Speaking appreciatively a few nights ago at the club, concerning a
recent magazine article on “Prescott, the Man,” I was reminded by a
youthful university graduate of only twenty-five years standing, that
“Prescott is an old-fashioned historian.”
There is much that is amusing in the attitude of the self-sufficient
present towards the things of the past and there is also an element of
the pathetic. I am often called an “old fogy,” an epithet whose origin
and derivation are uncertain, but whose meaning is reasonably plain.
Nobody who ever had the name applied to him was oppressed by any doubt
about its signification. Some authorities tell us that it comes from the
Swedish _fogde_—one who has charge of a garrison,—but I question it
despite the confident assertion of the _Century Dictionary_. It is not
altogether inappropriate, because old fogies are compelled to hold the
fort against all manner of abominations. They are the brakes on the
electric cars of modern pseudo-progress. Thackeray speaks of “old
Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney the East India director, old Cutler the
surgeon,—that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other
dinners sound and round and dine for the mere purpose of guttling.”
So the term is always associated with the stupid and the ridiculous,
used with regard to “elderly persons who have no sympathy with the
amusements and pursuits of the young.” Nobody ever refers to a young
fogy, although most of us know many exceedingly dull-witted young people
who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the aged or
even of the middle-aged. One class is no more worthy of contempt than
the other. The adolescents who find their highest form of entertainment
in “bridge” are at least as deserving of pity as the semi-centenarian
who prefers to pass his evenings among his books and his pictures or to
devote them to Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There are some
delights about the library fireside which compare favorably with those
of the corridors of our most popular hostelry.
Certain kindly critics have insisted that my own literary tastes were
acquired in the year 1850. I am not sure that the despised tastes formed
in those commonplace, mid-century days are to be esteemed more highly
than the tastes of our own self-satisfied times, but a good deal may be
said in their favor. Perhaps the past is not always inferior to the
present. There are varying opinions on the subject, from the familiar
saying of Alfonso of Aragon, quoted by Melchior, immortalized by Bacon,
and paraphrased by Goldsmith—that saying about old wood, old wine, old
friends, and old authors—to the dogmatic declaration of Whittier that
“still the new transcends the old.” It may occur to antiquated minds
that there are some elements of excellence about old plays compared with
the dramatic works of this careless, _insouciant_ time; that Wordsworth
has some merits which are superior to those of the worthy gentleman who
now fills the office of Laureate, and that possibly the poetry of the
last few years is not entitled to boast itself greatly beside that of
the early nineteenth century—the poetry of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley
and of Keats. But we have the telephone and the trolley-car, the
automobile, the aeroplane, and the operation for appendicitis; and we
admire our progress, the wonderful growth of the material, the
mechanical, and the million-airy, while a few may pause to ask whether
good taste and good manners have grown as greatly. Some of our older
buildings for example are assuredly far better to look at than the lofty
structures of steel which tower in lower New York and make of our
streets darksome canons where the light of day scarcely penetrates and
where the winds of winter roar wildly about our devoted heads as we
struggle, hat-clutching, to our office doorways. May we not cite the
City Hall and the Assay Office as honorable specimens of dignified
architecture? There was something impressive too about the old
“Tombs,”—replaced not long ago by a monstrosity;—a structure which a
lady recently told me was once referred to by an English friend who had
never been in New York, as “the Westminster Abbey of America.”
It is delightful to be young and to indulge in the illusions of youth—a
truism which it is safe to utter, for nobody will dispute it. “Youth is
a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret,” said the strange,
semi-oriental personage, an enigma in politics and a problem in
literature, Benjamin Disraeli. Everybody knows the rude saying of old
George Chapman, which it is almost an impertinence to quote, but every
one does not remember whence it came—that young men think the old men
are fools but old men know young men are fools. It is certain that we
have cherished that idea in our minds for many centuries. Pope, in his
epigrammatic way, remarked that “in youth and beauty wisdom is but
rare,” but we cannot give him credit for originality in the utterance.
We will go on with our regrets, our reproofs and our hesitancies, and in
the course of time those who sneer at us now as cumbersome relics,
_laudatores temporis acti_, mere maunderers enamored of an effete past,
will take their turn, fill our places, and endure the pitying and
condescending smiles of the succeeding generation. There is nothing new
under the sun, and the man of to-day may well pause in his arrogant
career to remember that he will quickly pass into the category of the
obsolete.
