_Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days_
Some Avenue Clubs in the Early Days--The Invention of the Club--Cato or
Dr. Johnson?--The Judgment of Thackeray--The Union--The Prolific
Diedrich Knickerbocker--Omens of 1836--The Century--Its Descent from the
Sketch and the Column--Old-Time Austerity--Leaders of the Talk--The
Lotos--The Union League--The Manhattan--The First of the College
Clubs--The Columbia Yacht--The New York Athletic--Rise and Fall of the
Traveller's--The Arcadian.
"Presuming that my dear Bobby would scarcely consider himself to be an
accomplished man about town until he had obtained an entrance into a
respectable club, I am happy to inform you that you are this day elected
a member of the 'Polyanthus,' having been proposed by my friend, Lord
Viscount Colchicum, and seconded by your affectionate uncle. I have
settled with Mr. Stiff, the worthy secretary, the preliminary pecuniary
arrangements regarding the entrance fee and the first annual
subscription--the ensuing payments I shall leave to my worthy nephew.
You were elected, sir, with but two black-balls; and every other man who
was put up for ballot had four, with the exception of Tom Harico, who
had more black balls than white. Do not, however, be puffed up by this
victory, and fancy yourself more popular than other men. Indeed, I don't
mind telling you (but of course I do not wish it to go any farther) that
Captain Slyboots and I, having suspicions of the meeting, popped a
couple of adverse balls into the other candidates' boxes; so that, at
least, you should, in case of mishap, not be unaccompanied in
ill-fortune."--Thackeray's "Mr. Brown the Elder takes Mr. Brown the
Younger to a Club."
Very likely there are a few thousand New Yorkers, who like the present
writer, not having considered the subject very deeply, have held to the
vague idea that the club was an invention of a certain Dr. Samuel
Johnson. Also that it came about in some such way as this. The Doctor
had grown weary of bullying the patient Boswell, and browbeating the
acquaintance met by chance in Fleet Street or the Strand did not
entirely satisfy him. So one day, storming out of the Cheshire Cheese,
after roundly abusing the larkpie of which he had consumed an enormous
quantity, he founded the first club, with the object of gathering
together a number of his fellow-mortals in one place, and upon them
pouring out the vials of his pompous and splenetic wrath.
One day, however, the "De Senectute" that had been long forgotten was
recalled by a passage in Mr. James W. Alexander's "History of the
University Club of New York." There it was pointed out, that as far back
as 200 B.C., Cicero represented Cato as saying: "To begin with, I have
always remained a member of a 'Club.' Clubs, as you know, were
established in my _quaestorship_ on the reception of the Magna Mater
from Ida. So _I used to dine at their feast_ with members of my club--on
the whole with moderation." But, except as a point of historical
interest, whether stern Cato or voluble Johnson was the inventor does
not matter greatly to the New York club member who is airing his weekly
grievance by drawing up a petition, or writing a scorching letter a day
to the House Committee.
If you will listen to the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are
likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter
of the last half-century at most. He is rather inclined to fleer at any
pretension to American club life of earlier date. In one sense he is
right. The club as we know it now is essentially a British institution
modelled on British lines. More and more is the British idea being
carried to the extreme, until we are associating club life with the vast
club-house of spacious lounges and marble swimming pools, and a cuisine
rivalling that of one of the great new hotels. The Fifth Avenue club of
half a century ago had little magnificence as we now understand the
word. It was a simpler and more limited hospitality that was offered to
the friend or the distinguished stranger from overseas. Yet that
hospitality must have had a rare flavour and atmosphere. There must have
been something about it that went far to make up for mere material
deficiencies, if we are to credit the verdicts of those who were in a
position to compare American club life with club life in England and on
the Continent. Thackeray was as fine a judge of the matter as any man
who ever strutted through St. James's Park and scowled back at the
Barnes Newcomeses and Captain Heavysideses in the club windows along
Pall Mall, and there was what he said and wrote about the Century.
