The rosettes were a failure, and the old lady admitted it. I have
forgotten whether she said they looked "mangy," or "measly," or "peaky;"
but she conveyed her idea in some such graphic phrase. But I must ask
you to believe me when I tell you that, from the distant street, that
poor, weather-worn old front seemed to have taken on the very grandeur
of mourning, with its great, clean, strong columns simply wreathed in
black and snowy white, that sparkled a little here and there in the
fitful, cold, spring sunlight. Of course, when you drew near to it, it
resolved itself into a bewildering and somewhat indecent confusion of
black petticoats, and starched shirts, and drawers, and skirts, and
baby-clothes, and chemises, and dickies, and neck-cloths, and
handkerchiefs, all twisted up into the most fantastic trappings of woe
that ever decked a genuine and patriotic grief. But I am glad, for
myself, that I can look at it all now from even a greater distance than
the highway at the foot of the lawn.
I must admit that, even in my day, the shops and houses of the Moderate
Means colony had so fringed the broad highway with their trivial,
common-place, weakly pretentious architecture, that very little of the
distinctive character of the old road was left. Certainly, from
Tiemann's to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum--about two miles of straight
road--there was little that had any saving grace of honorable age,
except here and there where some pioneer shanty had squatted itself long
enough ago to have acquired a pleasant look of faded shabbiness. The
tavern and the stage-office, it is true, kept enough of their old
appearance to make a link between those days and the days when swarms of
red-faced drovers, with big woollen comfortables about their big necks,
and with fat, greasy, leather wallets stuffed full of bank-notes,
gathered noisily there, as it was their wont to gather at all the
"Bull's Head Taverns" in and around New York. The omnibuses that crawled
out from New York were comparatively modern--that is, a Broadway 'bus
rarely got ten or fifteen years beyond the period of positive
decrepitude without being shifted to the Washington Heights line. But
under the big shed around the corner still stood the great old George
Washington coach--a structure about the size and shape of a small
canal-boat, with the most beautiful patriotic pictures all over it, of
which I only remember Lord Cornwallis surrendering his sword in the
politest and most theatrical manner imaginable, although the poignancy
of his feelings had apparently turned his scarlet uniform to a pale
orange. This magnificent equipage was a trifle rheumaticky about its
underpinning, but, drawn by four, six, or eight horses, it still took
the road on holidays; and in winter, when the sleighing was unusually
fine, with its wheels transformed into sectional runners like a gigantic
bob-sled, it swept majestically out upon the road, where it towered
above the flock of flying cutters whose bells set the air a-jingle from
Bloomingdale to King's Bridge.
[Illustration]
But if the beauty of Broadway as a country high-road had been marred by
its adaptation to the exigencies of a suburb of moderate means, we boys
felt the deprivation but little. To right and to left, as we wandered
northward, five minutes' walk would take us into a country of green
lanes and meadows and marshland and woodland; where houses and streets
were as yet too few to frighten away that kindly old Dame Nature who was
always so glad to see us. If you turned to the right--to the east, that
is--you found the laurel-bordered fields where we played baseball--I
don't mean that the fields sprouted with laurels for us boys in those
old days of 29 to 34 scores, but that the _Kalmia latifolia_ crowned the
gray rocks that cropped out all around. Farther up was the wonderful and
mysterious old house of Madame Jumel--Aaron Burr's Madame Jumel--set
apart from all other houses by its associations with the fierce,
vindictive passions of that strange old woman, whom, it seems to me, I
can still vaguely remember, seated very stiff and upright in her great
old family carriage. At the foot of the heights, on this side, the
Harlem River flowed between its marshy margins to join Spuyten Duyvil
Creek--the Harlem with its floats and boats and bridges and ramshackle
docks, and all the countless delights of a boating river. Here also was
a certain dell, halfway up the heights overlooking McComb's Dam Bridge,
where countless violets grew around a little spring, and where there was
a real cave, in which, if real pirates had not left their treasure, at
least real tramps had slept and left a real smell. And on top of the
cave there was a stone which was supposed to retain the footprint of a
pre-historic Indian. From what I remember of that footprint I am
inclined to think that it must have been made by the foot of a derrick,
and not by that of an Indian.
