himself as a lawyer with a strong bent toward literature, but not
yet fully committed to a change of profession. A year earlier he had
made a flying visit to the city and been warmly welcomed by Cooper,
Halleck, the Sedgwicks, and other well-known people. The appearance
of “Thanatopsis” in 1817, and of the memorable “Lines to a Waterfowl”
a year later, had put his reputation as a poet on a basis so solid
that, while it was greatly broadened as time went on, it did not
need to be strengthened. In June, 1825, his name appeared as editor
on the title-page of the “New York Review and Athenæum Magazine.”
Later in the year he read four lectures before the Athenæum Society;
and two years later, under the auspices of the recently established
National Academy of Design, he talked so well about certain phases of
Mythology that he was asked to repeat the course several successive
years. In 1826 he became the New York editor of a periodical which
bore the portentous name of “The New York Literary Gazette or American
Athenæum,” at a salary of five hundred dollars a year. His financial
position was precarious and had become desperate when he was invited
to join the editorial staff of the “New York Evening Post,” a journal
always intimately connected with the literary history of the city. As
a by-product of his industry, Bryant contributed editorial suggestion
and writing to the “Talisman,” one of those old-fashioned annuals
which grew like mushrooms during the decade which ended in 1830. In
the closing year of that decade, having acquired an interest in the
“Evening Post,” he wrote to R. H. Dana that he had made sure of a
comfortable livelihood: “I do not like politics any better than you do;
but they get only my mornings, and you know politics and a bellyful are
better than poetry and starvation.” Long after the Knickerbocker era
had become a tradition, Bryant was reaping the double reward of the
poet and journalist, and enjoying well-earned prosperity of hand and
heart.
Among the men who found a convenient meeting-place in the shop of
Charles Wiley, a well-known publisher of the Knickerbocker period, at
the corner of Wall and New Streets, was Richard Henry Dana, whose “Two
Years Before the Mast” has been thumbed by many generations of American
boys. A Cambridge man, with a Harvard education, Dana breathed another
air than that of the metropolis; but for many years his was a familiar
figure in the places where men of literary habit gathered in New York.
In the back room of Wiley’s shop, familiarly known as the “Den,” Dana
met Cooper, Halleck, Brevoort, and a genial company who found pleasure
in Cooper’s somewhat pessimistic talk. It was on Broadway, General
Wilson tells us, that the modest author of “The Idle Man” was almost
assaulted by an enthusiastic admirer who cried, “Are you the immortal
Dana?” lifted the astonished man in his arms, rushed across the street
with him, and placed him triumphantly on his own threshold; the author
meantime calling out, “Release me from this maniac!” Such lively
demonstrations of admiration for men of Letters are no longer seen on
Broadway!
Local self-consciousness was already pronounced in the foremost
towns of the country in the third decade of the Nineteenth Century.
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, were in the race for the intellectual
primacy of the New World, and Richmond and Charleston were not
unmindful of their claims upon the homage of the nation. Nearly every
State cherished the belief that it contained within its borders a
modern Athens which could bravely invite comparison with the ancient
capital of Attica. In 1824 Boston was spoken of as “The Literary
Emporium,” a description which had, unhappily, a suggestion of trade
associations. Three years later, Philadelphia, according to a magazine
prospectus, had “within herself a larger fund of talent, erudition,
and science--larger perhaps than any other city can boast.” New York
was not lacking in the audacity which is born of self-confidence.
In 1820 an attempt was made to establish in the Knickerbocker town
an “American Academy of Languages and Belles-Lettres,” which boldly
set out to protect the language from “local and foreign corruptions,”
and to establish a “standard of writing and pronunciation, correct,
fixed, and uniform, throughout our extensive territory.” To allay the
apprehensions of the Old World, it was announced that no effort would
be made “to form an American language.” It is painful to record the
fact that this modest effort to guard the mother tongue aroused local
jealousy and perished at birth. Boston derided it!