It was in the middle of the sixth decade of the last century that the
clubs began to find their way into Fifth Avenue. One of the first was
the Union Club. Writing of that organization in 1906, M. Charles Huard,
in "New York comme je l'ai vu," volunteered the puzzling information
that it was "_fondé en 1836 par les descendants de Knickerbocker, le
plus vieux donc des grand clubs de New York_." If the Frenchman was to
be taken literally he apparently regarded the offspring of Washington
Irving's creation as an exceedingly prolific race. The Union, in 1855,
moved from Broadway near Fourth Street into a house on the northwest
corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. That home, which the
Union occupied until fifteen or twenty years ago, was described as "a
superb structure which cost three hundred thousand dollars." It was the
first building erected in the city solely for club purposes. Almost to
the day of its demolition, although the neighbourhood about it was
changing rapidly, the old house wore an aspect of dignity. To the corner
the habitués of other years seldom come today. Instead, at the noon
hour, the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces and there is excited babble
in an alien tongue. The cloak and suit firm of Potash and Perlmutter is
as much at home here now as it was in its East Broadway--or was it
Division Street?--loft when the present century was coming into being.
There is an old volume, bearing the date 1871, called "The Clubs of New
York." The author was a Francis Gerry Fairfield, and the chapters that
make up the book were originally contributed to the columns of the "Home
Journal." There is a perceptible smile on Mr. Fairfield's face as he
writes of the town of thirty years before. To the present generation
that smile is irresistibly funny. He recalls the year 1836, when the
Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities. "Tradition
preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold
summer. Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of
fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora
hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens. People predicted
strange things; but the strange things did not happen. The hyena of
pestilence, the wolf of want, and the red death of war were conjured,
but emerged not, nevertheless, from the vasty deep supposed by
Shakespeare to be inhabited by their spirits." But Mr. Fairfield
disclaims any suggestion that "the gestation of the Union Club, then in
progress, had any material influence in the evolution of these omens, or
that the weather was affected by the parturition of the great social
event." With the metropolitan sophistication of 1871 he pats 1836 on the
head as a year when New York was a bit of a village, of rather more than
three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Houston, then North
Street, Bleecker, and Bond Streets were particularly uptown, and
thoroughfares of fashion and aristocracy. The old régime was still in
its glory; and real counts, in plaid pantaloons, were sensational
occurrences to be petted, set up as lions, and finally entrapped into
matrimony, just by way of improving the blood of the first families. He
tells of "the little white-faced hotel now termed the Tremont" as having
been kept by a real count, expatriated for political reasons, but
afterwards restored to titles and estates. There are those of the Year
of Grace 1918 who recall the "little white-faced Tremont." But its soul
has long since passed to t'other side of Styx.
From the day when the Union first opened its doors at No. 1 Bond
Street, it was one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of New York
clubs. The names of its organizers are names associated with the history
of the city. Ogden Hoffman, whom Mr. Fairfield describes as "a
bald-headed, dreamy-eyed man, in his day the star of the New York Bar,
both for fervid eloquence and profound learning"; Philip Hone, he of the
immortal "Diary"; Thomas P. Oakley, Samuel Jones, Beverly Robinson, W.B.
Lewrence, Charles King, E.T. Throop, and J. Depeyster Ogden. These were
some of the men whose names were appended to the provisional
constitution drawn up on June 30, 1836. C. Fenno Hoffman, "next to
Morris the sweetest song-writer America has produced," later became a
member of the association, which from its inception, was the
representative organization of the old families. Livingstons, Clasons,
Dunhams, Griswolds, Van Cortlandts, Paines, Centers, Vandervoorts,
Stuyvesants, Van Renssalaers, Irelands, Suydams, and other names of
Knickerbocker fame, filled its list of membership with a sort of
aristocratic monotony of that Knickerbockerism, which has since, to use
the words of Mr. Fairfield again, "in solemn and silent Second Avenue
(the Faubourg St. Germain of the city), earned the epithet of the
Bourbons of New York." Solemn and silent Second Avenue is solemn and
silent no more. Long since gone are the social glories of that
thoroughfare that once boldly stepped forward to challenge the supremacy
of the street that is the subject of this book. "Sic transit!" or
something of the kind would have been the probable comment of Mr.