[Illustration]
But it was on the other side of the Island, between the Deaf and Dumb
Asylum and Tubby Hook, and between the Ridge and the River, that I most
loved to ramble. Here was the slope of a woodland height running down to
a broad low strip, whose westernmost boundary was the railroad
embankment, beyond which lay the broad blue Hudson, with Fort Lee and
the first up-springing of the Palisades, to be seen by glimpses through
the tree-trunks. This was, I think, the prettiest piece of
flower-spangled wildwood that I have ever seen. For centuries it had
drained the richness of that long and lofty ridge. The life of lawns and
gardens had gone into it; the dark wood-soil had been washed from out
the rocks on the brow of the hill; and down below there, where a vagrom
brooklet chirped its way between green stones, the wholesome soil
bloomed forth in grateful luxuriance. From the first coming of the
anemone and the hepatica, to the time of the asters, there was always
something growing there to delight the scent or the sight; and most of
all do I remember the huge clumps of Dutchman's-breeches--the purple
and the waxy white as well as the honey-tipped scarlet.
[Illustration]
There were little sunlit clearings here, and I well recall the day when,
looking across one of these, I saw something that stood awkwardly and
conspicuously out of the young wood-grass--a raw stake of pine wood,
and beyond that, another stake, and another; and parallel with these
another row, marking out two straight lines, until the bushes hid them.
The surveyors had begun to lay out the line of the new Boulevard, on
which you may now roll in your carriage to Inwood, through the wreck of
the woods where I used to scramble over rock and tree-trunk, going
toward Tubby Hook.
It was on the grayest of gray November days last year that I had the
unhappy thought of revisiting this love of my youth. I followed
familiar trails, guided by landmarks I could not forget--although they
had somehow grown incredibly poor and mean and shabby, and had entirely
lost a certain dignity that they had until then kept quite clearly in my
remembrance. And behold, they were no longer landmarks except to me. A
change had come over the face of this old playground of mine. It had
forgotten the withered, modest grace of the time when it was
middle-aged, and when I was a boy. It was checkered and gridironed with
pavements and electric lights. The Elevated Railroad roared at its doors
behind clouds of smoke and steam. Great, cheerless, hideously ornate
flat buildings reared their zinc-tipped fronts toward the gray heaven,
to show the highest aspirations of that demoralized suburb in the way of
domestic architecture. To right, to left, every way I turned, I saw a
cheap, tawdry, slipshod imitation of the real city--or perhaps I should
say, of all that is ugliest and vulgarest, least desirable, and least
calculated to endure, in the troubled face of city life. I was glad to
get away; glad that the gray mist that rolled up from the Hudson River
hid from my sight within its fleecy bosom some details of that vulgar
and pitiful degradation. One place alone I found as I had hoped to find
it. Ex-Mayor Tiemann's house was gone, his conservatory was a crumbling
ruin; the house we decked for Lincoln's death was a filthy tenement with
a tumble-down gallery where the old portico had stood, and I found very
little on my upward pilgrimage that had not experienced some change--for
the worse, as it seemed to me. The very cemetery that belongs to old
Trinity had dandified itself with a wonderful wall and a still more
wonderful bridge to its annex--or appendix, or extension, or whatever
you call it. But just above it is a little enclosure that is called a
park--a place where a few people of modest, old-fashioned, domestic
tastes had built their houses together to join in a common resistance
against the encroachments of the speculator and the nomad house-hunter.
I found this little settlement undisturbed, uninvaded, save by a sort of
gentle decay that did it no ill-service, in my eyes. The pale dust was a
little deeper in the roadways that had once been paved with limestone,
a few more brown autumn leaves had fallen in the corners of the fences,
the clustered wooden houses all looked a little more rustily respectable
in their reserved and sleepy silence--a little bit more, I thought, as
if they sheltered a colony of old maids. Otherwise it looked pretty much
as it did when I first saw it, well nigh thirty years ago.
[Illustration]
To see if there were anything alive in that misty, dusty, faded little
abode of respectability, I rang at the door of one house, and found
some inquiries to make concerning another one that seemed to be
untenanted.
