Writers of Knickerbocker New York

by Hamilton Wright Mabie

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The last stages of the Knickerbocker age began when Fitz-Greene Halleck appeared on the scene. He was not to the manner born; he came from Guilford, Connecticut; but he felt the Knickerbocker spirit and shared its achievements. Born in one of the loveliest of the old New England villages, whose distinction was invariably expressed in a green or common, a Congregational spire, an academy, and rows of graceful elms, Halleck brought to New York, in 1811, a good school training and skill in bookkeeping gained in that forerunner of the modern department store, the country store. The laughter which greeted the appearance of the “Salmagundi” papers was a thing of the past, and the anger which met Diedrich Knickerbocker’s story of his ancestors had lost its heat; the merry youths who gathered at Cockloft Hall had blown the foam off the wine of life, though they had not lost their zest in the mere act of living; Irving was boarding on lower Broadway with Brevoort as a roommate, and there was plenty of good talk but very little work done.

Halleck made a very quiet entrance into the city which was later to honor him with one of the few statues commemorative of its Men of Letters. He was a born accountant, and during his long residence in New York he served two men in this capacity—Mr. Jacob Barker and Mr. John Jacob Astor. Mr. Astor, at his death in 1848, left him an annuity large enough in those days of moderate prices to enable him to retire to his native town and enjoy ease of condition and industrious leisure in a fine old colonial house which had some associations with Shelley’s adventurous grandfather.

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 charming fancy, who, at the age of five, was writing clever verse. By descent he was an American of the Americans, if we accept the dictum of Richard Grant White that to be an American one must have come of ancestors who arrived in this country before the War of the Revolution. Drake had an ancestor in the Plymouth Company, and his father held a colonelcy in Washington’s army. His mother was equally well-born in the true sense of the word. His childhood was overshadowed by the death of both his parents and the bitterness of poverty; but the boy was of a chivalrous spirit and faced hard conditions with a resolution which was an assurance of success. His active fancy opened a door of escape from these conditions, and he played many romantic parts in the drama of his bleak boyhood. He was an omnivorous reader, his memory let nothing escape, and despite his lack of opportunity he became exceptionally well informed. His facility in verse-writing, so early developed, grew with his years; and his endeavor to make a man of business of himself failed utterly.

Drake was eighteen and Halleck twenty-three when, on a sailing party in the bay, they met James De Kay, a young medical student. The day was genial, youth was at the prow and also at the helm, and Halleck remarked that “it would be heaven to lounge upon the rainbow and read Tom Campbell.” 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 and 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. Writing of a certain vivacious young woman who played “the sparkler,” he said: “God defend me from such vivacity as hers in future—such smart speeches without meaning; such bubble-and-squeak nonsense. I’d as lieve stand by a frying-pan for an hour and listen to the cooking of apple fritters”; and he reports that when he was out of the house he did not stop running for a mile. He speaks irreverently of the “divinities and blossoms” of the hour, of “rascally little tea parties,” and protests that he is weary of the “tedious commonplaces of fashionable society.”

The two young poets, hidden in an obscurity which they found very pleasant, were probably in great awe of the brilliant young Knickerbocker who had dared to ridicule the town, and who, in the glory of his local fame, was eager for fresh fields and a wider horizon. They found very excellent company and much pleasant talk in the city, and they hunted the joys of youth together. Halleck described Drake at this time as “perhaps the handsomest man in New York—a face like an angel, a form like an Apollo.” Music was one of the accomplishments of Drake, and he played the flute at a time when that instrument and the harp were the symbols of social cultivation. One of their hostesses was Mrs. Peter Stuyvesant, whose spacious house, not far from the square which bears her name, with its gardens and lawn stretching to the East River, was a centre of social activity. The city ended at Canal Street, and a visit in the vicinity of old St. Mark’s was like going to Tarrytown or Trenton in these swift-footed days. Mrs. Stuyvesant declared, when First Avenue was laid out and this earliest intrusion into the privacy of a great colonial estate made, that her heart was broken. A pear-tree which stood long at the corner of Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street was for many decades the only surviving relic of this hospitable home.

The country house of Mr. Henry Eckford was a kind of second home to the young poets, though its distance from the city was a test of their enjoyment of its hospitality. It stood in a pine grove on Love Lane where Twenty-first Street crosses Sixth Avenue! New York was surrounded by spacious country places, not only on the upper part of the island, but across the three rivers. Among these sylvan homes was that of the well-known Hunt family, on the Long Island shore almost opposite West Farms, to which Halleck and Drake made their way by stage and small boat, and where they often found delightful companionship over Sunday. On these occasions Halleck gave himself up to the pleasures of “female society,” but Drake went a-fishing in his old clothes. In the evening the two friends appeared in different rôles: Halleck told stories and recited verse, and Drake sang.

Drake had studied medicine and embarked in the business of selling drugs at one of the corners of Park Row, and there is a tradition that in this building, which was both a dwelling and a shop, the second series of satirical papers on the town, “The Croakers,” was conceived and brought forth. These lively satires, which took the town by storm, were in verse of varying degrees of wit and melody. They were clever skits on men and manners, many of them burlesques, and appeared first in the columns of the “Evening Post,” over the signature “Croakers,” adapted from “The Good-Natured Man.” This was in March, 1819, and thenceforth “Croakers” appeared at short intervals and speedily became the topic of the town. The poets and Coleman, the editor of the “Evening Post,” adroitly concealed the authorship of the poems, and great was the speculation on that subject. So great was the wincing and shrinking at “The Croakers,” that every person was on tenterhooks; “neither knavery nor folly has slept quietly since our first commencement,” wrote one of the two poets in a mood of pardonable elation. Poor Coleman was almost submerged by the flood of imitations called out by the brilliant success of the series. Conceived in the spirit of mischief, these facile and fetching rhymes have preserved the humors of the hour, and, with “Salmagundi,” are entertaining chapters in the history of the decade between 1819 and 1829.