring literature like so much sheet iron or calico. But no matter
what we have come to in Philadelphia, in the old days the Philadelphian
seldom gave his lions a chance to roar at home or paid the least
attention to them if they tried to. I rather think he would have
affected to share the Western Congressman's opinion of "them literary
fellers" when the literary fellers came from his native town.
But the Philadelphian must have done a great deal of reading to judge by
the number of public libraries in the town,--the Philadelphia Library,
the Ridgway, the Mercantile, the Free Public Library, the University
Library, the Bryn Mawr College Library, the Friends' Germantown Library,
the Library of the Historical Society, and no doubt dozens I know
nothing about--and there were always collectors from the days of Logan
and Dr. Rush to those of Mr. Widener, George C. Thomas and Governor
Pennypacker. But the Philadelphia reading man never talked books and the
Philadelphia collector never vaunted and advertised his treasures, as he
does now that collecting is correct. The average man kept his books out
of sight. I remember few in my Grandfather's house, and not a bookcase
from top to bottom--few in any other house except my Father's. But I
know that many people had books and a library set apart to read them in,
and I have been astonished since to see the large collections in houses
where of old I had never noticed or suspected their presence. The
Philadelphian was as reticent about his books and his pleasure in them
as about everything else, with the result that he got the credit for
neither, even at home. This had probably something to do with the fact
that though, as far back as I can remember, I had had a fancy for books
and for reading, I grew up with the idea that for literature, as for
beauty, the Atlantic had to be crossed, that it was not in the nature of
things for Philadelphia to have had a literary past, to claim a literary
present, or to hope for a literary future. But as I had discovered my
mistake about the beauty during those walks with J., so in my modest
stall in the literary shop, I learned how far out I had been about the
literature. It was the same story over again. I had only to get
interested, and there was everything in the world to interest me.
II
There was the past, for Philadelphia had had a literary past, and not at
all an empty past, but one full of the romance of effort and pride of
achievement. Because Philadelphians did not begin to write the minute
they landed on the banks of the Delaware, some wise people argue that
Friends were then, as now, unliterary. But what of William Penn, whose
writings have become classics? What of Thomas Elwood, the friend of
Milton? What of George Fox who, if unlettered, was a born writer no less
than Bunyan? Friends did not write and publish books right off in
Philadelphia for the same excellent reason that other Colonists did not
in other Colonial towns. Living was an absorbing business that left them
no time for writing, and printing presses and publishers' offices and
book stores did not strike them as immediate necessities in the
wilderness. It was not out of consideration that the early Philadelphia
Friends bequeathed nothing to the now sadly overladen shelves of the
British Museum and the Library of Congress.
When leisure came Philadelphians were readier to devote it to science.
According to Mr. Sydney Fisher, Pennsylvania has done more for science
than any other State: a subject upon which my profound ignorance bids me
be silent. But science did not keep them altogether from letters. No
people ever had a greater itch for writing. Look at the length of their
correspondence, the minuteness of their diaries. And they broke into
poetry on the slightest provocation. Authorities say that no real poem
appeared in America before 1800, but the blame lies not alone with
Philadelphia. It did what it could. Boston may boast of Anne Bradstreet
who was rhyming before most New Englanders had time for reading, but so
could Philadelphia brag of Deborah Logan--if Philadelphia ever bragged
of anything Philadelphian--and I am willing to believe there is no great
difference between the two poetesses without labouring through their
verses to prove myself wrong. And the Philadelphian was as prolific as
any other Colonial in horrible doggerel to his mistress's hoops and
bows, to her tears and canary birds. And as far as I know, only a
Philadelphian among Colonial poets is immortalized in the Dunciad,
though possibly Ralph, Franklin's friend to whom the honour fell, would
rather have been forgotten than remembered solely because his howls to
Cynthia made night hideous for Pope. And where else did the young men so
soon form themselves into little groups to discourse seriously upon
literature and kindred matters, as they walked sedately in the woods
along the Schuylkill? Where else was there so soon a society--a
junto--devoted to learning?
