the foulness of the streets. It said in the early forties that they
ought to be swept daily, as they were in London and Paris, and by
machinery; that with New York’s hot summer climate and the popular
habit of throwing offal into the gutters, it was intolerable to have
them cleaned only every two or three days. In 1846 it called the
neglect “scandalous,” the dust and odors “insufferable.” The reason why
horse-brooms were not employed was that the use of manual labor gave
employment to gangs whose votes the ward-heelers wanted at election
time; but really no men need be thrown out of work--they could be set
to repairing the broken pavements. When the Crystal Palace exhibition
was held in New York in 1853, the British section contained two
street-sweeping machines, one of which not only gathered together but
loaded the dirt. The machines, it was true, could not vote, but by
their use, according to the _Evening Post’s_ calculations, the cost
of cleaning New York might be reduced from $330,000 a year to between
$50,000 and $90,000. Next year Bryant gave publicity to the experiment
of John W. Genin, a Broadway merchant, who collected $2,000 from his
business neighbors, obtained horse-brooms, and at an expense of $450
a week, for a month, made Broadway from Bowling Green to Union Square
look like “a new-scrubbed kitchen floor.”
Not until the end of the thirties did allegations of corruption in
the city government become frequent in Bryant’s editorial columns.
In August, 1843, we find the _Evening Post_ beginning the complaints
against the Charter which it was to maintain without interruption
until the early seventies. It believed and continued to believe that
the two boards of aldermen and assistant aldermen, soon nicknamed “the
forty thieves,” had too much power. “They are at once our municipal
legislature and our municipal executive; in part also, they are our
municipal judiciary; they are the directors of the city finances; they
are the fountain of patronage; they are all this for the greatest
commercial city in the western world.” Their government it held to
be always expensive and arbitrary, often inefficient, and sometimes
dishonest.
The _Post_ supported an abortive effort to amend the Charter in 1846,
and in 1853, after Azariah Flagg as Controller had stripped some
flagrant extravagance and grafting, it gave its voice to another
movement which proved successful. Tweed was at this time an alderman.
The newspaper charged the body of which he was a member with selling
city property and valuable franchises for nominal prices, and then by
its control of the courts quashing all efforts at prosecution. When by
a smashing popular vote (June 7, 1853) the new Charter was carried,
abolishing the Board of Assistant Aldermen, and excluding the aldermen
from sitting in the courts of Oyer and Terminer and of the Sessions,
the _Post_ said that “a more significant and humiliating rebuke was
never administered upon a body of public officers in this State
before.” It little thought then that the corruption of the past was but
a trifle to the corruption coming.
Bryant’s place as the foremost citizen of the lusty young metropolis
was by 1850 becoming secure. He, Irving, and Cooper were universally
regarded as the country’s greatest literary men. Irving was passing
his final placid years at Sunnyside; Cooper on Otsego Lake, one of the
most quarrelsome men in the country, was near the end of his stormy
career. The city heard of them only occasionally. But Bryant was in
the prime of life, seen almost daily on the streets, and heard upon
every passing question. In the late forties he began to be known as a
speaker upon public occasions. He delivered his eulogy upon the artist
Cole in 1848 with much nervousness, but by 1851, when he presided over
the press banquet to Kossuth, he had acquired self-confidence and ease.
Thereafter he was in constant demand for addresses to all kinds of
audiences--literary groups, the New York Historical Society, the Scotch
when they celebrated the centenary of Burns’s birth, the Germans in
their Schiller celebration, and so on. His increasing prestige in the
city was naturally reflected upon the _Evening Post_.
CHAPTER NINE
LITERARY ASPECTS OF BRYANT’S NEWSPAPER, 1830–1855
For reasons fairly evident Bryant seldom used the _Evening Post_ for
the publication of his poems; he was too modest, and the magazines of
the day too earnestly besought him for whatever he might write. In
1832 he brought out “The Prairies” in it, and in 1841 “The Painted
Cup”--that was all in early years. He had no time for literary essays,
even had he felt the _Post_ the place for them. As for the new books,
no one yet thought that dailies should give them more than brief
notices; moreover, Bryant disrelished book-reviewing, a task against
which he had protested while a magazine editor, and he never quite
trusted his judgment upon new volumes of poetry. The _Evening Post_
had less literary distinction in his early editorship than might be
supposed; but it had much literary interest.