But if New York failed to make itself the seat of an academy, it did
not fail to foster the infant industry of journalism. Professor Cairns
enumerates no less than thirty periodicals of various kinds established
in the city between 1816 and 1833. These were all modest enterprises,
and of brief and varied careers. The scale of expenditure must fill the
editors of magazines to-day with bitter regret for the conditions of
the good old times. In 1822 the publishers of the “Atlantic Magazine,”
issued in New York, paid its editor five hundred dollars a year, and
authorized an expenditure of the same amount for the conduct of the
magazine!
There were many lesser writers and men of cultivated taste in
literature and art in the closing years of the Knickerbocker period,
who formed a congenial society in the growing city, and, in some cases,
made important contributions to the scholarship of their time and
secured local reputation and influence.
Gulian Crommelin Verplanck was a fine type of the old-time gentleman
of colonial descent. After his graduation from Columbia College he
studied law, made the “grand tour,” which was not only a part of a
liberal education in those days but an enterprise of an adventurous
character, returned to become a dignified professor in what is now
the General Theological Seminary, spent eight years in Congress, and
for nearly fifty years was Vice-Chancellor of the State University.
He had a happy faculty of dignified address on public occasions, was
a contributor to the “Talisman” with Bryant, edited an illustrated
edition of Shakespeare, and appears to have been regarded by the gay
spirits of Cockloft Hall as a person not quite of their kind. Older
men, however, held him in great esteem, Bryant reports, as “an example
of steady, studious, and spotless youth.” His protest against Irving’s
presentation of the founders of Manhattan would seem to indicate that
his sense of humor was not always keen.
Frederick S. Cozzens, whose “Sparrowgrass Papers” later achieved
a brilliant local reputation, has left a characterization of Dr.
John Wakefield Francis, a physician of considerable professional
distinction, strong literary interests, and much given to hospitality,
which stands in no need of amplification: “The Doctor is one of our old
Knickerbockers. His big, bushy head is as familiar as the City Hall. He
belongs to the ‘God bless you, my dear young friend’ school. He is as
full of knowledge as an egg is full of meat. He knows more about China
than the Emperor of the Celestial Empire.”
A fleeting figure in the Knickerbocker town was the author of “Home,
Sweet Home,” a song of such popularity that Foster’s songs are its
only rivals. It was one of the ironies of life that John Howard Payne
should spend his days in exile and die beyond the seas. He was born
at No. 33 Pearl Street in 1791, became a clerk in a counting-room at
fourteen, and a semi-professional editor while in his teens; though
his connection with the “Thespian Mirror,” a local journal devoted
to the drama, was kept secret. He spent two terms in Union College,
but the stage was calling him, and in 1809--a year memorable for the
extraordinary number of men of genius it brought to birth--he played
the once popular part of _Young Norval_ on the boards of the Park
Theatre. Three years later he was playing with moderate success in
English theatres, and a little later adapting and writing plays in
Paris, drawing his material chiefly from French sources. The song which
was to give him a world-wide reputation was written in a room in the
Palais Royal for his play, “Clari; or, The Maid of Milan.” He died at
Tunis in 1852, and thirty years later “Home, Sweet Home” was sung by
a host of people gathered in Washington about the grave in which his
body was reinterred. Payne had talents of an uncommon order; men of
the quality and distinction of Talma, Coleridge, and Lamb were warmly
attached to him; his work was rewarded with generous returns in money;
but he was always in financial straits and seems to have lacked the
happy faculty of making himself at home in the world.
Other men less fugitive than Payne, though of purely local fame,
contributed to the good-fellowship of the later Knickerbocker period.
Charles P. Clinch wrote plays, poems, and criticisms; held public
office; and became the devoted friend of Halleck and Drake. “The Spy,”
“The First of May,” “The Expelled Collegians,” and an address prepared
for the opening of the Park Theatre, testify to his industry, but
failed to give his reputation more than local and passing importance.
