Hamilton Wright Mabie

“ 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, though31 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 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 of121 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 “North American Review,” however, described “Salmagundi” as a production of extraordinary merit. Eleven years after the last number appeared, Irving wrote to Brevoort that,40 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. ”

“ 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,57 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. ”

“ 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 recreation58 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 many100 years his was a familiar figure in the places where men of literary habit gathered in New York. ”

“ 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 of42 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. ”

“ It requires some effort of the imagination to recall Campbell’s popularity at that time and to revive the state of mind which could see in him a possible relation with the rainbow; but in youth and73 fair weather all things tremble on the verge of poetry. Literature was still in the future for the ardent youths, but life was within easy reach, and especially the pleasant social life of a small city. In this same year Irving was beginning to look upon the quiet pleasures of New York with the jaundiced eye of a veteran man of the world upon whom the weight of twenty-nine years bore heavily. ”

“ 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 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 a99 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. ”

“ 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 time104 and secured local reputation and influence. ”

“ 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 formed37 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. ”

“ 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 was102 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 winged118 and phrased in the language of an easy, cordial society ”

“ To be living is sublime.
The free poetic temperament of the two poets revolted at the rigid doctrines powerfully and dogmatically expounded by Dr. Cox, and they amused themselves by delivering sermons of a very different theology to a very small but highly appreciative audience of two intimate friends. Unfortunately, these productions, which would have made a highly original contribution to sermonic literature, have not been preserved.
The friendship of Halleck and Drake, compounded of love and laughter, of work and wit, was severed by the death of Drake in September, 1820. ”

“ But if New York failed to make itself the seat of an academy, it did not fail to foster the infant industry of journalism.103 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. ”

“ The names of the streets in the lower section of the modern city recall men and women120 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. ”

“ 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 the115 remuneration of literary work far too meagre for “human nature’s daily food,” and took refuge in business occupations of various kinds. ”

“ Halleck did not find his way into the Knickerbocker group at the start, but he early made acquaintance with Joseph Rodman Drake and the two became ardent friends. Drake was a young man of captivating personality; variously gifted and brilliant; a thoroughbred in his sense of honor and a certain gallant rectitude and courage; a man of charming71 fancy, who, at the age of five, was writing clever verse. ”