Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_.
Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
_Of this book there have been printed three hundred
copies from type and original wood blocks on
French hand-made paper, and three copies
on Roman parchment, by order of the
Committee on Publications of The
Grolier Club of the City of
New York, November,
Nineteen Hundred
and Twelve_
[Illustration]
THE WRITERS
OF KNICKERBOCKER
NEW YORK
THE WRITERS
OF KNICKERBOCKER
NEW YORK
BY
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
ILLUSTRATIONS ENGRAVED BY
WALWORTH STILSON
[Illustration]
THE GROLIER CLUB
OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
1912
_Copyright, 1912, by
The Grolier Club of the
City of New York_
LIST OF WOODCUTS
DEVICE OF THE GROLIER CLUB Title-page
PAGE
TAIL-PIECE viii
“From Bowling Green to Trinity Church.”
1 HEAD-BAND 3
“New York has grown by the process of
destruction, and has become metropolitan
through successive stages of self-effacement.”
2 TAIL-PIECE 28
“And there was a bridge on the Boston Post
Road ... which bore the suggestive name
of the Kissing-bridge.”
3 HEAD-BAND 29
“The old Government House.”
4 TAIL-PIECE 51
“The old-fashioned gentleman who was last
seen on the Albany Post Road.”
5 HEAD-BAND 52
“Celebrated in the ‘Salmagundi’ papers as
Cockloft Hall.”
6 TAIL-PIECE 67
“Sitting ... overlooking the river ... the
old man delighted to recall the golden
Knickerbocker age.”
7 HEAD-BAND 68
“Whose distinction was invariably expressed
in a green or common, a Congregational spire,
an academy, and rows of graceful elms.”
8 TAIL-PIECE 88
“Let it be taken from the top of Weehawk
Hill, overlooking New York.”
9 HEAD-BAND 89
“In the back room of Wiley’s shop ... Dana
met Cooper, Halleck, Brevoort.”
10 TAIL-PIECE 121
“Lines to a water-fowl.”
[Illustration]
THE WRITERS
OF KNICKERBOCKER
NEW YORK
[Illustration]
KNICKERBOCKER
NEW YORK
In these days, when New York has become a metropolitan city with
a population of four million souls, and the old city has shrunk
politically into the Borough of Manhattan, it is not easy to recall the
obliterated outlines of the Town which was satirized by the vivacious
young men who wrote the “Salmagundi” papers. Unlike Rome, which has
been rebuilt half a dozen times on its early site and largely out of
its old materials, so that the city of to-day is a kind of palimpsest
in stone, brick, and mortar, New York has grown by the process of
destruction, and has become metropolitan through successive stages
of self-effacement. Here and there one comes upon a building which
has survived from the late colonial period, but no structure now
standing bears witness to the taste or lack of taste of the Dutch
settlers, and the streets preserve no traces of the old lanes and
highways save an occasional name as misleading descriptively as the
Bowery. Canal Street is as stolid a reminiscence of a water-channel
as is the heavy warehouse frontage of Grub Street of the humorous or
tragic traditions of literary Bohemia in the days of Mr. Pope and Dr.
Johnson. New York has changed its form almost as often as, according
to the physiologists, men change their bodies. It has kept certain
characteristics which marked its youth and predicted the traits of
its maturity; but its growth has been so great that the divergencies
between the latest and the earliest city seem to be differences in kind
rather than in degree.
The New York in which Washington Irving was born in April, 1783, was
still in the possession of British troops, who withdrew six months
later, leaving a half-ruined city behind them. The population had been
reduced from twenty thousand to ten thousand; shipping had deserted the
captive town, and the wharves were rotting from disuse; streets which
had been opened before the war to afford room for growth were desolate
and forlorn, with that overgrowth of straggling weeds which is the
final evidence of neglect. Many public and private buildings which had
been used for military purposes were falling in ruins. The great fire
of September, 1776, had left a large part of the western side of the
little city a mass of ruins; and Broadway from Bowling Green to Trinity
Church was a dreary waste of blackened walls and heaps of rubbish.
There was no money in the city treasury, and the once growing town was
apparently blighted. Other cities had been more active in the struggle
for independence; none had suffered more severely from the devastation
of war.
“In June, 1787,” wrote Samuel Breck, “on my return from a residence of
a few years in France, I arrived at that city [New York] and found it a
neglected place, built chiefly of wood, and in a state of prostration
and decay. A dozen vessels in port; Broadway, from Trinity Church,
inclusive, down to the Battery, in ruins, owing to a fire that had
occurred when the city was occupied by the enemy during the later part
of the war--the ruined walls of the houses standing on both sides of
the way testifying to the poverty of the place five years after the
conflagration; for although the war had ceased during that period,
and the enemy had departed, no attempt had been made to rebuild them.
In short, there was silence and inactivity everywhere.” Mr. Breck
was mistaken about the date of the fire, but his description of the
desolate city was accurate.
In these depressing conditions, New York did not give itself up to
gloomy misgivings; it had always been a cheerful, social community,
and it was not long in recovering its prosperity and high spirits.
