Cooper and His Friends
In that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the
name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this
half-century,--in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from
Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the
attention of an observant passer-by. A brick building, its
architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness--a condition
little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of
ground calls for compactness regardless of beauty of appearance. One
looking at this building and given to sentiment might argue that it is
strongly reminiscent of a human being who had once been vigorous and
had made a considerable show in the world of fashion and pride, but
who had sunk to poverty and decrepitude. For the carved window-cases
are hacked and beaten away, the wrought-iron railings are twisted and
rusty, the marble steps are cracked and crumbling, the high ceilings
with their heavy and ornate mouldings are seamed and discolored, and
the massive oaken doors are cracked by many a rusty nail driven into
them, holding ragged and worn-out garments. Yet even in its age and
neglect are found traces of its primal sturdy and artistic
proportions.
In the year 1821, this house was the home of James Fenimore Cooper.
His first book, _Precaution_, had failed utterly. His second book,
_The Spy_, had been prodigiously successful, when in this year he went
to New York to live in what was then the fashionable district of St.
John's Park. He was thirty-one years old, had lived at Cooperstown,
studied at Yale, shipped as a sailor before the mast, made voyages to
England and Spain, been appointed midshipman, and seen service on Lake
Ontario and Lake Champlain, had resigned his commission, and had
married Augusta de Lancey at Heathcote Hill Manor, Mamaroneck. After
the birth of his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who became a writer
of rural sketches, he settled down in Westchester County to live the
life of a country gentleman. He might have remained there all his days
but that one day he got hold of a particularly stupid book of English
life, and was so bored by it that it forced from him the exclamation
that he could write a better himself! Which remark being interpreted
literally by his wife, there was nothing for the country gentleman but
to make good his boast. So he wrote a dull and stupid story which
even his friends had difficulty in reading to the end, and then,
doubtless finding writing more agreeable than farming, wrote another
that destined him evermore to a literary life.
This much of Cooper's life was behind him when he moved into the Beach
Street house. In this home he wrote _The Pioneers_, first of the
famous Leatherstocking Tales and, too, _The Pilot_.
In the New York of that day there was one place where he loved to go
for a quiet dinner and discussion with the literary friends whom he
quickly gathered around him. This was the chief hostelry of the day,
the City Hotel, which stood close by where Wall Street runs into
Broadway. It was at one of these dinners that he met James A.
Hillhouse, who, though he had already written _The Judgment_ and was
recognized as a poet, was then engaged in mercantile pursuits in the
city; but was very soon to make a home in New Haven and remain there
during the rest of his life. Hillhouse was not a regular diner with
Cooper, but he introduced there a friend who became much more regular
in his attendance. Samuel Woodworth was even then shouldering aside
adversity with intermittent success. It was his habit to walk briskly
up from his printing office at the foot of Wall Street, very much in
the manner of a man having an imperative appointment. Four years
before Cooper came to town, on a very hot summer day, Woodworth had
walked in this same eager manner to his house farther up-town in Duane
Street, and there, drinking from a pump before his door, had said:
"I'd like to have a drink to-day from the old bucket that hung in my
father's well." Whereupon his kindly wife hinted that the old bucket
of his remembrance would make a good subject for a poem--a hint that
within the hour took the form of _The Old Oaken Bucket_, a pastoral
poem well remembered and much sung, though many another of his, many
an operetta, and even the historical romance, _The Champion of
Freedom_, have faded from memory.
At these dinners, when Cooper sat with his friends, Woodworth and
Morris held the first discussions of the plans for _The Mirror_, which
was started in 1823, but from which the inconstant Woodworth soon
retired.
On more than one occasion one of the dinner party was Richard Henry
Dana, a founder of the _North American Review_ and the friend of
Bryant. The City Hotel was quite convenient for him, for he had made a
sort of headquarters in the place of Wiley, the publisher, around the
corner in Wall Street by New Street. At that time he issued from
Wiley's shop _The Idle Man_, that literary publication which scarcely
lived long enough to include his novels, _Tom Thornton_ and _Paul
Felton_, and some contributions from Washington Allston and Bryant.
Many a good idea came from the meetings at the City Hotel, but
possibly none more felicitous than that of the Bread-and-Cheese Club.
