I hope private society in New York would still be found as correct if not
quite so violent; and I wish I could believe that the fine arts were
presently in as flourishing a condition among us as they were in 1849.
That was the prosperous day of the Art Unions, in which the artists
clubbed their output, and the subscribers parted the works among
themselves by something so very like raffling that the Art Unions were
finally suppressed under the law against lotteries. While they lasted,
however, they had exhibitions thronged by our wealth, fashion, and
intellect (to name them in the order they hold the New York mind), as our
private views now are, or ought to be; and the author “devotes an entire
number” of his series “to a single institution”--fearless of being
accused of partiality by any who rightly appreciate the influences of the
fine arts upon the morals and refinement of mankind.
He devotes even more than an entire number to literature; for, besides
treating of various literary celebrities at the “literary soirees,” he
imagines encountering several of them at the high-class restaurants.
At Delmonico’s, where if you had “French and money” you could get in that
day “a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with a picture by
Huntington, a poem by Willis, or a statue by Powers,” he meets such a
musical critic as Richard Grant White, such an intellectual epicurean as
N. P. Willis, such a lyric poet as Charles Fenno Hoffman. But it would
be a warm day for Delmonico’s when the observer in this epoch could
chance upon so much genius at its tables, perhaps because genius among us
has no longer the French or the money. Indeed, the author of ‘New York
in Slices’ seems finally to think that he has gone too far, even for his
own period, and brings himself up with the qualifying reservation that if
Willis and Hoffman never did dine together at Delmonico’s, they ought to
have done so. He has apparently no misgivings as to the famous musical
critic, and he has no scruple in assembling for us at his “literary
soiree” a dozen distinguished-looking men and “twice as many women....
listening to a tall, deaconly man, who stands between two candles held by
a couple of sticks summoned from the recesses of the back parlor, reading
a basketful of gilt-edged notes. It is . . . the annual Valentine
Party, to which all the male and female authors have contributed for the
purpose of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which,
for a few hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praise
which a cold world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb-
spinners.”
It must be owned that we have no longer anything so like a ‘salon’ as
this. It is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in its
celebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presently
intending immortality. Shall we, one day, we who are now in the rich
and full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination of
posterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours? Shall we, too,
appear in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as “John
Inman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals and
magazines,” or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, supposed for picturesque purposes
to be “stalking about with an immense quarto volume under his arm . . .
an early copy of his forthcoming ‘Female Poets of America’”; or as Lewis
Gaylord Clark, the “sunnyfaced, smiling” editor of the Knickerbocker
Magazine, “who don’t look as if the Ink-Fiend had ever heard of him,”
as he stands up to dance a polka with “a demure lady who has evidently
spilled the inkstand over her dress”; or as “the stately Mrs. Seba Smith,
bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright,
cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight”; or as “the
spiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a
baby,” where she sits “nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a
bird escaped from its cage”; or as Margaret Fuller, “her large, gray eyes
Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a
Pythoness”?
I hope not; I earnestly hope not. Whatever I said at the outset,
affirming the persistent equality of New York characteristics and
circumstances, I wish to take back at this point; and I wish to warn
malign foreign observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see us
as we see ourselves, that they must not expect to find us now grouped in
the taste of 1849. Possibly it was not so much the taste of 1849 as the
author of ‘New York in Slices’ would have us believe; and perhaps any one
who trusted his pictures of life among us otherwise would be deceived by
a parity of the spirit in which they are portrayed with that of our
modern “society journalism.”