Some of us who are beginning to descend that downward slope of life
which soon becomes sadly precipitous, but who retain a vivid
recollection of the long ago, are fond of recalling a period of New York
which in this era of lavish expenditures, indiscriminating profuseness,
and careless prodigality seems strangely simple. Those were the days
when in sedate Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Square were the homes of
dignified wealth, whose owners rather looked down upon Fifth Avenue as
_parvenu_; and Forty-second Street was almost an outpost of
civilization. We revelled in the delights of the ancient Philharmonic
concerts and believed that Carl Bergmann was the last evolution of a
conductor; later we recognized Theodore Thomas as the man who did more
to develop a taste for good orchestral music in this country than any
other one man who ever lived. We thronged the stalls of old Wallack’s,
with its most excellent of stock-companies—something which has wholly
disappeared—and we rejoiced in Dion Boucicault and Agnes Robertson. A
little later we haunted the upper gallery of the Academy of Music in
Fourteenth Street,—at least _I_ did, because of a confirmed stringency
in the money market,—and cheered the magical top-notes of the ponderous
but melodious Wachtel and the generous tones of that most inspiring of
singers, the splendid Parepa-Rosa. We hailed with loud acclaims the
manly and dignified Santley—more in his element in oratorio than in
opera—and the royal contralto, Adelaide Phillips, long since forgotten
except by the Old Guard who afterwards transferred their allegiance to
Annie Louise Cary. It may have been a provincial time, but we did not
think so; it was a good time, and we enjoyed it.
It seems but yesterday when all over the land flashed the news of
Lincoln’s death, and the black draperies suddenly shrouded the streets
while the triumphant note of Easter Sunday died away in a cry of
lamentation. I was in old St. Bartholomew’s in Lafayette Place that
Sunday, and the recollection of it will never be lost. Nor shall I
forget the grief and alarm of a small band of Southerners, secessionists
of the strongest type, domiciled in the same house with me, as they
lamented that in the death of Abraham Lincoln the South had been
deprived of its best friend, the man who would have made reconstruction
a blessing instead of an affliction. They had been rebels, it is true,
but they were conscious of the loftiness of the soul of that noble
citizen who, with faults which are often the accompaniments of
greatness, stood for all that was just and magnanimous in our national
life.
Some of us have a clear recollection of the camping of soldiers in City
Hall Park, the cheering of the multitude as the regiments of volunteers
swung down Broadway on their march to Virginia, when we were striving to
preserve the republic and the horror of civil war was present with us
every hour. We were less cynical, less ambitious, less strenuous in
those days, and I think we were more serene and sincere. We had serious
imperfections, but we did not carry ourselves quite as mightily, and on
the whole we had some creditable characteristics. There is no good
reason why we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Were we so very stupid in the fifties? Was there not some true and
honorable life in our social and literary world of that generation?
Surely our newspapers were as worthy of respect as some of our
contemporary journals with their blazing capitals, their columns of
crime, their pages of the sensational, and their provoking condensed
headlines which exasperate me by their airy flippancy. I sometimes
wonder that nobody except myself utters a protest against those dreadful
headlines. They reduce almost everything to vulgarity, and the affection
of condensation is distinctly irritating. Most objectionable of all are
the headlines followed by interrogation points, because they are
misleading. If, for example, they say in capitals “Mr. Smith strikes his
mother?” the average reader—and there is more of that sort than of any
other—glancing over the pages misses the query and goes to his grave
with the firm conviction that poor Smith was the most unmanly of brutes.
I am not sure that the interrogation mark protects the proprietors
against a libel suit.
It is true that in the fifties our art may have been of the tame and
tidy sort, timorously clinging to the conventional; our financial
enterprises were conducted on so small a scale that a million was a sum
which made the banker’s heart palpitate with apprehensive emotion; our
politics were concerned chiefly with the colored man and his relations
to the State; in architecture our awful brown stone fronts were
oppressing in a domineering way all the town in and above Fourteenth
Street. But there was a certain dignity about it all, an absence of
tawdriness, a savor of respectability.
Fourteenth Street! It must be difficult for the New Yorkers of to-day
who have not passed the half-century mark to realize that only fifty
years ago it was really “up-town.” It is easier to imagine the present
Thomas Street as it was in 1815, a spot to be reached only after a
bucolic journey through country lanes which my grandfather used to
traverse on his way to the New York Hospital where he studied medicine.