The most interesting book comments of the thirties were upon British
travels in America. England did not like it when Hawthorne, in “Our
Old Home,” called the British matron beefy. The United States did
not like Dickens’s portrait of Col. Jefferson Brick, praising the
ennobling institution of nigger slavery; of Prof. Mullit, who at the
last election had repudiated his father for voting the wrong ticket;
and Gen. Fladdock, who halted his denunciation of British pride to snub
Martin Chuzzlewit when he learned that Martin had come in the steerage.
At that period the United States was as sensitive as a callow youth.
“We people of the Universal Yankee Nation,” remarked the _Evening Post_
in 1833, “much as we may affect to despise the strictures of such
travelers as Fearon, Capt. Roos, Basil Hall, and Mrs. Trollope, are yet
mightily impatient under their censure, and manifest on the appearance
of each successive book about our country a great anxiety to get hold
of it and devour its contents.”
Most Americans joined in indiscriminating complaints over the
animadversions of the British travelers. A few were inclined to applaud
the less extreme criticism in the hope that the sound portions might
be taken to heart. Bryant thought that the country had been “far too
sensitive” to Basil Hall, calling that naval traveler “a good sort
of prejudiced English gentleman, who saw things in a pretty fair
light for a prejudiced man.” He had a high opinion of parts of Miss
Martineau’s travels, though he wrote his wife that she had been given
a wrong impression in some particulars by Dr. Karl Follen and the
narrow-minded Boston abolitionists. Twice he asked _Evening Post_
readers (1832–3) to remember that although Mrs. Trollope might be
shrewish, she was also shrewd, and that if she had exaggerated some
of the national foibles, she had sketched others accurately. In her
“Domestic Manners of the Americans,” he believed, “there was really
a good deal to repay curiosity. That work, notwithstanding all its
misrepresentations, exaggerations, and prejudices, was a very clever
and spirited production, and contained a deal of truth which, however
unpalatable, has at least proved of useful tendency.” He called Capt.
Marryat’s “Diary in America” a “blackguard book,” more flippant than
profound, and deplored the fact that Charles Augustus Murray’s “Travels
in America,” which was issued at the same time (1839), and was the work
of “a well-disposed, candid, gentlemanly sort of person,” would not
have one-tenth the sale. An excerpt from the dramatic criticism of the
_Evening Post_ in September, 1832, shows how effective Mrs. Trollope
actually was in improving our manners. At a performance by Fanny
Kemble, a gentleman, between acts, assumed a sprawling position upon a
box railing:
Hissings arose, and then bleatings, and then imitations of the
lowing of cattle; still the unconscious disturber pursued his
chat--still the offending fragment of his coat-tail hung over the
side. At last there was a laugh, and cries of “Trollope! Trollope!
Trollope!” with roars of laughter, still more loud and general.
But the most important visit of a foreigner after Lafayette’s was
the American tour of Dickens in the early months of 1842. It is of
special interest in the history of the _Evening Post_ as marking the
active beginning of a campaign in which it took the leading part among
American dailies--the campaign for international copyright, lasting a
full half century.
“The popularity of Mr. Dickens as a novelist throws almost all other
contemporary popularity into the shade,” the _Evening Post_ had
exclaimed on March 31, 1839, when each successive installment of
“Nicholas Nickleby” was being received with unprecedented enthusiasm
in America. “His humor is frequently broad farce, and his horrors are
often exaggerated, extravagant, and improbable; but he still has so
much humor, and so much pathos, that his defects are overlooked.” His
striking originality the paper also praised. In 1840–41 came the “Old
Curiosity Shop,” which, as the _Post_ noted, was issued in numbers as
rapidly as the text could be brought overseas, and caught up in Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia by piratical publishers. When Dickens spoke
at a public dinner in Boston he recalled how from all parts of America,
from cities and frontier, he had received letters about Little Nell.
There were few educated Americans who were not acquainted with these
books, or with the earlier “Pickwick” or “Oliver Twist”; and the news
that this genius of thirty was to visit the country sent a thrill
throughout it.