This remained so long in the germ that the realization seemed far off,
but finally, in 1824, began the holding of its fortnightly meetings in
Washington Hall--afterwards swept away to give place to the Stewart
Building at Broadway and Reade Street. The club derived its name from
Cooper's conceit of having candidates balloted for with bread and
cheese, a bit of bread favoring election and cheese deciding against
it.
[Illustration: Washington Hall]
As Cooper had in the main originated the club, he was the leading
spirit around whom gathered Halleck and Bryant, Percival, Professor
Renwick, Dr. J.W. Francis, and all the writers of the day. An
enthusiastic member was Philip Hone, who had just retired from
business and bought a house at 235 Broadway opposite the park, a site
considered a good way up-town for a residence. His diary, which in
after years led him to be called the Pepys of America, was commenced
in this house, but the greater part was written at his residence of
later date, at the southwest corner of Broadway and Great Jones
Street.
Gulian C. Verplanck was a member too. At the time he occupied a
professorship in the General Theological Seminary. From one of the
meetings he walked down Broadway and through Wall Street past the
house, near Broad Street, where he was born, discussing with Bryant
and Robert C. Sands an early suggestion of the _Talisman_ magazine,
which was not to ripen into an accomplished fact for a good three
years. On this same walk, too, he took part while Bryant and Sands
discussed plans for the _Atlantic Monthly_, which Sands established
the next year.
But writers were not the only members of the Bread-and-Cheese Club.
There were scholars and professional men, and often there were
statesmen and men of national distinction as guests. But as Cooper was
its leading spirit, when he left for his trip abroad the club went to
pieces. He started in 1825 on his foreign travels, and at the time of
his going was living at 345 Greenwich Street, where he had finished
work on _The Last of the Mohicans_.
In the year after his going there was a gala night at the Lafayette
Theatre, when _The Spy_ was enacted. The Lafayette was the largest
theatre then. Upon its site in West Broadway near Canal Street St.
Alphonsus's Church now stands. To that performance came from up-State
Enoch Crosby, who was said to be the original Spy, and when he
appeared in a box with some friends the audience gave him a thunderous
ovation.
Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added _The Prairie_, _The
Red Rover_, _The Water Witch_, and _The Bravo_ to his list of
published books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from
Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of
pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the
neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in
appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and
Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be
picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live
there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a
house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed
work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the titles
_Sketches in Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_. But he made no
very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St.
Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpretentious
brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote
_Homeward Bound_ and began in earnest that fierce combat with his
critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a
regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house
he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home.
At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway,
between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every
pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet.
His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the
ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose
eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the
name of The Mad Poet.
[Illustration: THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831.]
If Broadway was his walk of an afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by
night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre
(literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his
centring point.
The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one.
It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor
thought himself cramped in space and opportunity and, moving away to
seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the
city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and
swords that had seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and
frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who
had strutted their brief hour and passed away. It was the nightly
gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such
wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wallacks, Harry
Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitchell, Brown, and Junius Brutus
Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and
the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one
side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk.
In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after
night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai
M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and
who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers,
until in 1843 he was to publish the _Sunday Times and Messenger_,
which continued for more than half a century.
From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall
Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night
dreaming over his _Elixir of Moonshine_, or, with the memory of his
afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his _Afara, or the
Belles of Broadway_, and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat
there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a
favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's
Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring,
soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown
tombstones.
On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked
down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a
young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young
then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under
discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned
man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote
a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was
published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he
needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a
few years this hymn, _My Faith Looks Up to Thee_, was to be sung
oftener than any other American hymn.
The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to
Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,--on up
Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to
Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It
was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there
was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in
the midnight hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold
converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean
forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera
House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of
attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend
the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as
though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments
connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833--the
year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a
company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an
Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas,
_Don Giovanni_ and _Nozze di Figaro_. He was professor in Columbia
College when he matured an idea for establishing a home for Italian
opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house
near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers
of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da
Ponte's hopes.
If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few
years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at
his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from
there by his mourning friends--Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and
some few others,--followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby
St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave
crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay
buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of
these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he
said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but
had attained his ambition at last.
For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his
Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his
eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was
seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's,
acting so strangely that he was thought to be intoxicated. Next
morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the
shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the
Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died.
Years after, the author of _Glimpses of Home Life_, Emma C. Embury,
whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by
the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on
which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by
McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have
grown sturdier with the passing years, and the grave by the lake is
the grave of The Mad Poet.