Fairfield, for he, in common with others of his age, delighted in
flinging in a scrap of Latin or French on every possible occasion. They
were industrious investigators of the thesaurus in those days.
The first home of the Union, at No. 1 Bond Street, was in reality the
house of its secretary, John H.L. McCrackan. In 1837 a building on
Broadway near Leonard Street was secured, and the club moved into it,
there to remain for three years. Then, for seven years, it was in a
house on the other side of Broadway, and in 1847, obeying the prevalent
impulse up-townward, it shifted its quarters to the spot from which it
was later to remove to the Twenty-first Street home. That structure at
Broadway and Fourth Street was the property of the Stuyvesant family,
and after the departure of the men of the Union, was occupied by the
confectioner Maillard as a hotel and restaurant. In 1852 the question of
a permanent building began to be discussed, and in 1854 the land at the
Twenty-first Street corner was secured and the work of erecting the
structure that in its day was the most imposing of all that lined Fifth
Avenue between Waverly Place and the Broadway junction begun. The club
moved into the new quarters in May, 1855, at a time when its membership
numbered approximately five hundred. In writing of the Union as it was
in 1871 Mr. Fairfield made the comment that literature was hardly
represented at all, and journalism only by Manton Marble of the "World."
As had been the case of Thackeray and the Athenæum of London, Mr.
Marble, at the time of his first candidacy, had been blackballed. The
objection, also as in the case of Thackeray, was ascribed not to the
personality of the man, but to his profession. But Mr. Marble was
eventually admitted through the efforts of a member of the Board of
Directors, who declared boldly that not a new member should be elected
until the blackballs against the journalist had been withdrawn. Robert
J. Dillon, landscape gardener, and J.H. Lazarus, portrait painter, were
almost the sole art representatives, and in 1871 J. Lester Wallack was
the only actor on the club list. Wallack's great contemporary of the
stage, Edwin Booth, was a member of the Century and of the Lotos. The
law of the day was represented by such men as Mayor Hall, until he
resigned as a result of the criticism of fellow-members growing out of
the exposures of the Tammany frauds in the summer and autumn of 1871,
W.M. Evarts, Judge Garvin, Judge Gunning S. Bedford, Eli P. Norton, and
John E. Burrill. Of men prominent in political and municipal life were
August Belmont, Samuel J. Tilden, Peter B. Sweeny, former Mayor George
Opdyke, Isaac Bell, and Andrew H. Green, later to become the "Father of
Greater New York." Among the dominant financial figures, in addition to
August Belmont, were A.T. Stewart, John J. Cisco, Henry Clews, and John
Jacob Astor. From the Army were U.S. Grant, then the nation's President,
John H. Coster, George W. Cullom, Samuel W. Crawford, Howard Stockton,
Rufus Ingalls, J.L. Rathbone, I.U.D. Reeve, and Stewart Van Vliet. From
the Navy, James B. Breese, James Alden, Edward C. Gratton, Thomas M.
Potter, Henry O. Mayo, James Glynn, W.C. Leroy, L.M. Powell, and John H.
Wright.
By virtue of its descent from the Sketch and the Column, the Century
Association might lay claim to seniority among the clubs of Fifth
Avenue. The Sketch Club was the result of the union of the literary and
artistic elements of New York, which, in 1829, were producing an annual
called "The Talisman." Among the writers in the Sketch were Bryant,
Verplanck, and Sands, and later Washington Irving and J.K. Paulding
joined it. There was no regular home, the club meeting at the houses of
members in turn. For six months, during 1830, it did not exist, having
been dissolved in May of that year, and reorganized in December.
Thereafter, for a few years, it met in the Council Room of the National
Academy of Design, and then returned to the custom of meeting at the
homes of the members. That organization was the embryo Century. The
Sketch Club had first taken form in 1829. Four years before that a
society called the Column had been established by graduates of Columbia
College. That organization, too, had a share in the moulding of the new
club.