Before the end of January, 1842, readers of the _Evening Post_ and
other New York papers learned how Dickens had reached Halifax and
been given a reception in the Parliament House. A few days after,
the _Post_ published an account of his welcome in Boston. He was at
the Tremont House, the halls and environs of which were crowded; one
distinguished caller followed another; whenever he went out to see the
sights, or the theater, he was given an ovation; and deputations were
arriving with invitations from distant cities and towns. “Mr. Dickens,
we fear, is made too much a lion for his own comfort,” observed the
paper, and repeated the warning next day. On Feb. 2 it gave nearly an
eighth of its reading matter to an account of plans for the great Boz
Ball, as laid at a public meeting at the Astor House, presided over
by Mayor Robert H. Morris. The Park Theater was to be converted into
a ballroom, and its alcoves fitted up into representations of the Old
Curiosity Shop’s corners, in which scenes from Dickens’s novels might
be illustrated. On Feb. 7 there appeared an account of the ceremonial
Dickens dinner in Boston, with the happy speech of Mayor Quincy. An
invitation to a public dinner in New York, signed among others by
Bryant and Theodore Sedgwick, had meanwhile been dispatched to Dickens.
The Boz Ball on the fourteenth was, said the _Evening Post_ in
an account that was half news, half editorial, “one of the most
magnificent that has ever been given in this city. The gorgeousness
of the decorations and the splendor of the dresses, no less than the
immense throng, glittering with silks and jewels, contributed to the
show and impressiveness of the occasion. It is estimated that nearly
3,000 people were present, all richly dressed and sparkling with
animation.” Dickens’s letters bear this out--“from the roof to the
floor, the theater was decorated magnificently; and the light, glitter,
glare, noise, and cheering baffle my descriptive powers.” The great
crowd made dancing an ordeal, but the novelist and his wife remained
until they were almost too tired to stand. Some of the newspapers drew
heavily upon the imagination in their personal references to Dickens.
They told how, while a charming young man, bright-eyed, sparkling
with gayety and life, his freedom of manner shocked a few fashionable
people; how he could never have moved in such fine society in England;
and how he was “apparently thunderstruck” by the magnificence about
him. The _Evening Post_ confined its personal observations to the
statement that Dickens wore black, “with a gay vest,” and that his wife
appeared in a white figured Irish tabinet trimmed with mazarine blue
flowers, with a wreath of the same color about her head, and pearl
necklace and earrings. It described the tableaux in full--Mr. Leo
Hunter’s fancy dress party, the middle-aged lady in the hotel room that
Pickwick invaded, Mr. and Mrs. Mantalini in Ralph Nickleby’s office,
the Stranger and Barnaby Rudge, and so on.
The Boz Dinner, at which Bryant was a leading figure, received no
less than three columns, crowding out all editorial matter--pretty
good evidence that Bryant himself wrote the report. Washington Irving
presided, and made a few halting remarks, toasting Dickens as the guest
of the nation. “There,” he said as he took his seat (Bryant of course
did not mention this), “I told you I should break down, and I’ve done
it.” The _Evening Post_ gave a full transcript of Dickens’s speech,
much of which was a tribute to Irving, and which concluded with a
reference to the presence of Bryant and Halleck as making appropriate
a toast to American literature. The dinner closed with a storm of
applause for the sentiment, “The Works of Our Guest--Like Oliver Twist,
We Ask for More”; and the _Evening Post_ was soon reporting Dickens’s
reception in Washington.
Some observers were puzzled by the enthusiasm of Dickens’s reception,
and the _Courrier des Etats Unis_ tried to account for it by several
theories: first, because Americans were eager to refute the accusation
that they cared nothing for art and everything for money; second,
because they supposed Dickens was taking notes, and wished to
conciliate his opinion; and third, because the austere Puritanism of
America, restraining the people from many ordinary enjoyments, made
them seize upon such occasions as a vent for their natural love of
excitement.