In innumerable ways I could see, once I could see anything, how
Philadelphia was preparing itself all along for literary pursuits and
accomplishment. Let me brag a little, if Philadelphia won't. Wasn't it
in Germantown that the first paper mill of the Colonies was set up?
Wasn't it there that the New Testament was printed in German--and went
into seven editions--before any other Colony had the enterprise to print
it in English, so that Saur's Testament is now a treasure for the
collector? Isn't it maintained by some authorities, if others dispute
it, that the first Bible in English was published in Philadelphia by
Robert Aitken, at "Pope's Head above the Coffee House, in Market
Street"? And Philadelphia issued the first American daily paper, the
most important of the first American reviews, the most memorable Almanac
of Colonial days--can any other compete with Poor Richard's? And
Philadelphia opened the first Circulating Library--the Philadelphia
Library is no benevolent upstart of to-day. And Philadelphia publishers
were for years the most go-ahead and responsible--who did not know the
names of Cary, Lea, Blanchard, Griggs, Lippincott, knew nothing of the
publishing trade. And Philadelphia book stores, with Lippincott's
leading, were the best patronized. And Philadelphia had the monopoly of
the English book trade, with Thomas Wardle to direct it. And
Philadelphia held its own views on copyright and stuck to them in the
face of opposition for years--whether right or wrong does not matter,
the thing is that it cared enough to have views. There is a record for
you! Why the literary man had only to appear, and Philadelphia was all
swept and garnished for his comfort and convenience.
[Illustration: MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN]
And the literary man did appear, with amazing promptness under the
circumstances. When the demand was for political writers, Philadelphia
supplied Franklin, Dickinson, and a whole host of others, until it is
all the Historical Society of Pennsylvania can do to cope with their
pamphlets. When the demand was for native fiction, Philadelphia produced
the first American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, and if
Philadelphians do not read him in our day, Shelley did in his, which
ought to be as much fame as any pioneer could ask for. When the need was
for an American Cookery Book, Philadelphia presented Miss Leslie to the
public who received her with such appreciation that, in the First
Edition, she is harder to find than Mrs. Glasse. When, with the years,
the past rose in value, Philadelphia gave to America an antiquary, and
John Watson, with his Annals, set a fashion in Philadelphia that had to
wait a good half century for followers. And when the writer was
multiplied all over the country and the reader with him, Philadelphia
provided the periodical, the annual, the parlour-table book, that the
one wrote for and the other subscribed to--an endless succession of
them: _The Casket_, _The Gift_, _The Souvenir_, which I have no desire
to disturb on their obscure shelves; the _Philadelphia Saturday Museum_,
and _Burton's Gentleman's Magazine_, to me the emptiest of empty names;
_Sartain's Union Magazine_, which I might as well be honest and say I
have never seen; _Graham's_, in its prime, unrivalled, unapproached;
_Godey's Lady's Book_, offering its pages alike to the newest verse and
the latest mode, the popular magazine that every American saw at his
dentist's or his doctor's, edited by Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, for a
woman, then as always, could get where she chose, if she had the mind
to, without the help of arson and suicide; _Peterson's_, which I recall
only in its title; _Lippincott's_, in my time the literary test or
standard in Philadelphia and scrupulously taken in by the Philadelphia
householder. I can see it still, lying soberly on the centre table in
the back parlour of the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, never defaced
or thumbed, I fancy seldom opened, but like everything in the house,
like my Grandfather himself, a type, a symbol of Philadelphia
respectability. It was as much an obligation for the respectable
Philadelphia citizen to subscribe to _Lippincott's_ as to belong to the
Historical Society, to be a member of the Philadelphia Library, to buy
books for Christmas presents at Lippincott's or Porter and Coates'. The
Philadelphian, who had no particular use for a book as a book or, if he
had, kept the fact to himself, was content to parade it as an ornament,
and no parlour was without its assortment of pretty and expensive
parlour-table books, received as Christmas presents, and as purely
ornamental as the pictures on the wall and the vases on the mantelpiece.
I know one Philadelphian who carried this decorative use of books still
further and nailed them to the ceiling to explain that the room they
decorated was a library, which nobody would have suspected for a moment,
as they were the only volumes in it.