Six years after the close of the war it was the Capital of the United
States, the population had more than doubled, ships were in the harbor,
grass no longer gave the streets a rustic aspect, and the tide of
activity had reached the highest point in its history. There were
nearly twenty-four thousand people living south of Reade Street on the
west, and of Pike Street on the east; a swamp arrested the growth of
the town along the East River. There were about twenty-four hundred
slaves. The houses were mainly of English architecture, though peaked
roofs and gable-ends to the streets recalled the good old days of
Dutch dominion, when a canal ran through Broad Street and broad-sterned
Dutch vessels lay at anchor in the centre of the town.
Politics ran high, and during elections language was used with far less
restraint than at present. The first man sent to Congress from New York
under the recently adopted national Constitution was Mr. John Lawrence,
and a letter published in the “Daily Advertiser” in March, 1789,
contains the following frank statement: “Of all the men who framed
that monarchical, aristocratical, oligarchical, tyrannical, diabolical
system of slavery, the New Constitution, _One Half_ were lawyers. Of
the men who represented, or rather misrepresented, this city and county
in the late convention of this State, to whose wicked arts we may
safely attribute the adoption of that diabolical system, _seven_ out
of the _nine_ were lawyers.... And what crowns the wickedness of these
wicked lawyers is, that a great majority of them throughout the State
are violently opposed to our GOOD and GREAT HEAD and never-failing
friend of the city and city interests, the present GOVERNOR.
“Beware, beware, beware of Lawyers!”
Very pleasant things were said about the New York of 1789 when, at
the end of a three months’ session of the United States Congress, it
was announced that only one member had been ill. After commenting on
its nearness to the ocean and the sweetening of its air by abundant
verdure, a charming picture is evoked by the statement that the
residents on the west side of Broadway are “saluted by fragrant odors
from the apple orchards and buckwheat fields in blossom on the pleasant
banks of the Jersey shore.”
The little city was already charged with extravagance and frivolity,
and the details of these offences are not lacking. One reads of
blue satin gowns with white satin petticoats, large Italian gauze
handkerchiefs with satin border stripes worn about the neck, completed
by a head-dress of “pouf of gauze in the form of a globe, the headpiece
of which was made of white satin having a double wing, in large plaits,
and trimmed with a large wreath of artificial roses.” There were shoes
of blue satin adorned by rose-colored rosettes, and muffs of wolfskin
with knots of scarlet ribbon. The gentlemen of the period were arrayed
with equal splendor: bottle-green, pearl, scarlet, purple, mulberry,
and garnet were among the colors of cloths advertised by a local tailor
on Hanover Square; while waistcoats fairly glowed with brilliant hues
and brocaded and spangled buttons. Beaver and castor hats were in
vogue, and superior boots were made by Mr. Thomas Garner, of Pearl
Street, whose proud claim to the patronage of the fashionable was that
he had worked for the first nobility in England. It cost approximately
seventy-five dollars to dress a lady’s hair every day in the year; and
there were dentists who pulled the teeth of the poor _gratis_ between
the hours of six and nine on the mornings of Monday and Thursday. The
sociability and hospitality of the city made a deep impression on Noah
Webster, who was also struck by the absence of affectation and of
social snobbery.
Lectures appear to have been few in number and serious in theme; the
city, which took its pleasures comfortably, took its opportunities of
enlightenment sparingly and in a heroic temper. There appears to have
been but one candidate on the lecture platform for public approval in
this field during the winter of 1789, and he is described as “a man
more than thirty years an Atheist.” The lecture was delivered at Aaron
Aorson’s tavern, and tickets were to be had from the Aldermen!
The play enjoyed greater popular favor, but the John Street Theatre
was without competition until 1798, when the Old Park Theatre was
opened. During the season of 1789, William Dunlap put several home-made
American dramas on the stage. He was the prolific author of forty-nine
plays, which stand to the credit of his industry if not of his genius.
These dramas were the premature births of the Genius of the American
stage, and none of them survives. They were very faint prophecies of
the interesting dramatic movement now in progress; but one of them,
“Darby’s Return,” achieved the rare distinction of evoking a laugh from
Washington--an occurrence so unusual that it stimulated a writer in
the “Daily Advertiser” to report it in the most stately English: “Our
Adored Ruler seemed to unbend and for the moment give himself to the
pleasures arising from the gratifications of the two most noble organs
of sense, the Eye and the Ear!”
The Musical Society gave an occasional recital, and there were
subscription concerts under the management of local music-teachers.
The young gentlemen at Columbia College were delivering Commencement
orations “On the Progress and Causes of Civilization” and “On the
Rising Glory of America.” There were nine publishers and booksellers
in the city, and in the year of Irving’s birth one of them announced
“The First American Novel” under the portentous title, “The Power of
Sympathy; or, the Triumph of Nature.” The Society Library, disrupted
by the war, was re-established, and a circulating library organized.