The meeting that brought the Century into being was held the evening of
January 13, 1847, in the rotunda of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts in
the City Hall Park. The call for the meeting had been sent out a few
weeks before, the men composing the signing committee being John G.
Chapman, A.B. Burand, C.C. Ingham, A.M. Cozzens, F.W. Edmonds, and H.T.
Tuckerman. The original Centurions were forty-two in number, of whom
twenty-five came from the Sketch, and six from the Column. There were
ten artists, ten merchants, four authors, three bankers, three
physicians, two clergymen, two lawyers, one editor, one diplomat, and
three men of leisure. All were more or less representative men of the
city, which had grown from the town of three hundred and fifty thousand
of the day of the Union's formation, to a young metropolis of six
hundred thousand. Gulian C. Verplanck was the club's first president,
and back in his day began the Century's peculiar Twelfth Night Festival,
which has been continued ever since. Twelfth Night with the Centurions
is distinctive in that it is not an annual event nor the event of any
given year. The very uncertainty of the ceremonial has added zest to the
revel, which usually ends with an old-fashioned Virginia Reel. A few
years ago the reel was led by Theodore Roosevelt and the late Joseph H.
Choate.
The first home of the Century, which it occupied for two years, was in
rooms at 495 Broadway--between Broome and Spring Streets. During this
period a journal called the "Century" was started, and edited by F.S.
Cozzens and John H. Gourley. Then, in 1848, the club moved to 435 Broome
Street; thence, in 1850, to 575 Broadway; in 1852, to Clinton Place,
where Thackeray learned to love it, and where, by virtue of proximity,
it first laid claim to be regarded as a Fifth Avenue club.
[Illustration: WHERE THE AVENUE AND THIRTY-FOURTH STREET CROSS STANDS
THE BUILDING POPULARLY KNOWN AS THE KNICKERBOCKER TRUST COMPANY. HERE,
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY, "SARSAPARILLA" TOWNSEND BUILT IN
BROWN-STONE, AND A.T. STEWART LATER BUILT IN WHITE MARBLE]
In Clinton Place the Century stayed until it went to its Fifteenth
Street house, where it was so long to remain. Gulian Verplanck's
presidency lasted for many years. At first it was a happy tenure of
office. But the Civil War came, bringing with it grave dissensions.
Verplanck may be said to have invited the divisions that crept into
the club, and which led to his overwhelming defeat in the election of
1864. He was succeeded by the historian Bancroft, who held office until
1868, when he resigned because of his departure for Prussia as the
United States Minister to Berlin.
From the very day when it took form the Century seems to have had an
atmosphere--almost a history. In the years long before the more modern
clubs of a literary flavour were dreamed of, the Century was bringing
together the leading men-of-letters and of art of New York. Yet somehow
the Century of early times impresses newer generations as having been
tremendously portentous and dignified. There was never any suggestion of
Bohemia. After the establishment of the Century the gifted Poe was to
enjoy, or rather to endure, two more years of life. By no stretch of the
imagination can we think of his being in the club, even as the guest of
an evening. There was plenty of good-fellowship, no doubt, and good
cheer, but also the chill of a certain reserve. The talk seems, after
all the years, to have been essentially serious--men expressing
themselves not lightly, but judicially, and after long deliberation; Mr.
Bryant gravely conceding the right of Pope or Dryden or Watts, according
to the subject of discussion, to be ranked as a poet, or denying the
same, while members of lesser note sat about listening and nodding, but
preserving becoming reticence. There was almost a Bostonese austerity
about the great men of that early time and circle. They wore their
garments as Roman Senators wore their togas. It was not good form for
the stranger to break lightly into the talk of the Immortals. To have
done so would have been to provoke the amazement and censure that was
the lot of Mark Twain many years after, when, at a dinner in the Hub, he
sought to jest irreverently with the sacred names of Holmes, Emerson,
and Longfellow. Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident
genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"
at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid
intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than
Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so
persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer
been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe
come up for election, he might have been one of the first to drop a
black pill in the box, loudly acclaiming the genius, but deploring the
impossible and unclubable personality.