For the man who had a living to make out of literature, Philadelphia was
a good place, not to come away from, but to go to, and a number of
American men of letters did go, though I need hardly add Philadelphia
made as little of the fact as possible. In Philadelphia Washington
Irving, sometimes called America's first literary man, published his
books, but truth compels me to admit that he fared better when he handed
them over to Putnam in New York; though of late years, the Lippincotts
have done much to atone for the old failure by their successful issues
of _The Alhambra_ and _The Traveller_. To Philadelphia magazines, N. P.
Willis, and there was no more popular American writer, pledged himself
for months ahead. To Philadelphia, Lowell came from Boston to get work.
Poe deserted Richmond and the South for Philadelphia, where he
contributed to Philadelphia magazines, edited them, planned new ones,
while Philadelphia waited until he was well out of the world to know
that he ever had lived there. Altogether, when I came upon the scene,
Philadelphia had had a highly creditable literary past, and was having a
highly creditable literary present, and, in pursuance of its invariable
policy, was making no fuss about it.
III
As I look back, the three most conspicuous figures of this literary
present were Charles Godfrey Leland, George Boker and Walt Whitman. All
three were past middle age, they had done most of their important work,
they had gained an international reputation. But that of course made no
difference to Philadelphia. I doubt if it had heard of George Boker as a
man of letters, though it knew him politically and also socially, as he
had not lost his interest in society and the Philadelphia Club. My
Uncle, having no use for society in Philadelphia and saying so with his
accustomed vigour, and not having busied himself with politics for many
years, was ignored unreservedly. Walt Whitman, who probably would not
have been considered eligible for the Assembly and the Dancing Class
had he condescended to know of their existence, did not exist socially,
and it is a question if he would have collected round him his ardent
worshippers from Philadelphia had he not had the advantage of having
been born somewhere else. If I am not mistaken, this worship had not
begun in my time, when he was more apt to receive a visitor from London
or Boston than from Philadelphia.
[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING--INTERIOR]
The fact that it was my good fortune to know these three men contributed
considerably to my new and pleasant feeling of self-importance. When I
wrote the life of my Uncle a few years ago, I had much to say of him and
my relations with him at this period, and I do not want to repeat
myself. But I can no more leave him out of my recollections of literary
Philadelphia than out of my personal reminiscences. When he entered so
intimately into my life he was nearer sixty than fifty, but he had lost
nothing of his vigour nor of his physical beauty--tall, large,
long-bearded, a fine profile, the eyes of the seer. He was fastidious in
dress, with a leaning to light greys and browns, and a weakness for
canes which he preferred thin and elegant. I remember his favourite was
black and had an altogether unfashionable silver, ruby-eyed dragon for
handle. On occasions to which it was appropriate, he wore a silk hat; on
others, more informal, he exchanged it for a large soft felt--a modified
cowboy hat--which suited him better, though he would not have forgiven
me had I had the courage to say so to his face, his respect for the
conventions, always great, having been intensified during his long
residence in England. It seems superfluous to add that he could not pass
unnoticed in Philadelphia streets, which did not run to cowboy hats or
dragon-handled canes or any deviations from the approved Philadelphia
dress. Nor did his fancy for peering into shop windows make him less
conspicuous, and as his daily walk was hardly complete if it did not
lead to his buying something in the shop, were it only a five-cent bit
of modern blue-and-white Japanese china, this meant that before his
purchase was handed over to me, as it usually was, his pleasure being
not in the possession but in the buying, he had parcels to carry, a
shocking breach of good manners in Philadelphia. In his company
therefore I became a conspicuous figure myself, and I was often his
companion in the streets; but to this I had no objection, having been
inconspicuous far too long for my taste.