Bryant admitted that there was force in the third part of this
explanation, but in the _Evening Post_ he took the simpler view that
the cordiality originated in the main from a sincere admiration for
the novelist’s genius. He pointed out that Dickens’s excellences
were of a kind that appealed to all classes, from the stableboy to
the statesman. “His intimate knowledge of character, his familiarity
with the language and experience of low life, his genuine humor, his
narrative power, and the cheerfulness of his philosophy, are traits
that impress themselves upon minds of every description.” But his
higher traits were such as particularly recommended him to Americans.
“His sympathies seek out that class with whom American institutions
and laws sympathize most strongly. He has found subjects of thrilling
interest in the passions, sufferings, and virtues of the mass.” For
itself, while regretting a certain excess of fervor in Dickens’s
welcome, the _Evening Post_ regarded it as a healthy token. “We have so
long been accustomed to seeing the homage of the multitude paid to men
of mere titles, or military chieftains, that we have grown tired of it.
We are glad to see the mind asserting its supremacy--to find its rights
generally recognized. We rejoice that a young man, without birth,
wealth, title, or a sword, whose only claims to distinction are in
his intellect and heart, is received with a feeling that was formerly
rendered only to conquerors and kings.”
Dickens’s visit was not merely for pleasure or observation, and in his
endeavors to promote the cause of international copyright legislation
the _Post_ was already keenly interested. As early as 1810 Coleman,
under the heading, “Imposition,” had attacked the pirating of “Travels
in the Northern Part of the United States,” by Edward A. Kendall,
an Englishman whom Coleman knew, as not only “a trespass upon the
rights of the author,” but a fraud upon the public, since the edition
was mutilated. In 1826 he or Bryant had commented acridly upon the
appearance of a Cambridge edition of Mrs. Barbauld’s poems at the
same time that the New York publishers, G. and C. Carvill, brought
out an authorized edition the profits of which went to the author’s
heirs. Miss Martineau, sojourning in America in 1836, had taken up the
question with Bryant. Upon returning home she had sent him a copy of a
petition by many English writers, including Dickens and Carlyle, to
Congress, together with copies of brief letters by Wordsworth, Miss
Edgeworth, Lord Brougham, and others indorsing it; and it was published
with hearty commendation in the _Evening Post_.
The question was one in which Bryant, like Cooper and Irving, had a
selfish as well as altruistic interest. All American authors were
trying to sell their wares to publishers and readers who could get
English books without payment of royalty. Each of Dickens’s works, as
it appeared, was snapped up and placed on the market for twenty-five
cents or less. “Barnaby Rudge,” during his tour of this country, was
advertised in the _Evening Post_ as available, complete, in two issues
of the _New World_, for a total cost of sixteen and one-fourth cents.
The next week it was issued under one cover for twenty-five cents. The
novels of Bulwer, Disraeli, and Ainsworth were presented in the same
way, as was the poetry of Hood and Tennyson. Napier’s “Peninsular War”
was advertised in the _Post_ in 1844 by J. S. Redfield in nine volumes
at a quarter dollar apiece, and Milman’s edition of Gibbon, with his
notes copyright in England, by Harpers in fifteen parts at the same
price.
In his speech at the Boston dinner “Boz” boldly set forth the injustice
which he believed the lack of an American international copyright law
was doing English writers. Several Boston journals were offended, while
the paper-makers belonging to the “Home League” in New York met to
express opposition to any new copyright legislation. Bryant at once (on
Feb. 11) took Dickens’s side in the _Evening Post_. If the American
laws allowed every foreigner to be robbed of his money and baggage
the moment he landed, he wrote, and closed the courts to his claims
for redress, the nation would be condemned as a den of thieves. “When
we deny a stranger the same right to the profits of his own writings
as we give to our citizens, we commit this very injustice; the only
difference is that we limit the robbery to one kind of property.”
At the New York dinner Dickens advanced the same subject in a few
words. “I claim that justice be done; and I prefer the claim as one
who has a right to speak and be heard,” the _Evening Post_ quoted him.