After the presidency of Bancroft came that of Bryant. He held the office
until his death in 1878, but as he was always averse to crowds, he was
seldom seen at the club except in official meetings. An enthusiastic
Centurion, writing of the club at the time of Bryant's death, when it
had been in existence thirty-one years, spoke of it as having drawn
together the choicest spirits of that generation of New York. "Without
formality or design, it had become an institute of mutual enlightenment
among men knowing the worth of one another's work, likened by Bellows,
more than half seriously, to the French Academy. A sure result of this
communion was absolute equality among those who shared it. No true
Centurion ever assumed anything, each standing in his real place. The
atmosphere killed pretension and stifled shams. The pedant or the
conceited person silently drifted away. How could it be otherwise, while
a famous painter was describing some scene, or a noted philosopher
illustrating some theory, or an acute statesman drawing some historical
parallel, than that the egotist should drop himself, and the proser
forget to prose?" The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the
Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained "the
rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country." Many times
has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with
New York. In some of the novels of Robert W. Chambers it appears as the
Pyramid. Twenty years ago Paul Leicester Ford brought it into "The
Story of an Untold Love," calling it The Philomathean. According to the
hero of that tale, the Philomathean was the one club where charlatanry
and dishonesty must fail, however it succeeded with the world, and where
the poorest man stood on a par with the wealthiest. The Centurion of all
times has had much to be proud of, and he has not been blind to his
blessings, nor ashamed to acquaint the world with his great good
fortune.
Although most of them began in side streets, and many of them have in
the later years migrated again to side streets, through the greater part
of their history the clubs here discussed belong essentially to the
"Avenue" from which they have drawn so much of their inspiration. It
does not matter that the present home of the Century is at 7 West
Forty-third Street, or that the Lotos for the past few years has been at
110 West Fifty-seventh Street. They remain, as they always have been,
Fifth Avenue clubs. Part of the history of the Lotos Club is written in
the chapter dealing with "Some Great Days on the Avenue." For the fame
of the organization as a giver of elaborate banquets to distinguished
guests has spread through the land. The Lotos dates back to the early
spring of 1870, when a group of young New York journalists met in the
office of the New York "Leader" to take the initiatory steps necessary
for the formation of a club. These men were De Witt Van Buren of the
"Leader," Andrew C. Wheeler of the "Daily World," George W. Hows of the
"Evening Express," F.A. Schwab of the "Daily Times," W.L. Alden of the
"Citizen," and J.H. Elliot of the "Home Journal." As the founders were
all connected with the literary, musical, art, or dramatic departments
of their papers, it was not surprising that the projected association
was to be modelled upon the Savage, Garrick, and Junior Garrick of
London. Earlier failure had shown that a strictly literary organization
was out of the question. A wider and more comprehensive membership was a
necessity. As set forth in Article I., Section 2 of the Lotos
Constitution, the primary object of the club was "to promote social
intercourse among journalists, literary men, artists, and members of the
theatrical profession."
From the first temporary quarters in the parlours of the Belvidere
House, then at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, the
club moved into a permanent home at No. 2 Irving Place, a building
adjoining the Academy of Music. In the autumn of 1870 the first
president, De Witt Van Buren, died, and was succeeded by A. Oakley Hall,
then the Mayor of New York, who assumed the office entirely in his
social capacity, as a journalist, dramatist, and patron of the arts. It
was he who suggested the famous "Lotos Saturday Nights." There is a
flavour of high Bohemia in the list of members of that period. Among the
artists were Beard, Reinhart, Burling, Lumley, Chapin, Bispham, and
Pickett; there were such pianists as Wehli, Mills, Hopkins, Colby, and
Bassford; singers like Randolfi, Laurence, Thomas, MacDonald, Perring,
Seguin, Matthison, and Davis; and actors like Edwin Booth, Lawrence
Barrett, Mark Smith, John Brougham, and George Clark.
