Writers of Knickerbocker New York

by Hamilton Wright Mabie

Give half his years if but he could

Have been with us at Monterey.

Hoffman was connected editorially with the “New York American” and was one of the founders of the “Knickerbocker Magazine,” which was born in the afterglow of the Knickerbocker period and continued the Knickerbocker tradition, though its scope gave it national importance. His editorial duties left Hoffman an ample margin of time for lyrical work, and his short poems of singing quality, “The Myrtle and Steel,” “Room, Boys, Room,” “’Tis Hard to Share her Smiles with Many,” were sung, hummed, and whistled in many parts of the country. His “Winter in the West,” made up of a series of letters, was one of the early reports of adventure and incident on the frontier.

Albany was, after New York, the chief centre of the Dutch tradition, and had a very hospitable and delightful society intimately connected with its kin city at the mouth of the Hudson. From Albany, at short intervals, came Alfred Billings Street. He was always welcome in New York, where his somewhat prolific verse was held in great esteem. He was a devout student of Nature, and had a happy command of the descriptive phrase, and his contemporaries among the American poets were generous in their estimates of the excellence of his poetry. Longfellow gave him the first place as a reporter of forest scenery, and Bryant was “impressed with the fidelity and vividness of the images newly drawn from Nature.”

Among the scholarly writers of the later time was Henry Theodore Tuckerman, whose name has a colonial flavor in the mind of the New Yorker of to-day. He brought the name here from Boston in the afterglow of the Knickerbocker age, spent many years in Europe, and became the most accomplished of the early American writers in the field of art. He was a man of wide reading, with a charm of manner which won him an enviable popularity in the social life of New York and Newport, and with the catholicity of interests and tastes which mark the cosmopolitan temper. Evert Augustus Duyckinck, on the other hand, was a son of the soil and an inheritor of the tradition, though he was born too late to be counted among the Knickerbocker writers. In 1830, when the Knickerbocker age reached its end and the mid-century writers began to appear, Duyckinck was preparing for Columbia College, and it was not until 1840, on his return from an extended visit in Europe, that he began a long and industrious career as an editor and writer. His chief claim on the attention of lovers of old New York rests on his service as a literary historian. His “Cyclopædia of American Literature,” his text for the “National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans,” and his “Memorial of Fitz-Greene Halleck” are valuable records of the early men of Letters in this country, with many of whom he was personally associated.

Edgar Allan Poe came to New York in the later Thirties, and made and lost friends as in every place where he tried, with pathetic hopefulness, to find anchorage. 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 the remuneration of literary work far too meagre for “human nature’s daily food,” and took refuge in business occupations of various kinds. 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. In 1822, Professor Cairns reminds us, he set a price on his shorter poems which could hardly be regarded as exorbitant—two dollars each. George P. Morris was more fortunate so far as income was concerned, and reached such an altitude of popularity that he could sell a song unread for fifty dollars, while a very unimportant drama from his hand brought him thirty-five hundred dollars. Then, as now, journalism was a refuge from the inadequate rewards of literature; though it must be frankly conceded that, while much of the work of the lesser Knickerbocker writing had a pleasant humor, a delightful gaiety of mood or lightness of style, it was neither vital nor original, and its appeal was limited to a small group of readers.

In the later years of his life, Irving was in the habit of speaking of “Salmagundi” as light and trivial; an overflow of youthful fun and audacity. Mr. Barrett Wendell is of opinion that the “literature of Brockden Brown, of Irving, of Cooper, and of Poe is only a literature of pleasure, possessing, so far as it has excellence at all, only the excellence of conscientious refinement”; and that nothing in it “touched seriously on either God’s eternities, or the practical conduct of life in the United States.” 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 winged and phrased in the language of an easy, cordial society; tolerant in opinion, hospitable to differences of religion and political habit, concerned chiefly to make itself agreeable and the time of its sojourn in the vale of tears pleasantly profitable. New York was not indifferent to the religious side of life, but its preaching was reserved for churches; its literature, though somewhat provincial in time and manner, was kept well within the ancient province of art.

In 1858 the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of “The Knickerbocker Magazine” was commemorated by the publication of “The Knickerbocker Gallery,” a volume of portentous size and effusive elegance, made up of articles written by contributors to the magazine. Fifty-four men are represented in the collection, of whom only four belonged to the early and characteristic Knickerbocker period. Irving drew upon a commonplace-book of a date thirty-five years earlier for a few notes; Bryant and Halleck were among the poets of the collection; John W. Francis and Alfred B. Street were familiar names to the old New Yorkers of that day. A new generation was in possession of the stage, however; and the Old Town, with its Dutch traditions, was slowly losing its outlines in the neighborly city of the years between 1830 and 1880, as that in turn is fast being obliterated by the cosmopolitan city of to-day.

The old places have vanished, and the old faces are remembered to-day only by the aid of a few portraits. The names of the streets in the lower section of the modern city recall men and women 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. 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.