We think of that condition of things in about the same state of mind as
that in which we contemplate the Roman Forum or the stony avenues of
Pompeii. It amuses me to recall the period of the fifties and early
sixties when the Hudson River Railroad had its terminus in Thirtieth
Street near Tenth Avenue, but sent its cars, horse-drawn, to Chambers
Streets and College Place just opposite old Ridley’s, whose pictures
were on those familiar inverted cones of never-to-be-forgotten candies,
the virtues whereof have been proclaimed sonorously on railway trains
from time immemorial, and that Chambers Street station will always live
in the memory of old-fashioned people who used to “go to town” from
rural neighborhoods. My aforesaid grandfather took me often, much to my
joy, to visit his son in West Nineteenth Street, and the conservative
old gentleman, who served as a surgeon under Commodore Charles Stewart
on the good ship “Franklin,” always went to Chambers Street and thence
by the Sixth Avenue horse-railway to Nineteenth Street, which caused the
pilgrimage to be unduly protracted, but we always reached our
destination sooner or later—generally later. I remember that an idiotic
notion possessed me that we were confined to traveling on West Broadway
because country people were not allowed to encumber the real, the
glorious Broadway, of whose omnibus-crowded splendors I caught but
furtive glimpses by peering up the cross-streets. Another gentleman of
the old school, whom I loved sincerely, invariably proceeded from
Thirtieth Street—and after the genesis of the Grand Central Station,
from Forty-second Street—to the Astor House, from which venerable house
of cheer he wended his way serenely to Union Square, or to Madison
Square, or to any quarter where his business or his pleasure led him,
however remote it might be from City Hall Park. To him the Astor House
was practically the hub of the metropolis. These details may seem to be
trivial, but they are characteristic of the old-fashioned men of half a
century ago who still clung to the swallow-tailed coat as a garment to
be worn by daylight. It never occurred to them to “take a cab,” possibly
because there was no cab which a decent person would willingly occupy
unless it had been ordered in advance from a livery stable. There are
many reasons why this land of freedom—modified freedom—is preferable to
any other land; but when we come to cabs, we must, in all fairness,
admit the superiority of the London hansom over a New York “growler,”
the hansoms now vanishing, we learn, before the all-conquering horde of
motor-cars.
The old-fashioned magazines—how few ever turn their pages now, and yet
how much in them is of interest, even to a casual reader. Far be it from
me to whisper the slightest word of disparagement about our gorgeous and
innumerable “monthlies,” with their pomp and pride of illustration,
extending from text to the copious advertisements, those soul-stirring
and lucrative adjuncts to a magazine of the present. Do not tell me that
a man who buys the thick, paper-covered book does not read the
advertisements; he pretends that he does not, but he does. According to
my experience he follows them from soap to steam-yachts, from
refrigerators to railway routes, but he would rather die than confess
it. Much as I admire these products of our later civilization, I
nevertheless maintain that there is more charm in an ancient number of
any worthy periodical than is to be found in the latest issue. Time
seems to add a mellow flavor to the good things of the past. There is
not much to say in praise of the solemn _Whig Review_ or of O’Sullivan’s
portentous _Democratic Review_, but take from the shelf a shabbily bound
volume of _Graham’s Magazine of Literature and Art_, published in the
forties, and there will be discovered a wilderness of delights. The
fashion-plates alone are dreams of comical beauty, and the steel plates
of “The Shepherd’s Love,” “The Proffered Kiss,” and “Lace Pattern with
Embossed View” far surpass—in a sense—the boasted work of Pyle and of
Abbey. What soul will decline to be thrilled at the lovely skit entitled
“Born to Love Pigs and Chickens” by that butterfly of literature,
Nathaniel Parker Willis, which you will find in the number of February,
1843. Consider the portrait of Charles Fenno Hoffman, with his exquisite
coatlet, his wonderful legs attired in what appear to be tights, and his
mild but intellectual countenance beaming upon us as he sits,
bare-headed, upon a convenient stage rock, holding in one hand an object
which may be a pie, a boxing-glove or a hat, according to the
imagination of the beholder. Contemplate the list of contributors,
including Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, and “Edgar A. Poe, Esq.,”
the “Esq.” adding a delicious dignity to each of the illustrious names.
It was only “sixty years since,” but can any magazine of to-day rival
that catalogue? Almost every one knows that Poe was editor of _Graham_
for a year and that _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_ as well as
Longfellow’s _Spanish Student_ first appeared in that magazine. Coming
to a later day, recall the _Harper_ of the fifties. No pleasure of the
present can equal that which we felt when we revelled in Abbott’s
Napoleon, which turned us lads into enthusiastic admirers of the great
Emperor; or when we enjoyed the jovial Porte Crayon, whose drawing was
consistently as bad as Thackeray’s, but whose fascinating humor had a
quality peculiarly its own. Not long ago Mr. Janvier, to the
gratification of the surviving members of the brotherhood of early
_Harper_ readers, gave to Strother the tribute of his judicious praise.