Some one has said that every generation must express itself in a new
club. The decade from 1861-1870 expressed itself in several. To those
years of New York date the Columbia Yacht (1867), the Harvard, first of
the college clubs (1865), the Manhattan (1865), the New York Athletic
(1868), and the Union League (1863). The last named organization owes
its birth to the doubts and complications of the darkest hour of the War
of Secession. Unite to stand behind the President with our full
strength, was the slogan of the men who met in January, 1863, to form
the plans for the new association. At the beginning there was talk of
adopting the name "Loyal League." The first work of the club was the
organization of negro troops in New York City. Despite the opposition of
Governor Seymour, and the ridicule of the newspapers, who held up the
idea of the negro as a soldier as a huge joke, the Leaguers persisted in
their efforts, with the result that in December, 1863, the Twentieth
Regiment of U.S. coloured troops was enlisted, and within a few months,
two more regiments, known as the Twenty-sixth and the Thirty-first.
In those days the club-house faced Union Square, at the junction of
Seventeenth Street and Broadway. Early in 1868 the Union League moved to
a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the
building afterwards to be occupied in turn by the University Club and
the Manhattan Club. The structure had been erected by Mr. Jerome for the
use of the Jockey Club, but was leased to the Union League for a term of
ten years. Among the early honorary members of the Union League were
Abraham Lincoln, General U.S. Grant, General W.T. Sherman,
Lieutenant-General "Phil" Sheridan, Major-Generals Burnside, Wright, and
Hancock, Admiral David G. Porter, and Rear-Admiral Bailey. The active
membership of 1870 included such names as William Cullen Bryant, William
M. Evarts, Whitelaw Reid, Parke Godwin, Horace Greeley, Chester A.
Arthur, Thomas Nast, Joseph H. Choate, Eastman Johnson, George P.
Putnam, Daniel P. Appleton, Dr. Samuel Osgood, George Griswold, E.D.
Stanton.
To the name of the Union League is inevitably linked that of the
Manhattan Club, for, the Civil War once at an end, the latter became the
expression of the political aims and aspirations of the Democratic Party
as the former was of the Republican. The Manhattan had its origin in the
turmoil of the election of 1864, and the defeat of the Democratic
candidate, General McClellan. The first movers in its foundation were
Douglass Taylor, then secretary of the Tammany society, Street
Commissioner George W. McLean, S.L.M. Barlow of the "World," Judge
Hilton, the Hon. A. Schell, A.L. Robertson, and John T. Hoffman, later
Governor of New York State from 1869 till 1872. The earlier meetings
were held in the old Delmonico's, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and
Fifth Avenue, and then the Manhattan moved into its first real home at
No. 96 Fifth Avenue, just a block above the famous restaurant, where
many of the meetings continued to be held. John Van Buren was the first
president, with Augustus Schell first vice-president, A.L. Robertson
second vice-president, Manton Marble secretary, and W. Butler Duncan
treasurer.
In the winter of 1867-8 the club was enlivened by a bout of fisticuffs
that was a "celebrated case" of its day. There was then a strict club
rule forbidding the introduction of a guest. Manager Bateman, the
father of Miss Bateman the actress, saw fit to violate this law. A
member of the House Committee, perhaps overzealous in the idea of his
duties, carried his protest to the point of forbidding the servants of
the club to serve the unwelcome guest. Mr. Bateman's resentment of the
action took the form of a personal assault, which became the sensation
of the hour and the topic of the newspapers. "Evidently," remarked the
"Herald" (those were the days of the elder Bennett, who in his vast
experience in New York journalism had more than once felt the sting of a
horse-whip), "to be slapped is what some faces are made for!" But the
Governors did not see the matter in the light that the "Herald" did, and
the pugilistically inclined manager was summarily expelled, the board
refusing to settle the matter by accepting his resignation.
Another Fifth Avenue club that claimed 1865 as the year of its origin
was the Traveller's. For obvious reasons many of the clubs of the
seventh decade of the last century chose to be near the old Delmonico
restaurant, and the Traveller's was no exception, making its first home
on the opposite corner. The object of the association was to bring
together travellers of all nations, and to do proper honour to
distinguished who were visiting the United States. After two years at
the Fourteenth Street corner the Traveller's moved northward to a new
home at No. 222 Fifth Avenue, the George W. Burnham residence at
Eighteenth Street. Mr. Fairfield apparently did not regard the club with
entire favour, for in his book of 1873 he speaks of the club-house as
being "a leading resort for America-examining Englishmen, and the
headquarters of an English coterie of considerable social importance."