[Illustration]
It was a very pretty young lady who opened the door for me, with such
shining dark eyes and with so bright a red in her cheeks, that you felt
that she could not have been long in that dull, old-time spot, where
life seemed to be all one neutral color. She answered my questions
kindly, and then, with something in her manner which told me that
strangers did not often wander in there, she said that it was a very
nice place to live in. I told her that I knew it _had_ been a very nice
place to live in.
THE BOWERY AND BOHEMIA
One day a good many years ago an old gentleman from
Rondout-on-the-Hudson--then plain Rondout--was walking up Broadway
seeing the sights. He had not been in New York in ten or twelve years,
and although he was an old gentleman who always had a cask of good ale
in his cellar in the winter-time, yet he had never tasted the strange
German beverage called lager-beer, which he had heard and read about. So
when he saw its name on a sign he went in and drank a mug, sipping it
slowly and thoughtfully, as he would have sipped his old ale. He found
it refreshing--peculiar--and, well, on the whole, very refreshing
indeed, as he considerately told the proprietor.
But what interested him more than the beer was the sight of a group of
young men seated around a table drinking beer, reading--and--yes,
actually writing verses, and bandying very lively jests among
themselves. The old gentleman could not help hearing their conversation,
and when he went out into the street he shook his head thoughtfully.
[Illustration]
"I wonder what my father would have said to that?" he reflected. "Young
gentlemen sitting in a pot-house at high noon and turning verses like so
many ballad-mongers! Well, well, well, if those are the ways of
lager-beer drinkers, I'll stick to my good old ale!"
And greatly surprised would that honest old gentleman have been to know
that the presence of that little group of poets and humorists attracted
as much custom to good Mr. Pfaff's beer-saloon as did his fresh, cool
lager; and that young men, and, for the matter of that, men not so
young, stole in there to listen to their contests of wit, and to wish
and yearn and aspire to be of their goodly company. For the old
gentleman little dreamed, as he went on his course up Broadway, that he
had seen the first Bohemians of New York, and that these young men would
be written about and talked about and versified about for generations to
come. Unconscious of this honor he went on to Fourteenth Street to see
the new square they were laying out there.
[Illustration]
Perhaps nothing better marks the place where the city of New York got
clean and clear out of provincial pettiness into metropolitan tolerance
than the advent of the Bohemians. Twenty-five years earlier they would
have been a scandal and a reproach to the town. Not for their
literature, or for their wit, or for their hard drinking, or even for
their poverty; but for their brotherhood, and for their calm
indifference to all the rest of the world whom they did not care to
receive into their kingdom of Bohemia. There is human nature in this;
more human nature than there is in most provincialism. Take a community
of one hundred people and let any ten of its members join themselves
together and dictate the terms on which an eleventh may be admitted to
their band. The whole remaining eighty-nine will quarrel for the twelfth
place. But take a community of a thousand, and let ten such internal
groups be formed, and every group will have to canvass more or less hard
to increase its number. For the other nine hundred people, being able to
pick and choose, are likely to feel a deep indifference to the question
of joining any segregation at all. If group No. 2 says, "Come into my
crowd, I understand they don't want you in No. 1," the individual
replies: "What the deuce do I care about No. 1 or you either? Here are
Nos. 4, 5, 6, and 7 all begging for me. If you and No. 1 keep on in your
conceit you'll find yourselves left out in the cold."
And as it frequently happens to turn out that way, the dweller in a
great city soon learns, in the first place, that he is less important
than he thought he was; in the second place, that he is less unimportant
than some people would like to have him think himself. All of which goes
to show that when New Yorkers looked with easy tolerance, and some of
them with open admiration, upon the Bohemians at Pfaff's saloon, they
had come to be citizens of no mean city, and were making metropolitan
growth.