William Dunlap, the playwright, painted portraits and, later, became
one of the founders of the National Academy of Design. Mr. Edward
Savage and Mr. Joseph Wright followed the same profession, and
Washington sat for all three. The city was kept informed of events
by five newspapers; a magazine had been born prematurely and expired
after a brief and unimportant life. The journalistic style of the day
was of an eloquence that is happily illustrated by a description of one
of the barges which escorted Washington on his voyage across the bay
to New York to attend his inauguration: “The voices of the ladies were
as much superior to the flutes that played with the stroke of the oars
in Cleopatra’s silken-corded barge, as the very superior and glorious
water scene of New York bay exceeds the Cydnus in all its pride.”
The two-story house in which Irving was born, at No. 131 William
Street, about half-way between Fulton and John Streets, was pulled down
ten years before his death, and the house directly across the street,
in which he spent his childhood, has shared its fate. The latter was
larger and afforded greater facilities for boyish gymnastics. There
were front and rear buildings with a narrow structure between which was
hardly more than a passage, and it was from the sloping roof at the
rear that Irving made his perilous descents when he set out to enjoy
the forbidden pleasures of the John Street Theatre. George William
Curtis tells a delightful story of a boy in Philadelphia, whose father,
like the elder Irving, was of a very serious turn of mind, and who, by
way of youthful reaction, secretly frequented the forbidden playhouse.
“John,” said the father, “is this dreadful thing true that I hear
of thee? Hast thou been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?”
“Yes, father.” “I hope thee has not been more than once, John.” “Yes,
father,” was the honest if somewhat discouraging answer; “more than
thirty times.”
The easy-going temper of the metropolis to which Irving was to give
a lasting expression is still further indicated by the story that in
order to escape the rigid requirements of his father’s Presbyterian
faith the boy had himself confirmed in Trinity Church. His temper was
genial and kindly, and the mingled sentiment and humor which were to
give his books a quality American writing had so far lacked, made
him a loiterer and an observer rather than an arduous and methodical
student. New York was the gateway to the beautiful country of Dutch
settlement and tradition on the banks of the Hudson, and the gun and
fishing-rod were the instruments of exploration with which the boy who
was to write “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” carried
his discoveries into the heart of a region in which it was always
afternoon. He had read “Orlando Furioso” and had played the knight
with great fire and gallantry in the back yard on John Street; he had
surreptitiously saved candle-ends and read the moving adventures of
Sindbad and Robinson Crusoe in forbidden places and at improper hours,
and the thirst for travel was on him. He wandered about the pier-heads
when he should have been poring over textbooks, and watched lessening
sails with eager desire to fare with them to the ends of the earth. He
was, in a word, taking that course in romance, adventure, and dreaming
which boys of his temperament and genius have elected from the
beginning of time, to the sore but fortunate disappointment of their
elders. His brothers went through Columbia College, but he went up the
Hudson and discovered to the imagination the river which Hudson had
discovered to the eye. Diedrich Knickerbocker was last seen, it will be
remembered, by the passengers in the stage for Albany!
The literary temperament in Irving was not without the confirmation of
the literary impulse, and while he was still in his teens he began to
try his hand at social satire, a form of literature which is practised
only by men of city breeding and interest. In the “Morning Chronicle,”
of which his brother Peter was editor and proprietor, he published, in
1802, a series of short papers dealing with the fashions and foibles
of the town after the manner of the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” and
especially with the manners of the actors and their auditors. They
were boyish performances, but they showed sensibility and humor, and
a chivalrous attitude toward women. Irving’s health, which had been
uncertain, was established by a residence of two years in Europe,
where he saw countries and peoples with infinite zest not only in the
picturesque Old World but in the range and variety of character, the
broad contrasts, the mingled tragedy and comedy of life in a more
highly organized society. “I am a young man and in Paris,” he wrote
to a friend at home, and he was happy in a wholesome appetite for a
more picturesque and vivid life than he had enjoyed in the little
provincial city at the mouth of the Hudson. When he returned in 1806
it was to find a group of companions whose knowledge of the great world
was less than his, but who were equally ready for work or for mischief
in a little provincial city which had developed what may be called a
town-consciousness.
It was still bounded on the north by Anthony and Hester Streets;
Greenwich Village, a pleasant suburban village through which
Christopher Street now passes, was a place of refuge from the plague
for families fleeing from the city; the State prison was there, and
there were faint streets budding in the adjacent farms. Broome Street
had been laid out; Astor Place and Greenwich Street, Mr. Jarvis tells
us, were lanes; the latter had attained the dignity of a fashionable
drive, and opulent citizens drove out to Greenwich Village on pleasant
afternoons, as to-day they motor to West Point or Peekskill! The seats
of fashion were to be found on the Battery, which would have remained
the most delightful locality for residence in New York if the people
of the metropolis had not conceived a repugnance to living in near
proximity to business quarters. Lower Broadway, Upper Pearl and Nassau
Streets were of high respectability; and Broadway had been paved as far
as the City Hall. Beyond lay charming country roads, occasional country
houses to which the leading families retreated from the summer heat,
and thrifty farms whose owners were happily ignorant of the enormous
future values of their fields.