The informal fellowship of the early Knickerbockers gave way to the
earliest literary and artistic clubs. Of one of the earliest of these
Robert Charles Sands was a member. The “Sketch Club” included Bryant,
Halleck, Verplanck, Cole, Ingham, Durand, Weir, and other practitioners
of the arts. The “Century Association,” which has been intimately
associated with the literary, artistic, and professional life of New
York, was organized at a meeting of the “Sketch Club” in 1847. Sands
was a poet and journalist, a warm-hearted, kindly humorist. A more
vigorous personality was William Leggett, who began his professional
life in the navy, while still a young man published a volume of poems
in New York, wrote with great ardor for the periodicals of the day,
and finally became one of the editors of the “Evening Post.” He was a
man of the old-time belligerent type, and fought a duel of much local
notoriety at Weehawken, where the most famous and tragic duel ever
fought on American soil had taken place in 1804.
The most popular member of the later Knickerbocker group was Charles
Fenno Hoffman, who had a happy faculty of song and verse writing. The
lasting popularity of “Sparkling and Bright” needs no explanation;
while the verses on the battle of Monterey have a ring of genuine
emotion and a force of spirited action which carry them in spite of
awkward lines:
We were not many--we who stood
Before the iron sleet that day;
Yet many a gallant spirit would
Give half his years if but he could
Have been with us at Monterey.
Hoffman was connected editorially with the “New York American” and
was one of the founders of the “Knickerbocker Magazine,” which was
born in the afterglow of the Knickerbocker period and continued the
Knickerbocker tradition, though its scope gave it national importance.
His editorial duties left Hoffman an ample margin of time for lyrical
work, and his short poems of singing quality, “The Myrtle and Steel,”
“Room, Boys, Room,” “’Tis Hard to Share her Smiles with Many,” were
sung, hummed, and whistled in many parts of the country. His “Winter in
the West,” made up of a series of letters, was one of the early reports
of adventure and incident on the frontier.
Albany was, after New York, the chief centre of the Dutch tradition,
and had a very hospitable and delightful society intimately connected
with its kin city at the mouth of the Hudson. From Albany, at short
intervals, came Alfred Billings Street. He was always welcome in New
York, where his somewhat prolific verse was held in great esteem.
He was a devout student of Nature, and had a happy command of the
descriptive phrase, and his contemporaries among the American poets
were generous in their estimates of the excellence of his poetry.
Longfellow gave him the first place as a reporter of forest scenery,
and Bryant was “impressed with the fidelity and vividness of the images
newly drawn from Nature.”
Among the scholarly writers of the later time was Henry Theodore
Tuckerman, whose name has a colonial flavor in the mind of the New
Yorker of to-day. He brought the name here from Boston in the afterglow
of the Knickerbocker age, spent many years in Europe, and became the
most accomplished of the early American writers in the field of art.
He was a man of wide reading, with a charm of manner which won him
an enviable popularity in the social life of New York and Newport,
and with the catholicity of interests and tastes which mark the
cosmopolitan temper. Evert Augustus Duyckinck, on the other hand, was a
son of the soil and an inheritor of the tradition, though he was born
too late to be counted among the Knickerbocker writers. In 1830, when
the Knickerbocker age reached its end and the mid-century writers began
to appear, Duyckinck was preparing for Columbia College, and it was not
until 1840, on his return from an extended visit in Europe, that he
began a long and industrious career as an editor and writer. His chief
claim on the attention of lovers of old New York rests on his service
as a literary historian. His “Cyclopædia of American Literature,” his
text for the “National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans,” and his
“Memorial of Fitz-Greene Halleck” are valuable records of the early
men of Letters in this country, with many of whom he was personally
associated.
Edgar Allan Poe came to New York in the later Thirties, and made
and lost friends as in every place where he tried, with pathetic
hopefulness, to find anchorage. His attitude toward the Knickerbocker
group was one of mingled condescension and contempt. In any society he
would have been a detached and lonely figure, and the lasting memorial
of his ill-starred genius and broken career in New York is the cottage
at Fordham in which Virginia Poe died.
These variously gifted men found the remuneration of literary work
far too meagre for “human nature’s daily food,” and took refuge
in business occupations of various kinds. Halleck was an expert
accountant fortunate in his connection with Mr. Astor, while Drake
studied medicine and, after the custom of many old-time physicians,
had an interest in a drug-store. Clinch was in the employment of a
ship-builder, and for nearly two generations was Deputy Collector of
the Port of New York; Payne began his career as a clerk; and Sprague
was a bank cashier. Irving and Cooper were amply rewarded by a public
to which they offered the novelty of original American literature;
Bryant found ease and a comfortable fortune in journalism. In 1822,
Professor Cairns reminds us, he set a price on his shorter poems which
could hardly be regarded as exorbitant--two dollars each. George P.