[Illustration: FRONT AND CALLOWHILL]
He had written his _Breitmann Ballads_ years before when the verse of no
other American of note--unless it was Longfellow's and Whittier's and
Lowell's in the _Biglow Papers_--had had so wide a circulation. He had
also published one or two of his Gypsy books, never surpassed except by
Borrow. And he was engaged in endless new tasks--more Gypsy papers, Art
in the Schools, Indian Legends, Comic Ballads, Essays on Education, and
I did not mind what since my excitement was in being admitted for the
first time into the companionship of a man who devoted himself to
writing, to whom writing was business, who sat down at his desk after
breakfast and wrote as my Father after breakfast went down to his office
and bought and sold stocks, who never stopped except for his daily walk,
who got back to work if there was a free hour before dinner and who,
after dinner, read until he went to bed. Moreover, he had brought with
him the aroma, as it were, of the literary life in London. He had met
many of the people who, because they had written books, were my heroes.
Here would have been literature enough to transfigure Philadelphia had I
known no other writers.
IV
But, through him, I did know others. First of all, George Boker with
whom, however, I could not pretend to friendship or more than the barest
acquaintance. In the streets he was as noticeable a figure as my Uncle,
though given neither to cowboy hats and dragon-handled canes nor to
peering into shop windows and carrying parcels. Like my Uncle, he was
taller than the average man, and handsomer, his white hair and white
military moustache giving him a more distinguished air, I fancy, in his
old age than was his in his youth. His smile was of the kindliest, the
characteristic I remember best. He had returned from his appointments as
Minister to Russia and Turkey and had given up active political and
diplomatic life. He had written most of his poems, if not all,
including the _Francesca da Rimini_ which Lawrence Barrett was shortly
afterwards to put on the stage, and he impressed me as a man who had had
his fill of life and work and adventure and was content to settle down
to the comforts of Philadelphia. He and my Uncle, who had been friends
from boyhood or babyhood, spent every Sunday afternoon together. My
Uncle had large spacious rooms on the ground floor of a house in South
Broad Street where the Philadelphia Art Club now is, and there George
Boker came Sunday after Sunday and there, if I dropped in, I saw him. I
had the discretion never to stay long, for I realized that their
intimate free talk was valued too much by both for them to care to have
it interrupted. I can remember nothing he ever said--I have an idea he
was a man who did not talk a great deal, while my Uncle did; my memory
is of his kindly smile and my sense that here was one of the literary
friendships I had read of in books. So, I thought, might Dr. Johnson and
Goldsmith have met and talked, or Lamb and Coleridge, and Broad Street
seemed tinged with the romance that I took for granted coloured the
Temple in London and Gough Square.
V
Through my Uncle I also met Walt Whitman, and he impressed me still more
with the romance of literature. He was so unexpected in Philadelphia,
for which I claim him in his last years, Camden being little more than a
suburb, whatever Camden itself may think. I could almost have imagined
that it was for the humour of the thing he came to settle where his very
appearance was an offence to the proprieties. George Boker was
scrupulously correct. My Uncle's hat and dragon-handled cane only seemed
to emphasize his inborn Philadelphia shrinking from eccentricity. But
Walt Whitman, from top to toe, proclaimed the man who did not bother to
think of the conventions, much less respect them. You saw it in his long
white hair and long white beard, in his loose light grey clothes, in the
soft white shirt unlaundered and open at the neck, in the tall, formless
grey hat like no hat ever worn in Philadelphia. To have been stopped by
him on Chestnut Street--a street he loved--would have filled me with
confusion and shame in the days before literature had become my shop.
But once literature blocked my horizon, to be stopped by him lifted me
up to the seventh heaven. If people turned to look, and Philadelphians
never grew quite accustomed to his presence, my pleasure was the
greater. I took it for a visible sign that I was known, recognized, and
accepted in the literary world. And what a triumph in streets where, of
old, life had appalled me by its emptiness of incident!