The American imagination, which has since built so many cities over
night in the newer sections of the country, did not slumber, however,
even in a city in which Dutch reluctance to move faster than the fact
was so large a factor, and a map made by Mangin in 1803 carries the
Boston Road far north through a network of supposititious streets
that lay across the broad fields owned by Mr. Bayard, Mr. Rutgers,
Mr. Lispenard, Mr. De Peyster, and other well-known citizens, and
obliterates as by magic the Swamp; the Collect, or fresh-water pond;
and the salt meadows of the earlier maps.
The Collect was not, however, so easily dealt with. It was a marsh
lying across the island from Roosevelt Slip to the Hudson at what is
now the foot of Canal Street. The focal point of this marsh was a pond
which found an outlet through the Swamp where leather has had its
shrine these many years, and whence the first Brooklyn Bridge takes its
flight over the East River. The Swamp had been drained and the water
from the pond flowed along the course of the present Canal Street;
but the pond was still to be disposed of. It was very deep and it was
proposed at one time to connect it with the two rivers by canals, which
would have made New Amsterdam reminiscent of old Amsterdam; but it was
finally filled in by leveling the high ground, and adventurous youths
and maidens who had been accustomed, on pleasant afternoons, to venture
into the country beyond the City Hall lost a convenient excuse for
Sabbath-day excursions.
It is amusing to find a pleasure-garden bearing the Old World name of
Ranelagh on the older maps; and Old Vauxhall, which stood originally
at the corner of Warren and Greenwich Streets in a house built by Sir
Peter Warren, was also a public garden, patterned after its famous
original in London and kept by Sam Fraunces, at one time a steward in
the employ of Washington, and whose connection with the old tavern
which still stands ensures his name a local immortality. Later this
pleasure-ground covered the section between Broadway and the Bowery
of which the Astor Library was the centre. The chief cattle-market
was on the Bowery somewhat south of the garden. There were various
road-houses along the East River where oysters and turtles were cooked
with great skill. Fishing and water parties in summer and sleighing
parties in winter found the best of fare in these houses, with their
pleasant grounds. It was the day of the old-fashioned chaise, and
there was a bridge on the Boston Post Road at about Third Avenue
and Seventy-seventh Street which bore the suggestive name of the
Kissing-bridge. The exaction of this kind of toll appears to have been
widely practised; not only bridges but gates and stiles were penalized
for women. The Rev. Mr. Burnaby sagely observed that this custom was
“curious, yet not displeasing.” New York had spread out since Irving’s
birth, but it was still a neighborly little city, of a social turn and
disposed to make easy terms with life.
In 1809 Thomas Paine had just died in Greenwich Village, at what is
now No. 293 Bleecker Street, where he was often to be seen at the open
window reading, with his book in close proximity to a decanter of what
appeared to be brandy or rum. It is reported that two clergymen who
visited him with the hope of changing his attitude toward Christianity
were abruptly dismissed and the housekeeper received orders to bar the
door against such visitors. “If God does not change his mind, I’m sure
no human can,” was her sage comment, and the author of “The Age of
Reason” was troubled no more.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
[Illustration]
After a stormy passage of sixty-four days, not lacking in serious
perils, Irving landed in New York in the wake of a heavy snowstorm in
February, 1806, in high spirits and ready for such pleasures as the
little town afforded. One of his biographers has described it as a
“handy” city; it was large enough to furnish ample variety of character
studies and many opportunities for good-fellowship of an intimate,
easy-going sort; there was an air of conviviality about the place,
but there was little serious dissipation. It was a very pleasant
moment in the growth of the metropolis which had become, in a quiet,
provincial way, a town in the special sense in which that word connotes
a group of people numerous enough to constitute a society, fond of
the same pleasures, interested in local incidents and amusements,
sufficiently intimate to have formed a code of social standards and
manners. In a word, in the New York of Irving’s early maturity, as in
the London of the time of Steele and Addison, there was an organized
society, open to clever portraiture and brisk satire; supplying at
the same time the material and the audience for local wit and humor.
It was easy to know everybody in the society of the town, and easy
to get about the place. The tone was not intellectual, though the
city never lacked men and women of distinguished ability and social
cultivation. It was a well-bred and hospitable society, with a keen
relish for pleasure. There were numberless dinners and suppers, much
less costly and elaborate than those of to-day, and more informal and
merry. The country was convivial in all sections outside New England,
and the social use of wine was over-generous. In America, as in
England, getting under the table was an indiscretion, not a fault. One
of Irving’s friends reported that, after a festive occasion, he had
fallen through an open grating on his homeward way and was disposed to
feel very much depressed by the darkness and solitude; but, one after
another, several fellow-guests joined him in the same manner, and the
hilarity was prolonged until dawn.
Like many other young men whose ultimate good or evil fortune it was
to write books, Irving was admitted to the bar at about the same time
that the sign, “William Cullen Bryant, attorney and counsellor at Law,”
appeared in the little village of Cummington in western Massachusetts.
