It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was
clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It
attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be
seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,
and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was
to be in the company of Fitz James O’Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,
Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in
verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true
that, as Henry Giles said of it, “Man cannot live by snapping-turtle
alone,” the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then;
I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like
snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my
taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is
that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the
same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly
in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found
there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against
respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second
country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by
the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with
“Oh, a couple of shysters!” and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they
could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said
that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope
again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken
very seriously by me.
In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other
newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so
distinctively Bohemian in these ‘anime prave’, these souls so baleful by
their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could
well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be
very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That
very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I
was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away.
It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes
came to Pfaff’s: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name
or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose
fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the
history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her
dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms
of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New
York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow
was cast forward upon Pfaff’s, whose name often figured in the verse and
the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the ‘Saturday Press’. I felt
that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go
home without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not
share the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my
part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they
had very good at Pfaff’s, and to listening to the whirling words of my
commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous
space under the pavement. There were writers for the ‘Saturday Press’ and
for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the
artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk
remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk
as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went but
slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the
others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just
recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the
wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was
presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy of
their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of
the supper with an appetite that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for
worse things till eleven o’clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a
literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me. I do not say
that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only
report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and
I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When I came the
next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his
contributors had no longer a common centre. The best of the young
fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters
which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable
one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of
the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.
It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and
still waits its second palingenesis.
The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had
inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic
power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more
apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he
was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that
he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle
alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a
vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call
generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday
Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side
of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that
his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen
some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark
concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and
the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No
doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he
would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact
that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was
often at Pfaff’s with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief
fact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way
out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head
of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow
stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his
chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give
it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair
upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked
most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly
gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed
up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubt
if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young
poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name
printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meet
him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he
was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I saw
him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that
city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking
friends who gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense of
a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will
not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a
passage from a private letter of Emerson’s, though I believe he would not
have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in
another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the
dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what
denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the
adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make sure only
of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man. The apostle of the
rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp,
translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular
quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.
As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in
effect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very “imperial
anarch” in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and
what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called
his verse. I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better;
there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial,
such as I felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me
not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one’s emotions; yet I would
not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great
pleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I
cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he
made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does,
and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or
dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly,
fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me
and spoke to me.