Morris was more fortunate so far as income was concerned, and reached
such an altitude of popularity that he could sell a song unread for
fifty dollars, while a very unimportant drama from his hand brought
him thirty-five hundred dollars. Then, as now, journalism was a refuge
from the inadequate rewards of literature; though it must be frankly
conceded that, while much of the work of the lesser Knickerbocker
writing had a pleasant humor, a delightful gaiety of mood or lightness
of style, it was neither vital nor original, and its appeal was limited
to a small group of readers.
In the later years of his life, Irving was in the habit of speaking
of “Salmagundi” as light and trivial; an overflow of youthful fun and
audacity. Mr. Barrett Wendell is of opinion that the “literature of
Brockden Brown, of Irving, of Cooper, and of Poe is only a literature
of pleasure, possessing, so far as it has excellence at all, only
the excellence of conscientious refinement”; and that nothing in
it “touched seriously on either God’s eternities, or the practical
conduct of life in the United States.” This is an incidentally happy
characterization of the Knickerbocker literature: it was a literature
of pleasure, and it was delightfully free from the didactic and
sermonic note at a time when, Lowell declared, all New England was
a pulpit. Its touch on morals and manners was light, satiric, and
amusing; in its way it had the tone of the world of society rather than
of theology or reform. Its preaching, like that of Addison and Steele,
was lightly winged and phrased in the language of an easy, cordial
society; tolerant in opinion, hospitable to differences of religion
and political habit, concerned chiefly to make itself agreeable and
the time of its sojourn in the vale of tears pleasantly profitable.
New York was not indifferent to the religious side of life, but its
preaching was reserved for churches; its literature, though somewhat
provincial in time and manner, was kept well within the ancient
province of art.
In 1858 the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of “The
Knickerbocker Magazine” was commemorated by the publication of “The
Knickerbocker Gallery,” a volume of portentous size and effusive
elegance, made up of articles written by contributors to the magazine.
Fifty-four men are represented in the collection, of whom only four
belonged to the early and characteristic Knickerbocker period. Irving
drew upon a commonplace-book of a date thirty-five years earlier for a
few notes; Bryant and Halleck were among the poets of the collection;
John W. Francis and Alfred B. Street were familiar names to the old New
Yorkers of that day. A new generation was in possession of the stage,
however; and the Old Town, with its Dutch traditions, was slowly losing
its outlines in the neighborly city of the years between 1830 and 1880,
as that in turn is fast being obliterated by the cosmopolitan city of
to-day.
The old places have vanished, and the old faces are remembered to-day
only by the aid of a few portraits. The names of the streets in the
lower section of the modern city recall men and women whose genial
hospitality set a fashion which has never gone out in New York, though
the guests of the city have become so many that hotels of imposing
size and oppressive splendor are taxed to provide them shelter. But
behind the tumult of the great tides of life which flow through the
thoroughfares there is a silent New York, which is unspoiled by the
possession of wealth, and which hears the appeals of the unfortunate
within its borders, and gives time and work and money with tireless
generosity of heart and hand.
There was a charm about the Old Town which depended largely on
neighborliness and the narrower interests which thrive in a small and
homogeneous community; the charm of ease and of leisure and a certain
contentment with life; of the ripeness of temper and of mind which is
the fine flowering of an education based on the humanities; of room
for work and pleasure large enough for fame, but not too large for the
nearer satisfactions of local celebrity. It was the good fortune of the
early Knickerbocker writers, by temperament and taste, instinctively to
adapt their gifts to their time and Town; and it was the good fortune
of the Town to be the birthplace of American literature, and the home
of two writers who were first to give that literature a place in the
interest of the world.
[Illustration]
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
This book does not have a Table of Contents, but the “Head-bands”
entries in the List of Woodcuts may serve almost as well.