[Illustration]
A Bohemian may be defined as the only kind of gentleman permanently in
temporary difficulties who is neither a sponge nor a cheat. He is a type
that has existed in all ages and always will exist. He is a man who
lacks certain elements necessary to success in this world, and who
manages to keep fairly even with the world, by dint of ingenious shift
and expedient; never fully succeeding, never wholly failing. He is a
man, in fact, who can't swim, but can tread water. But he never, never,
never calls himself a Bohemian--at least, in a somewhat wide experience,
I have known only two that ever did, and one of these was a baronet. As
a rule, if you overhear a man approach his acquaintance with the
formula, "As one Bohemian to another," you may make up your mind that
that man means an assault upon the other man's pocket-book, and that if
the assault is successful the damages will never be repaired. That man
is not a Bohemian; he is a beat. Your true Bohemian always calls himself
by some euphemistic name. He is always a gentleman at odds with fortune,
who rolled in wealth yesterday and will to-morrow, but who at present is
willing to do any work that he is sure will make him immortal, and that
he thinks may get him the price of a supper. And very often he lends
more largely than he borrows.
Now the crowd which the old gentleman saw in the saloon--and he saw
George Arnold, Fitz-James O'Brien, and perhaps N. P. Shepard--was a
crowd of Bohemians rather by its own christening than by any ordinary
application of the word. They were all young men of ability, recognized
in their profession. Of those who have died, two at least have honor and
literary consideration to-day; of those who lived, some have obtained
celebrity, and all a reasonable measure of success. Mürger's Bohemians
would have called them Philistines. But they have started a tradition
that will survive from generation unto generation; a tradition of
delusion so long as the glamour of poetry, romance, and adventure hang
around the mysteriously attractive personality of a Bohemian. Ever since
then New York has had, and always will have, the posing Bohemian and his
worshippers.
Ten or fifteen years ago the "French Quarter" got its literary
introduction to New York, and the fact was revealed that it was the
resort of real Bohemians--young men who actually lived by their wit and
their wits, and who talked brilliantly over fifty-cent table-d'hôte
dinners. This was the signal for the would-be Bohemian to emerge from
his dainty flat or his oak-panelled studio in Washington Square, hasten
down to Bleecker or Houston Street, there to eat chicken badly _braisé_,
fried chuck-steak, and soggy spaghetti, and to drink thin blue wine and
chicory-coffee that he might listen to the feast of witticism and flow
of soul that he expected to find at the next table. If he found it at
all, he lost it at once. If he made the acquaintance of the young men at
the next table, he found them to be young men of his own sort--agreeable
young boys just from Columbia and Harvard, who were painting
impressionless pictures for the love of Art for Art's sake, and living
very comfortably on their paternal allowances. Any one of the crowd
would think the world was coming to pieces if he woke up in the morning
to wonder where he could get his breakfast on credit, and wonder where
he could earn enough money to buy his dinner. Yet these innocent
youngsters continue to pervade "The Quarter," as they call it; and as
time goes on, by much drinking of ponies of brandy and smoking of
cigarettes, they get to fancy that they themselves are Bohemians. And
when they get tired of it all and want something good to eat, they go up
to Delmonico's and get it.
And their Bohemian predecessors, who sought the French fifty-cent
restaurants as _their_ highest attainable luxury--what has become of
them? They have fled before that incursion as a flock of birds before a
whirlwind. They leave behind them, perhaps, a few of the more
mean-spirited among them, who are willing to degenerate into fawners on
the rich, and habitual borrowers of trifling sums. But the true
Bohemians, the men who have the real blood in their veins, they must
seek some other meeting-place where they can pitch their never-abiding
tents, and sit at their humble feasts to recount to each other, amid
appreciative laughter, the tricks and devices and pitiful petty schemes
for the gaining of daily bread that make up for them the game and comedy
of life. Tell me not that Ishmael does not enjoy the wilderness. The
Lord made him for it, and he would not be happy anywhere else.
There was one such child of fortune once, who brought his blue eyes
over from Ireland. His harmless and gentle life closed after too many
years in direst misfortune. But as long as he wandered in the depths of
poverty there was one strange and mysterious thing about him. His
clothes, always well brushed and well carried on a gallant form, often
showed cruel signs of wear, especially when he went for a winter without
an overcoat. But shabby as his garments might grow, empty as his pockets
might be, his linen was always spotless, stiff, and fresh. Now everybody
who has ever had occasion to consider the matter knows that by the aid
of a pair of scissors the life of a collar or of a pair of cuffs can be
prolonged almost indefinitely--apparent miracles had been performed in
this way. But no pair of scissors will pay a laundry bill; and finally a
committee of the curious waited upon this student of economics and asked
him to say how he did it. He was proud and delighted to tell them.