In after years his estimate of his legal acquirements was indicated by
his quoting the comments of two well-known lawyers who were examining
students for admission to practise law. “Martin,” said one of these
examiners, referring to an aspirant who had acquitted himself very
lamely--“Martin, I think he knows a _little_ law.” “Make it stronger,”
was the reply; “damned little.” Irving had loitered and dreamed on
the water-front as a boy when he ought to have been at his books; and
now, at the gateway of his career, the literary temperament turned
him toward congenial fellowship rather than arduous study. There was
plenty of material for comradeship in the town, and young men of spirit
instinctively gathered about him. It was a very kindly and wholesome
Bohemia in which they disported themselves in the halcyon days of a
fleeting youth. They regarded themselves as “men about town” of the
deepest dye, but it was a very innocent town in which they amused
themselves, and they all bore honorable names in later and more serious
years.
Henry Ogden, Henry Brevoort, James K. Paulding, John and Gouverneur
Kemble, Peter and Washington Irving, the leaders of this vivacious
company, were members of families who had long been foremost in the
social life of the city, and they were far from being the “roistering
blades” they fondly thought themselves to be. They were young men of
spirit, generous tastes, and no little cultivation. They combined
with great success devotion to literature and social activity. Irving
speaks of himself as “a champion at the tea-parties,” and the “nine
worthies,” or “lads of Kilkenny,” as he called them, shone in the
society of what was then known as “the gentler sex” no less than on
the festive occasions when they celebrated their youth in private
revels. The old country house built by Nicholas Gouverneur, from whom
it had descended to Gouverneur Kemble, was the favorite out-of-town
haunt of these lively youths. It had a pleasant site on the banks of
the Passaic not far from Newark, and is celebrated in the “Salmagundi”
papers as Cockloft Hall. An old-time air hung about the place, with
its antique furniture and generous endowment of family portraits. It
was cared for by two old servants of long standing in the family, and
a negro boy, and it afforded a well-set stage for the lively comedy
which these vivacious youths made of life in the golden hour of coming
into the heritage of youth and pleasure and Letters. “Who would have
thought,” wrote Irving in his sixty-seventh year to the owner of the
old Hall, “that we should ever have lived to be two such respectable
old gentlemen?”, and many years after the curtain had fallen on the
gaiety and fun of those hilarious days, Peter Irving often recalled the
Saturdays at the Hall, when “we sported on the lawn until fatigued, and
sometimes fell sociably into a general nap in the drawing-room in the
dusk of the evening.” In town the “lads of Kilkenny” often assembled at
Dyde’s, a tavern of good standing in Park Row; a convenient place for
after-theatre suppers.
To riot at Dyde’s on imperial champagne,
And then scour our city--the peace to maintain,
was an occupation which these gentlemen pursued with great success.
When the financial resources of the revelers ran low they reduced the
scale of expenditure by resorting to an unpretentious porter-house at
the corner of Nassau and John Streets, not far from the theatre, where
they indulged in what they depreciatingly called “Blackguard Suppers.”
The modern misogynist habit of living in clubs and associating with
one sex only had not come into vogue in those sociable and informal
days, and the young men who formed the Knickerbocker group were on
good terms with the belles of the day, and appear to have been much in
evidence at social functions. Irving asked Henry Ogden, who had sailed
for China, to “pick up two or three queer little pretty things that
would cost nothing and be acceptable to the girls,” and there are hints
of a Chinese supper later.
The first number of “Salmagundi,” the initial work of the so-called
Knickerbocker School, was published on January 24, 1807, preceded
by some clever and mystifying announcements in the “Evening Post.”
It appeared fortnightly through the year, and came to an untimely
end in January, 1808, not because its popularity was waning, but
because its publisher was disposed to deal in an arbitrary fashion
with its high-spirited editors. The idea of a periodical which would
deal freely and frankly, in a satiric or humorous spirit, with the
fashions and foibles of the town originated with Irving, who secured
his brother William and his friend James K. Paulding as associates in
what turned out to be a more extended and elaborate frolic than they
had hitherto planned. They proposed to amuse themselves with the town,
and they succeeded for a year in keeping the little city on tip-toe
expectation, not unmixed with apprehension; for “Salmagundi,” while
entirely free from personalities and scandal, was keen in its comments
on manners and local social standards. It was written in the manner of
the “Spectator”; but New York did not furnish the varied and brilliant
material which London offered Steele and Addison, and the Irvings and
Paulding lacked the sophisticated charm, the intimate and adroit skill
of their predecessors. They were, moreover, very young apprentices,
and must not be judged by the standards set by the masters of the
art, whose comments on passing fashions have become contributions to
literature. The banter was somewhat heavy-handed and the humor gave
little promise of the lightness of Irving’s later manner, or of the
clear-cut and nimble wit of Lowell and Holmes. It bore the stamp of a
provincial society and was rollicking and hilarious rather than keen
and pungent.
Irving had no illusions about its quality. The “North American Review,”
however, described “Salmagundi” as a production of extraordinary merit.