"_O tempora! O mores_!" he exclaims. There were palmy days in the past,
when the receptions were social reunions of _éclat_. But "they have made
an end of all that, having settled into a body as quiet as Mr. Mantilini
expected to be after taking a bath in the Thames." But, granting Mr.
Fairfield's claim that the literary quality of the Traveller's had
deteriorated, there still remained the list of Honorary Members carrying
a certain prestige. Professor Louis Agassiz headed the list; and others
were Paul Du Chaillu, the African explorer whose adventures were for a
long time regarded as clever romance; the Hon. Anson Burlingame, who had
been an envoy from the Chinese Emperor; Sir Samuel Baker, of London;
Rev. J.C. Fletcher, Professor Raphael Pumpelly, the Right Rev. Bishop
Southgate, the Hon. J. Ross Browne, and M. Michel Chevalier, of the
French Senate.
"Lotos and Arcadian: both stuff for dreams. The one excogitated in
spring-time, when Nature was taking her break-of-day drowse, previous to
getting up and going about business; the other suggestive of Nature
indulging in a half-light reverie in a sort of crimson and scarlet
dressing-gown, previous to putting on her night-cap and going to bed,
after a hard summer's work. The one reminding of a land where it is
always afternoon of a day in the last of June, when one can almost hear
the music of corn-growing, the mystic throes of buds toiling into
blossom; the other of a land where it is always about eight o'clock in
the morning with the dew still on the meadow-grass, and the world
rubbing its eyes and brushing away cobwebs of dream, before buckling
down to the struggle. The one somewhat reminiscent of Egypt and
crocodiles, lisping palms and Arabs, of long and lotos-eating days of
_keff_, in which even the lazy hours loiter in shady nooks, and the wind
holds its breath in sympathy with the general doziness, and seems to be
listening to something; the other of vivid Greek life, with its
shepherds:
"'Piping on hollow reeds to their pent sheep,
Calm be thy Lyra's sleep,'
of Pindar, of Orphic song, of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing
into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic,
the other beautiful, both symbolical."
With this rhapsody Mr. Fairfield introduced the Arcadian Club of New
York, an organization that for a time threatened to rival the Lotos in
the latter's particular field. Writing men snatched up into the clouds
in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for
illustrations with which to garnish descriptions of the most commonplace
events of everyday life. Here is another gem from Mr. Fairfield's book,
also in his chapter about the Arcadian Club.
"Gentlemen of society, bankers, stylish young men with vast ideas of
personal importance, amateurs and patrons! City Hall is the brain of New
York, of the continent, and it is one of the laws of the world that
brains will rule. Rebel as muscles merely of the body politic, and ye
rebel against inexorable law: that scribbling _literati_ in the fifth
story--for newspapers like men have their brains in the upper story--is
more potent than you in settling the artistic position of a Lucca or a
Rubenstein, a Dickens or a Doré, a Tennyson or a Carlyle. Have ye ever
read a wonderful little ballad by Uhland, entitled 'The Minstrel's
Curse?' If so, recall it--for it is typical, not of that which comes
by-and-by, but of that which is: the exponent of the beautiful having
become in his way an autocrat. Unfortunate it is that journalism is not
always representative of the best culture--that managing editors will
now and then entrust criticism to incompetents, but its popular power is
quite the same, notwithstanding, and this good the popular newspaper has
wrought, to wit--that the exponent of the arts, media of culture as they
are, is no longer dependent upon the caprices and whims of isolated
patrons, nor hampered in his freedom of expression by canons of theirs."
And so on ad infinitum. The present writer confesses in all humility
that he has not the least idea as to what the eloquent gentleman meant.
But remember that it was the age that produced the "St. Elmo" of Augusta
Evans Wilson.