"I-I-I'll tell ye, boys," he said, in his pleasant Dublin brogue, "but
'twas I that thought it out. I wash them, of course, in the
basin--that's easy enough; but you'd think I'd be put to it to iron
them, wouldn't ye, now? Well, I've invinted a substischoot for
ironing--it's me big books. Through all me vicissichoods, boys, I kept
me Bible and me dictionary, and I lay the collars and cuffs in the
undher one and get the leg of the bureau on top of them both--and you'd
be surprised at the artistic effect."
[Illustration]
There is no class in society where the sponge, the toady, the man who is
willing to receive socially without giving in return, is more quickly
found out or more heartily disowned than among the genuine Bohemians. He
is to them a traitor, he is one who plays the game unfairly, one who is
willing to fill his belly by means to which they will not resort, lax
and fantastic as is their social code. Do you know, for instance, what
"Jackaling" is in New York? A Jackal is a man generally of good address,
and capable of a display of good fellowship combined with much knowledge
of literature and art, and a vast and intimate acquaintance with
writers, musicians, and managers. He makes it his business to haunt
hotels, theatrical agencies, and managers' offices, and to know
whenever, in his language, "a new jay comes to town." The jay he is
after is some man generally from the smaller provincial cities, who has
artistic or theatrical aspirations and a pocketful of money. It is the
Jackal's mission to turn this jay into an "angel." Has the gentleman
from Lockport come with the score of a comic opera under his arm, and
two thousand dollars in his pocket? Two thousand dollars will not go
far toward the production of a comic opera in these days, and the jay
finds that out later; but not until after the Jackal has made him
intimately acquainted with a very gentlemanly and experienced manager
who thinks that it can be done for that price with strict economy. Has
the young man of pronounced theatrical talent arrived from Keokuk with
gold and a thirst for fame? The Jackal knows just the dramatist who will
write him the play that he ought to star in. Does the wealthy and
important person from Podunk desire to back something absolutely safe
and sure in the line of theatrical speculation? The Jackal has the very
thing for which he is looking. And in all these, and in all similar
contingencies, it is a poor Jackal who does not get his commission at
both ends.
The Jackal may do all these things, but he may not, if he is treated,
fail to treat in return. I do not mean to say at all that Jackaling is a
business highly esteemed, even in darkest Bohemia, but it is considered
legitimate, and I hope that no gentleman doing business in Wall Street,
or on the Consolidated Exchange, will feel too deeply grieved when he
learns the fact.
But where have the real Bohemians fled to from the presence of the
too-well-disposed and too-wealthy children of the Benedick and the
Holbein? Not where they are likely to find him, you may be sure. The
true Bohemian does not carry his true address on his card. In fact, he
is delicate to the point of sensitiveness about allowing any publicity
to attach to his address. He communicates it confidentially to those
with whom he has business dealings, but he carefully conceals it from
the prying world. As soon as the world knows it he moves. I once asked a
chief of the Bohemian tribe whose residence was the world, but whose
temporary address was sometimes Paris, why he had moved from the
Quartier Latin to a place in Montmartre.
"Had to, my dear fellow," he answered, with dignity; "why if you live
over on that side of the river they'll call you a _Bohemian_!"
In Paris the home of wit in poverty has been moved across the Seine to
the south side of the hill up which people climb to make pilgrimages to
the Moulin Rouge and the church of St. Pierre de Montmartre. In New York
it has been moved not only across that river of human intercourse that
we call Broadway--a river with a tidal ebb and flow of travel and
traffic--but across a wilder, stranger, and more turbulent flood called
the Bowery, to a region of which the well-fed and prosperous New Yorker
knows very, very little.
As more foreigners walk on the Bowery than walk on any other street in
New York; and as more different nationalities are represented there than
are represented in any other street in New York; and as the foreigners
all say that the Bowery is the most marvellous thoroughfare in the
world, I think we are justified in assuming that there is little reason
to doubt that the foreigners are entirely right in the matter,
especially as their opinion coincides with that of every American who
has ever made even a casual attempt to size up the Bowery.
[Illustration]