Eleven years after the last number appeared, Irving wrote to Brevoort
that, while it was pardonable as a youthful production, it was full
of errors, puerilities, and imperfections; and in a letter to Irving,
Paulding said: “I know you consider old Sal. a sort of saucy, flippant
trollope belonging to nobody and not worth fathering.” “Salmagundi” had
the crudity of youth, but it also had its high spirits, its gaiety, and
its audacious confidence in its own opinions. It was frolicsome and
joyous and not devoid of literary grace and skill, and will remain the
happiest contemporary record of old New York.
The old Government House, which had been built for the President of
the United States, faced Bowling Green when “Salmagundi” published the
chapter entitled “A Tour in Broadway.” This building passed through
a period of great distinction as the residence of Governor George
Clinton and of Chief Justice Jay, and then lost prestige as the
local post-office. In its cellar were stored the statues of gods and
goddesses belonging to the homeless Academy of Arts. The lead statue
of George the Third, which formerly stood on Bowling Green, had been
pulled down and run into bullets to be aimed at his Majesty’s troops,
and the Green had been put to bucolic uses as a pasturage for cows.
Cortlandt Street corner was a famous vantage-ground from which to see
the belles go by in pleasant weather, on shopping bent. The City Hall,
according to “Salmagundi,” was a resort for young lawyers, not because
they had business there, but because they had no business anywhere else.
There was an advanced wing of society which practised the latest arts
of pleasure imported from the Old World. The great god Style already
had its votaries, and then, as now, many were the sacrifices of good
taste and refined manners offered at its painted paste-board shrine.
“Salmagundi” found a rich yield of satire in the imitative instinct
which shaped many of the customs and social habits of the hour. It
informs us that
Style, that with pride each empty bosom swells,
Puffs boys to manhood, little girls to belles.
The waltz was a novelty in those days, and “Salmagundi” “views with
alarm” its introduction into the social life of the town:
Scarce from the nursery freed, our gentle fair
Are yielded to the dancing-master’s care;
And, ere the head one mite of sense can gain,
Are introduced ’mid folly’s frippery train.
A stranger’s grasp no longer gives alarms,
Our fair surrender to their very arms,
And in the insidious waltz will swim and twine,
And whirl and languish tenderly divine!
O, how I hate this loving, hugging dance;
This imp of Germany brought up in France!
* * * * *
Let France its whim, its sparkling wit supply,
The easy grace that captivates the eye;
But curse their waltz,--their loose, lascivious arts
That smooth our manners to corrupt our hearts!
In the novel and play of the time “Salmagundi” found still more
alarming evidences of a decline in morals and manners:
Where now those books, from which in days of yore
Our mothers gained their literary store?
Alas! stiff-skirted Grandison gives place
To novels of a new and rakish race;
And honest Bunyan’s pious, dreaming lore,
To the lascivious rhapsodies of Moore.
And, last of all, behold the mimic stage
Its morals lend to polish off the age,
With flimsy farce, a comedy miscall’d,
Garnished with vulgar cant, and proverbs bald,
With puns most puny, and a plenteous store
Of smutty jokes, to catch a gallery roar.
Or see, more fatal, graced with every art
To charm and captivate the female heart,
The false, “the gallant, gay Lothario” smiles,
And loudly boasts his base seductive wiles--
In glowing colors paints Calista’s wrongs,
And with voluptuous scenes the tale prolongs.
The stage of social development at which the town had arrived is
indicated by the words “female heart.” Its old-fashioned virtue,
assailed by “Lalla Rookh” and “The Penitents,” had, fortunately, no
premonitions that its infancy in the dramatization of vice was to pass
into the full and voluptuous maturity of these later days of the play
of passion without a shred to its back.
“Salmagundi” had made the town smile, but “A History of New York” was
so broad in its mock-heroic treatment of the local forefathers that
it gave grievous offence to those members of the early Dutch families
who lacked the sense of humor. An old gentleman who died twenty years
ago once said to the writer of these lines, with perfect gravity, that
Mr. Irving once confessed to him that the history was not entirely
accurate! It appeared just before Christmas in 1809, preceded by
cunningly devised hints and intimations in the form of letters, asking
for information about a certain old gentleman who bore the name of
Knickerbocker, who was last seen resting himself near Kingsbridge by
the passengers in the Albany stage. He had a small bundle tied in a
red bandana handkerchief in his hands, and appeared to be very much
fatigued. Ten days passed without news of the whereabouts of this weary
old gentleman, when it was announced that a book in his handwriting
had been discovered in his room and would be disposed of to pay the
arrears of his board and lodging!