In one way or another I saw a good deal of Walt Whitman, but most
frequently by the chance which increased the picturesqueness of the
meeting. I called on him in the Camden house described many times by
many people: in my memory, a little house, the room where I was received
simple and bare, the one ornament as unexpected there as Walt Whitman
himself in Philadelphia, for it was an old portrait, dark and dingy, of
an ancestor; and I wondered if an ancestor so ancient as to grow dark
and dingy in a frame did not make it easier to play the democrat and
call every man comrade--or _Camerado_, I should say, as Walt Whitman
said, with his curious fondness for foreign words and sounds. But though
I saw him at home, he is more associated in my memory with the
ferry-boat for Camden when my Uncle and I were on our way to the Gypsy's
camping place near the reservoir; and with the corner of Front and
Market and the bootblack's big chair by the Italian's candy and fruit
stand where he loved to sit, and where I loved to see him, though,
Philadelphian at heart, I trembled for his audacity; and with the Market
Street horse-car, where he was already settled in his corner before it
started and where the driver and the conductor, passing through, nodded
to him and called him "Walt," and where he was as happy as the modern
poet in his sixty-horse-power car. He was happiest when sitting out in
front with the driver, and I have rarely been as proud as the afternoon
he gave up that privileged seat to stay with my Uncle and myself inside.
His greeting was always charming. He would take a hand of each of us,
hold the two in his for a minute or so beaming upon us, never saying
very much. I remember his leading us once, with our hands still in his,
from the fruit-stand to the tobacconist's opposite to point out to my
Uncle the wooden figure of an Indian at the door, for which he professed
a great admiration as an example of the art of the people before they
were trained in the Minor Arts.
[Illustration: THE ELEVATED AT MARKET STREET WHARF]
These chance meetings were always the best, and he told us that he
thought them so, that he loved his accidental meetings with
friends--there were many he prized among his most valued reminiscences.
And I remember his story of Longfellow having gone over to Camden
purposely to call on him, and not finding him at home, and their running
into each other on the ferry-boat to Market Street, and Longfellow
saying that he had come from the house deeply disappointed, regretting
the long quiet talk he had hoped for, but deciding that perhaps the
strange chance of the meeting on the water was better. My Uncle, had he
been hurrying to catch a train, would still have managed to talk
philosophy and art education. But I remember Walt Whitman also saying
that the ferry and the corner of Market Street and the Market Street car
were hardly places for abstract discussion, though the few things said
there were the less easily forgotten for being snatched joyfully by the
way.
It was one day in the Market Street car that he and my Uncle had the
talk which left with me the profoundest impression. As a rule I was too
engrossed in thinking what a great person I was, when in such company,
to shine as a reporter. But on this occasion the subject was the School
of Industrial Arts in which I was giving my Uncle the benefit of my
incompetent assistance. He asked Walt Whitman to come and see it,
telling him a little of its aims and methods. Whitman refused, amiably
but positively. I cannot recall his exact words, but I gathered from
them that he had no sympathy with schemes savouring of benevolence or
reform, that he believed in leaving people to work out their own
salvation, and this, coming as it did after I had seen for myself the
terms he was on with the driver and conductor, expressed more eloquently
than his verse his definition of democracy. I may be mistaken, but I
thought then and have ever since that his belief in the people carried
him to the point of thinking they knew better than the philanthropist
what they needed and did not need. My Uncle was not of accord with him
and I, who am neither democrat nor philanthropist, would not pretend to
decide between them. My Uncle did not like Walt Whitman's attitude and
refusal, convinced as he was of the good to the people that was to come
of the reform he was initiating, though he was constitutionally
incapable of meeting the people he was reforming on equal terms. The
twinkle in Walt Whitman's eye when he refused gave me the clue to the
large redeeming humour with which he looked upon a foolish world, seeing
each individual in the place appointed, right in it, fitting into it,
unfit for any other he did not make for himself of his own desire and
courage--the humour without which the human tragedy would not be
bearable.
I wish I could have had more talk with Whitman, I wish I had been older
or more experienced, that I might have got nearer to him--or so I felt
in those old days. I have now an idea that his silence was more
effective than his speech, that if he had said more to any of his
devoted following he might have been less of a prophet. But his tranquil
presence was in itself sufficient to open a new outlook, and it
reconciled me to the scheme of the universe for good or for ill. His
personality impressed me far more than his poems. It seemed to me to
explain them, to interpret them, as nothing else could--his few words of
greeting worth pages of the critic's eloquent analysis.