One may not gossip lightly about the _Atlantic_, but the _Knickerbocker_
is distinctly old-fashioned. Longfellow’s _Psalm of Life_ first saw the
light in its pages; immortal, even if Barrett Wendell does truthfully
say that it is full not only of outworn metaphor but of superficial
literary allusion. Old New York, adds Professor Wendell, expressed
itself in our first school of renascent writing, which withered away
with the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. But there was a Knickerbocker school,
and the brothers Willis and Gaylord Clark helped to sustain its glories.
The magazine began in 1832, faded in 1857 and died in 1864; and out of
it sprang many of the authors whose names are inseparably associated
with a golden period of our literature.
It was only a short time ago that one of the men of those by-gone times
departed this life, and the scanty mention of him in the public press
compelled a sad recognition of the familiar truth that in order to
retain popular attraction one must pose perpetually under the
lime-light. Parke Godwin, who belonged to the order of scholarly,
high-minded Americans, had outlived his fame, except among the
Centurions of West Forty-third Street and a few old people of the same
class. Perhaps he did not concentrate his powers sufficiently. Editor,
writer of political essays, author of _Vala, a Mythological Tale_,
biographer of his father-in-law, William Cullen Bryant, and by virtue of
his _History of France_, historian,—but he published only one volume
more than forty years ago and then abandoned the task—he had that broad
culture which sometimes disperses itself and fails to win for its
possessor the highest place in the literary hierarchy. He was a
delightful example of what we now regard as the old-fashioned, and his
address on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Century Club
is a mine of good things for one who is interested in the past of New
York. “I have stood once more” said he “beside the easel of Cole as he
poured his ideal visions of the Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire
in gorgeous colors upon the canvas. I have seen the boyish Kensett
trying to infuse his own refinement and sweetness into the wild woods of
the wold. I have watched the stately Gifford as he brought the City of
the Sea out of its waters, in a style that Cavaletto and Ziem would envy
and with a brilliancy of color that outshone even its native Italian
skies. I have stood beside the burly Leutze as he portrayed our
Washington among the ice of the Delaware, or depicted the multitudinous
tramp of immigrants making their western way through the wilderness to
the shores of the Oregon, that ‘hears no sound save its own dashings.’
All have come back for a moment, but they are gone, oh whither? Into the
silent land, says Von Salis; yet how silent it is! We speak to them, but
they answer us not again.” He brought back to us the beginning of
things, when he told us of the incipient conditions of the Academy of
Design. “They took a room—was it suggestive?—in the old Alms House in
the Park, and they worked under a wick dipped in whale-oil which gave
out more smoke than light.” He spoke of Halleck, of Gulian Verplanck, of
Bryant, of Charles Fenno Hoffman, of Robert C. Sands, and of old Tristam
Burges, “who had swallowed Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary;” and he
closed with a brief flight of eloquence such as in these days of
new-fashioned chilliness it is seldom vouchsafed to us to hear.
Of the same order was William Allen Butler, the friend of Halleck and of
Duyckinck, of Andrew Jackson and of Martin Van Buren, who knew Samuel
Rogers and visited him in London. He was nine years the junior of
Godwin. He might have won the highest eminence in the world of books if
he had not made the law his chief occupation and literature only his
recreation. The bar does not among its rewards number that of enduring
fame, unless occasionally some great political or criminal trial
perpetuates the name of the advocate chiefly concerned in it. Of course,
Mr. Butler’s early essay in verse, “Nothing to Wear,” will never be
entirely forgotten. A humorous skit as it was, its enduring merit is
shown by the fact that in spite of the old-fashioned terms descriptive
of woman’s dress and of the fashionable life of fifty years ago, in its
general tone it is curiously contemporaneous. Scarcely less witty and
amusing were his poems, “General Average” and “The Sexton and the
Thermometer,” the former being more highly esteemed by many than its
popular predecessor. I suppose that he left it out of the later
collection of his poems because, with his gentle and kindly nature, he
feared that a few of its passages might give offense to some of his
friends of the Jewish faith whom he esteemed and respected. His
translations of Uhland are marked by graceful and poetic fervor, and his
prose style was lucidity itself. His humor, always attractive and
appropriate, lightened even his most serious work, from an address on
Statutory Law to an argument in the Supreme Court in Washington City. It
was well said of him by a jurist now living, that “no man of his time,
either in England or America, held an equally high rank both as a lawyer
and a literary man.”
Another of the old-fashioned literary men, who was, however,
considerably the senior of both Godwin and Butler, was George Perkins
Morris, who died in 1864. He was at once a general of militia, an
editor, a favorite song-writer, and the composer of an opera libretto.