The town became immensely interested, and when the History appeared it
was eagerly read, laughed over, and denounced. Never was a book more
cleverly announced even in this day, when advertising has become an art
based on a deep study of the psychology of the crowd and the effect
on the human mind of rhythmical recurrence, at short intervals, of
skilfully phrased testimonials from eminent persons to the superiority
of certain articles without which it is impossible to live. There
were eighty thousand people in New York, and the society folk who
constituted the “town” in the technical sense of the word were a
comparatively small and homogeneous group, many of whom were of Dutch
descent and bore names long honored in the city and now inscribed
on the signs on the corners of the streets. The History, originally
projected as a satire on a solemn and heavy-handed “Picture of New
York” which had recently appeared, had widened its scope, and, like
“The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews,” which started out
to be a travesty on Richardson’s “Pamela,” took on the dimensions of
an original contribution to literature. The dedication “To the New
York Historical Society” struck the key-note of its burlesque gravity
of manner and its audacious and rollicking fun. Its appearance was the
signal for a blaze of wrath accompanied by a peal of laughter from
New York to Albany. Mrs. Hoffman wrote to Irving, referring to one of
his friends who was a social leader: “Your good friend, the old lady,
came home in a great stew this evening. Such a scandalous story had got
about town--a book had come out called a ‘History of New York’; nothing
but a satire and ridicule of the old Dutch people--and they said you
was the author; but from this foul slander, I’ll venture to say, she
has defended you. She was quite in a heat about it.”
Ten years later, when its obvious burlesque intention ought to have
filtered into the most solemn-minded, it was described by an eminent
citizen of Dutch descent as “a coarse caricature.” Its humor was not
lost, however, by a host of people in the town and elsewhere. “If it is
true, as Sterne says,” wrote a correspondent in a Baltimore newspaper,
“that a man draws a nail out of his coffin every time he laughs, after
reading Irving’s book your coffin will fall to pieces.” Walter Scott
wrote to Irving’s friend Henry Brevoort: “Looking at the simple and
obvious meaning only, I have never read anything so closely resembling
the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have
employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two
ladies who are our guests, and our sides have been absolutely sore with
laughing.”
This audacious burlesque of the early history of the city and of its
men of local fame and Dutch descent was the initial volume in American
literature, the first book of what used to be called _belles-lettres_
published in this country, the first piece of American writing of
literary quality which caught the attention of Europe. It also created
the Knickerbocker Legend, and gave the earliest group of writers in
New York a descriptive name. Diedrich Knickerbocker has long been the
impersonation of old New York, and, with Rip Van Winkle and Brom Bones,
forms the central group in our New World mythology; and “The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and the old-fashioned gentleman who
was last seen on the Albany Post Road constitute our chief group of
legendary characters and are all the creations of Irving’s imagination.
While descriptions of the scenery and peoples of the New World had been
written south of Manhattan Island and theological treatises abounded
in New England, it was significant of the metropolitan spirit of New
York that its earliest writers, who were also the earliest writers
of literary spirit and purpose in the country, were men of humor and
urbanity, and on easy terms with life.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
[Illustration]
Two years after the publication of “A History of New York,” Irving was
living at No. 16 Broadway, near Bowling Green, with his friend Henry
Brevoort. He had made various journeys to Albany and Washington by the
tedious methods of travel in use at the time, and his letters showed
conditions in political life which differed from those prevailing
to-day chiefly in being more sordid and unscrupulous. The coterie who
were to become known as the Knickerbocker group had become a little
less boisterous in their convivialities, but not less persuaded that
literature and jovial good-fellowship throve well together. They were
often at the Hall on the Passaic or at the home of Captain Phillips in
the Highlands of the Hudson, where spacious mansions and large estates
had multiplied; and there were houses in town, like Mrs. Renwick’s,
where these gay young men were at ease.
On the 25th of May, 1815, Irving sailed for Liverpool, and did not
set foot on Manhattan Island again until 1832. He had given New York
the Knickerbocker tradition, made the first important contribution to
_belles-lettres_ in this country, and conferred on the metropolis the
distinction of being the birthplace of American literature.
Between the publication of “Salmagundi” in 1807 and Irving’s return
from Europe in 1832, the group of young men who belonged to his
coterie and who formed the Knickerbocker group had their golden age
of easy conditions so far as absence of competition was concerned.
Long afterward Irving said to George William Curtis: “You young
literary fellows to-day have a harder time than we old fellows had.
You trip over each other’s heels; there are so many of you. We had it
all our own way. But the account is square, for you can make as much
by a lecture as we made by a book.” The “town” lasted well on into
the Thirties, but it was no longer the undisturbed provincial city.
Cooper, Bryant, Willis, and Poe had become residents, and there was a
further progression toward cosmopolitanism. Moreover, the city was
fast outgrowing its old-time metes and bounds, and complaints about
the distances between sections and lamentations for the passing of
“the good old times” began to be heard. While Irving was industriously
transcribing the half-forgotten background of ripe landscape and
ancient custom in the Old World and winning a reputation of the most
enviable kind, the rollicking friends who had been young together were
passing into maturity and making the most of the morning hours of
reputation and position.
No more interesting face was seen in the streets of New York in the
days of Irving’s long expatriation than that of James Kirke Paulding.
The regular and clear-cut features, the smiling but penetrating eyes,
the compact, well-poised head with its mass of hair worn with the
picturesque carelessness of nature, gave him a look of distinction.
