TO
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
My dear Theodore,—You know—for we have talked it over often enough—that I do not hold you to be a typical New-Yorker, since you come of Dutch stock, and first saw the light here on Manhattan Island, whereas the typical New-Yorker is born of New England parents, perhaps somewhere west of the Alleghanies. You know, also, that often the typical New-Yorker is not proud of the city of his choice, and not so loyal to it as we could wish. He has no abiding concern for this maligned and misunderstood town of ours; he does not thrill with pride at the sight of its powerful and irregular profile as he comes back to it across the broad river; nor is his heart lifted up with joy at the sound of its increasing roar, so suggestive and so stimulating. But we have a firm affection for New York, you and I, and a few besides; we like it for what it is; and we love it for what we hope to see it.
It is because of this common regard for our strange and many-sided city that I am giving myself the pleasure of proffering to you this little volume of vignettes. They are not stories really, I am afraid—not sketches even, nor studies; they are, I think, just what I have called them—vignettes. And then there are a dozen of them, one for every month in the year, an urban calendar of times and seasons. Such as they are, I beg that you will accept them in token of my friendship and esteem; and that you will believe me, always,
Yours truly,
BRANDER MATTHEWS
New York, May, 1894
"When I came to my chamber I writ down these minutes; but was at a loss what instruction I should propose to my readers from the enumeration of so many insignificant matters and occurrences; and I thought it of great use, if they could learn with me to keep their minds open to gratification, and ready to receive it from anything it meets with."
—STEELE, in "The Spectator," August 11, 1712.
INTRODUCTION
FEW volumes of short stories published a generation ago remain in print to-day and fewer still either merit or would repay reprinting. But the case is different with the two volumes published by Mr. Matthews in the early nineties under respectively the title and subtitle now given to their contents combined in one and made once more accessible to the reading public. Whatever may be said of the progress made by current literature in the interval, the public for it has augmented at least correspondingly with the census, and it is permitted to hope that the interest of this wider public in work of such exceptional authorship, subject and quality has similarly increased. Mr. Matthews has himself a wider public, amply earned, and I should say that interest in New York has probably increased in pretty nearly equal measure with the change in its character. Its cosmopolitanism has grown prodigiously, yet its self-consciousness far from diminishing has distinctly deepened—if one may properly speak of depth in connection with it. No doubt the chameleon's changes, even shallower, quicken its sense of self. Vignettes of Manhattan should therefore appeal to such actual local pride and public spirit as we have, as well as to a historic interest in a previous epoch of their subject's evolution—as the pace of the day requires us to consider the aspect, character and manners of twenty-five years ago, when Mr. Matthews had the idea of fixing these in the framework of the short story. Besides, a good deal of the scent of those roses survives.
So far as I know it was a unique idea. It was certainly a happy one. Would it not be a pleasant thing if we had such series of analogous authorship systematically celebrating London, Paris, not to say Florence, Rome, Athens itself? Perhaps it was never attempted by any one before because it was too difficult of execution. To the pure fictionist it would necessitate irksome notation; the mere observer would hardly perceive its fictional value. Mr. Matthews fortunately was at home in both departments of writing. The result was that almost every essential phase of New York life and character, belonging to every quarter of the city, is veraciously pictured in these twenty-four proficient and polished stories. Each is composed with attentive art to illustrate its two-fold motive of interest as fiction and as portraiture. And the whole, the collection, constitutes a dramatic panorama of the metropolis a generation ago of great variety and point. "Little old New York" has never had so thorough-going and so diverting a historiographer. Are there any New York "types" omitted? I think of none. How did the author come across some of them? How get some of them to sit for him? Unlike a writer with a reporter's record he has never been, as it were, a prowler among the precincts and purlieus of the town; yet clearly he knows his Mulberry Bend material as well as that of Fifth Avenue, the studios as well as the stage, the now extinct saloon as well as the still flourishing Salvation Army barracks, and portrays Lazarus and Dives with equal familiarity—our kind, too, of each and all. I suppose a writer must have been born in New Orleans to have such a sharp sense of New York, but it is true that he immigrated early.