He breakfasted with Bryant and Halleck, and was entertained at the
poet’s home, where he probably spoke to him in private and received
assurances of the _Post’s_ support. On May 9 there appeared a letter
from Dickens “To the Editor of the _Evening Post_,” dated April 30 at
Niagara Falls, in which he repeated his appeal. With it he enclosed a
short letter from Carlyle, wherein the Scotchman thanked him because
“We learn by the newspapers that you everywhere in America stir up the
question of international copyright, and thereby awaken huge dissonance
where else all were triumphant unison for you.” He also enclosed a much
longer address “To the American People,” signed by Bulwer, Campbell,
Tennyson, Talfourd, Hood, Leigh Hunt, Hallam, Sydney Smith, Rogers,
Forster, and Barry Cornwall. This eminent group pointed out that the
lack of an international copyright agreement was a serious injury to
American authors, who had to compete on unfair terms with the British;
and it argued that the supply of standard English books in a cheap form
would not really be diminished by such copyright legislation. Books
were sold at a high or low price not because they were copyrighted or
uncopyrighted, but in proportion as they obtained few or many readers;
and the educational system of the United States guaranteed a large
reading public.
Bryant reinforced these letters with an editorial, remarkable as an
expression of confidence in the brilliant future of American letters.
It was a mistake, he maintained, to suppose that in the absence of an
international copyright agreement the United States had wholly the best
of the situation:
Within the last year, the number of books written by American
authors, which have been successful in Britain, is greater than
that of foreign works which have been successful in this country.
Robertson’s work on Palestine, Stephens’s Travels in Central
America, Catlin’s book on North American Indians, Cooper’s
Deerslayer, the last volume of Bancroft’s American history,
several works prepared by Anthon for the schools--here is a list
of American works republished in England within the year for which
we should be puzzled to find an equivalent in works written in
England within the same time, and republished here. Our eminent
authors are still engaged in their literary labors. Cooper within a
fortnight past has published a work stamped with all the vigor of
his faculties, Prescott is occupied in writing the History of Peru,
Bancroft is engaged in continuing the annals of his native country,
Sparks is still employed in his valuable historical labors, and
Stephens is pushing his researches in Central America, with a view
of giving their results to the world. We were told, the other day,
of a work prepared for the press by Washington Irving, which would
have appeared ere this but for the difficulties in the way of
securing a copyright for it in England, as well as here.
He drew an inspiring picture of the effect of the success of these
authors in raising up aspirants for literary fame. Irving had just told
him, he wrote, “that if American literature continued to make the same
progress as it had done for twenty years past, the day was not very far
distant when the greater number of books designed for readers of the
English language would be produced in America.”
The editor continued his unavailing efforts for a sound copyright law
year after year, decade after decade. He took pains to do justice to
the opposition, recognizing that it was by no means all mercenary,
and that economists like Matthew Carey advanced arguments worthy of
examination. When Dickens published a letter (July 14, 1842) in the
London _Morning Chronicle_, asserting that the barrier to the reform
in America was the influence of “the editors and proprietors of
newspapers almost exclusively devoted to the republication of popular
English works,” and that they were “for the most part men of very low
attainments, and of more than indifferent reputation,” Bryant hastened
in the _Evening Post_ to call this a misrepresentation. He knew many
sincere and respectable men who condemned the international copyright
proposals from the best of motives. But the crusade was always near
his heart. When in 1843 a petition for the needed law was presented to
Congress by ninety-seven firms and persons engaged in the book trade,
he supported it, and he did the same when ten years later five New
York publishers addressed Secretary of State Everett in behalf of a
copyright treaty with Great Britain. At this time he believed that the
chief obstacle was the simple indifference of Congressmen; that they
did not comprehend the question, nor try to comprehend it, because no
party advantage or disadvantage was connected with it.
In the thirties and forties book-reviewing, in the strict sense of
the phrase, was almost unknown in the New York daily press. The chief
exceptions to the rule were furnished by Edgar Allan Poe, who in the
middle forties contributed some genuine criticism to N. P. Willis’s
_Mirror_ and other journals, and by Margaret Fuller. Miss Fuller,
writing in the _Tribune_ for more than a year and a half preceding her
visit to Europe in 1846, performed a signal service to American letters
by her courage and acuteness, for her criticism of Longfellow as too
foreign in his themes and of Lowell as too imitative had a salutary
effect upon those poets. But Poe and Margaret Fuller were passing
meteors in New York journalism. Until George Ripley and John Bigelow
joined the _Tribune_ and _Evening Post_ respectively in 1849 mere hasty
notices were given most books.