His title to immortality rests mainly upon the sentimental verses known
as “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” which had a flavor about them very dear
to our grandparents. To look at his manly countenance in the portrait
engraved by Hollyer (who at the present writing is still extant and
vigorous) after the Elliott painting, we can scarcely imagine him as the
author of such lines as “Near the Lake Where Drooped the Willow,” “We
Were Boys Together,” “Land-Ho,” “Long Time Ago” and “Whip-poor-will.”
But James Grant Wilson says that for above a score of years he could,
any day, exchange one of his songs unread for a fifty dollar cheque,
when some of _literati_ of New York (possibly Poe) could not sell
anything for the one-fifth part of that sum. In the presence of Morris,
I confess I cannot quite give myself up to adoring admiration of the
taste of our predecessors. This stanza indicates his ordinary quality:
The star of love now shines above,
Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;
Among the leaves, the wind-harp weaves
Its serenade for thee.
Notwithstanding this rather trifling vein, admirably satirized by
Orpheus C. Kerr, and a certain tone of commonplace, Morris had a genuine
lyrical quality in his verse, although it was devoid of startling bursts
of inspiration, and English literature affords many examples of less
deserving poesy. Morris was an industrious editor, appreciative of
others, and he had a personal charm which endeared him to those who had
the good fortune to come within the pale of his friendship, and
particularly to those who were permitted to enjoy the generous
hospitality of his sweet and dignified home at Undercliff opposite West
Point. Smile as we may at his little conceits and his obvious rhymes, we
must recognize the sincere and genial nature of the kindly General, so
long conspicuous in the social and literary life of old New York.
These men, it may be said, do not prove the permanent value of the
literature of the fifties. Godwin and Morris were editors and Butler a
busy lawyer, none of them able to give their undivided attention to
authorship. I suppose that Irving and Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow,
Hawthorne and Bayard Taylor were more distinctly the ornaments of the
time, and there are other names which more judicious and discriminating
men might substitute for some of those I have chosen. Bayard Taylor’s
greatest work was done in later years, but he had already won his first
fame—not a giant, but a poet with “the spontaneity of a born singer,” as
Stedman said. Irving, the most charming and amiable of writers, had not
the most forceful intellect, but he was calm and graceful, with a gentle
and bewitching humor and a strong appreciation of the beautiful—a good
man, beloved and honored at home and abroad. His fame is paler now than
it was forty years gone by, but he has the immortality of a classic.
Emerson had a powerful influence over the minds of men, but, viewed in
the perspective of time, he does not loom so largely now. I am not
competent to venture far into the territory of criticism, having only
the equipment of a general reader who timidly expresses his personal
feelings and leaves to trained and experienced judges the task of
scientific analysis; but we general readers are the jury, after all.
As time slips by there is a tendency to merge the decades of the past,
and to the young people of 1909 the period of 1850–1860 is every bit
as remote as the period of 1830–1840. The university undergraduate
does not differentiate between the alumnus of 1870 and him of 1855, as
I know by experience. A melancholy illustration of this well-known
fact was afforded of late in a popular play, the scene of which was
laid in a time supposed to be exceedingly far distant, and the
programme announced it as “the early eighties.” The representation was
enlivened by such antiquated melodies as “Old Zip Coon,” “Maryland, My
Maryland,” and “Old Dan Tucker,” as well as “Pretty as a Picture,” “Ye
Merry Birds,” and “How Fair Art Thou,” all as appropriate to the early
eighties as Dr. Arne’s “Where the Bee Sucks” and “Rule Britannia.” It
was almost as abominably anachronistic as the naive declaration of a
pseudo-Princetonian who asserted a membership in the Class of 1879 and
assured me that he had been, while in college, a devoted disciple of
Doctor Eliphalet Nott. If I have mingled my old-fashioned decades
unduly, it has been because of that tendency to merger which no
Sherman Act can suppress.
Few there are who cling with affection to the memory of the
old-fashioned. Most of us prefer to spin with the world down the ringing
grooves of change, to borrow the shadow of a phrase which has itself
become old-fashioned. The flaming sword of the Civil War severed the
latest century of America in two unequal parts, and its fiery blade
divided the old and the new as surely and as cleanly as the guillotine
cleft apart the France of the old monarchy from the France of modern
days. To stray back in recollection to the land of fifty years ago is
almost like treading the streets of some mediæval town. But for some of
us there is a melancholy pleasure in the retrospect and a lingering
fondness for the life which we thought so earnest and so vigorous then,
but which now seems so placid and so drowsy.