He was a very companionable man, and there was no suggestion of the
precision and preoccupation of the man of affairs about Paulding; his
convictions were deep-set and never kept in the background if there was
occasion for their expression; but, like all companionable men, he knew
how to find common ground with a friend ample enough for the freest
interchange of jest and idea. He was of colonial stock, as were all
the men of his craft in New York. For many years before the Revolution
the Pauldings had lived in Tarrytown, which is intimately associated
with the Knickerbocker tradition; but that lovely shore of the Hudson
was open to the ravages of both armies during the war, and the family
removed to Dutchess County. This county lies north of Westchester, and
both have fed New York with men of distinction. Dutchess claims to
have been the mother of beautiful women as well, one of them of such
surpassing loveliness that the Czar of Russia of that day pronounced
her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The poet’s father was
active in the American cause, and his cousin John was one of the
captors of Major André. His boyhood was so ravaged by the uncertainties
and hardships of war that he said later that he never wished to be
young again.
He was in his nineteenth year when he came to New York, and, through
his acquaintance with William Irving, met the group of young men who
were making a business of pleasure and a recreation of literature.
He and Washington Irving were soon fast friends, and the first number
of “Salmagundi” was their joint production. Paulding, like Cooper,
became involved later in controversies which gave sharp point to his
pen, but in “Salmagundi” he shared with Irving the gaiety of spirit
and urbanity of manner which made the keen satire of that quick-witted
journal entertaining even to its victims. Duyckinck was of opinion
that the papers in Oriental guise were from Paulding’s hand, and that
he wrote many of the best descriptive passages; and characterized his
style as stamped by feeling, observation, friendly truth, and genial
sympathy. He was one of the first to state forcibly the American case
in the long and at times acrimonious interchange of criticism between
this country and England, and “The Diverting History of John Bull
and Brother Jonathan” was so keen a piece of satire, but so free from
malice, that it was reprinted in England. A later satire in the form of
a parody on the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” made such stinging comment
on the British raids on Chesapeake Bay as to be thought worthy of the
attention of the “Quarterly Review,” an adept in the heavy-handed
castigation in vogue at that time. A retort to the strictures of the
“Quarterly Review” soon followed in pamphlet form, and raided English
morals and manners with such effectiveness that it caught the attention
of President Madison.
In 1816 Paulding traveled in Virginia and wrote one of the earliest of
those local studies which record the interstate commerce of observation
and criticism for which this country supplies such abundant
material. The spirited and frank retorts to the somewhat oppressive
“condescension of foreigners” had made Paulding known to the country
at large, but when “The Backwoodsman” appeared in 1818 its elaborate
and very formal heroics, descriptive of the fortunes of an emigrant who
made the perilous change from the Hudson to the frontier, found the
same scanty measure of favor now generally extended to narrative poems.
The poem enjoyed a distinction, however, at that time very rare: it was
translated into French. Paulding’s friend and contemporary has left a
somewhat enigmatic comment on this original American production:
Homer was well enough; but would he ever
Have written, think you, “The Backwoodsman”?
Never!
If these lines had fallen under the eye of Matthew Arnold we should
have had another light-handed international amenity to contribute to
the joy of both nations.
When Paulding tried to recall the atmosphere and tone of “Salmagundi”
in 1819, it was soon evident that the “town” of the early Knickerbocker
had merged into a larger community, and much of the wit went wide
of the mark. Paulding, meanwhile, had entered public service and
was living in Washington. In 1823 he published his first novel,
“Koningsmarke,” a study of life among the Swedish settlers on the banks
of the Delaware. But the satirical impulse was strong in him, and the
title of his next book, “John Bull in America; or, the New Münchausen,”
is sufficiently descriptive to make further comment unnecessary; while
“The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham,” which appeared a
year later, touched somewhat caustically the new social doctrine of
Robert Dale Owen, the rising science of phrenology, and other matters
of interest at the moment. His aptness for satire was braced in
Paulding by a lively dislike for the heavy contemptuousness of manner
of some Englishmen of the time, and the abundant material furnished by
some of these candid friends led him again to enter the field with one
of the keenest of his satires, “The Mirror for Travelers,” a burlesque
guide-book and record of travel in this country, in a cleverly imitated
British manner.
In this satiric view Paulding was a true child of the Knickerbocker
spirit, and his next books, “Tales of the Good Woman” and “Chronicles
of the City of Gotham,” purported to be translations of legends of
early New York. A Mrs. Grant, who had written pleasantly of the old
Dutch settlers, furnished material for “The Dutchman’s Fireside”;
a story which so greatly pleased the readers of the day that it
went promptly through six editions and was republished in England,
France, and Holland. In Washington, as in New York, Paulding was a
thoroughgoing Knickerbocker; but he had an eye for manners and great
zest for the pleasures of hospitality, and his account of Virginia
was followed, the year after the appearance of the Dutch novel,
by “Westward Ho!”, a story that, moving with the southern flow of
emigration, began in Virginia and was worked out in Kentucky. Paulding
was charmed by the plantation life, the generous hospitality, and the
winning Southern temperament, and in 1836, when the tide of feeling in
the country was rising, wrote an uncompromising defence of slavery, an
institution with which he was not unfamiliar in his own State, where it
was not abolished until 1799. In 1837 Paulding entered the cabinet of a
Knickerbocker President, Van Buren, as Secretary of the Navy.