The World of Washington Irving

by VAN WYCK BROOKS

33

THE literary evenings of Mrs. Legend, in the early 1830’s in New York, were the “focus of American talents,” this lady said, for there the literati, as they called themselves already; assembled for a weekly flow of soul. There one found Mr. Pindar, who occasionally threw off an ode, Mr. Moccasin, who had written two Indian novels, the author of Lapis Lazuli, Miss Annual, Julietta, and the Pottawattomie prophet, “Single Rhyme.”D.O.V.E. was usually present, and a dozen female “Hajjis,” who had made the pilgrimage to Paris, the American Mecca, and who had seen pictures and statues abroad and appeared in this society because they Were able to talk about them at home.¹ In order to give her literary fâtes an air of cosmopolitanism and a sprinkling of the European tongues, Mrs. Legend was obliged to stoop a little. She invited a German linen-merchant, an Italian who sold beads, and certain dealers in gin who came from Holland.

The conversation at Mrs. Legend’s was animated, if somewhat vague, and it largely consisted of questions of a literary kind — for instance, whether Byron was a development of Shakespeare or Shakespeare was a shadowing forth of Byron. What was the right pronunciation of the name of Byron’s lady-love — was it properly Guykee-oh-ly or Gwy-ky-o-lee? And which feeling was the more ecstatic, love or despair? Was the soul of Chateaubriand more expanded than his reason, or his reason more expanded than his soul? And was there more pathos in the sacred songs of Moore than there was in the profane songs of Little? These were the questions that eonfronted the worthy Captain Truck, who was taken for the “celebrated English writer and wit,” when the Effinghams, just off his ship, appeared at Mrs. Legend’s, and the honest tar followed in their train. The captain, whose head was “so Byronic, with a little of Milton about the forehead,” was mystified at first in these strange waters. But he soon rallied and parried the assaults of all the petticoats and became, in fact, the lion of the occasion.

The scene occurred in Cooper’s Home as Found, and the Effinghams — the Coopers in a thin disguise - had set out to make an evening of it. Having lived for so many years abroad, they were eager to note the changes that had taken place in America during their absence, and they went on to Mrs. Hawker’s party. In fact, they went to three parties, finding Hajjis everywhere, together with monarchical opinions, for the general braggadocio and democratic spread-eagleism had bred a distaste for the republic.² That a republic was odious because it was full of odious things was a budding notion everywhere in the social world, and the Effinghams were shocked by this, as Cooper had been shocked abroad when he heard it expressed in the legations. However, the Effinghams, who scorned New York as a market-town and a mere “huge expansion of commonplace things,”returned at once to Templeton, as Cooper returned to Cooperstown, to enjoy a permanent and elegant villeggiatura.

Country life, for Cooper, was the only worthy American life, and in spite of Mrs. Hawker and Mrs. Bloomfield, who lived in the good old style in Hudson Square, he despised the commercial metropolis and its works and ways. He scorned the Hajjis and other Americans who had acquired in Europe whatever notions they had of civilization, without the knowledge of the social usages aud distinctive features of their own land that gave one a proper scale for measuring others. With what pleasure he presented as a social paragon the lady who had never been abroad, — “Not a foot out of my own country, scarcely a foot out of my own state,” — yet who could have been more completely a woman of the world? The charming, intelligent, simple-hearted, well-bred Mrs. Bloomfield had visited “Lake George, the Falls and the Mountain House,” and she knew the rest of the world by report alone.

Cooper, moreover, disdained the literati as much as another novelist, Hemingway, later. But no doubt he had seen Mr. Pindar and the author of Lapis Lazuli, Miss Annual, Julietta, and D.O.V.E. at some such party as Mrs. Legend’s that might have been an evening in the latter days of Edgar Allan Poe. For the first time, in Home as Found, the literati appeared on the scene with a capacious mind to take their measure — among them, possibly, George P. Morris, the author of “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” and Samuel Woodworth, who wrote “The Old Oaken Bucket.” HalleCk perhaps was another of them, and probably mcDonald Clarke, who walked the streets composing his Elixir of Moonshine, with various feminine counterparts of Miss Sarah Soothings; and still another who might have been present was the essayist Willis Gaylord Clark, on a brief visit from Philadelphia. This twin brother of the editor Lewis Gaylord Clark was a rival of Cooper’s Mr. Steadfast Dodge in spreading the literary eagle.³ One glance at the literati was enough for Cooper, who preferred Lafayette and Captain Truck; and as for the new New York society, with its “hundred dollar handkerchiefs,” what was Cooper to this or this to Cooper?

For times had changed in every way, and Cooper, like Scott, was out of date in a world in which Bulwer’s novels were the latest vogue. The “band-box” — Tennyson’s phrase for Bulwer — appealed to the new generation, for which nothing was too flamboyant and artificial, and the simple, heroic tales of Cooper seemed flat and trite and obvious in the light of the glittering, dandified author of Pelham. The sophisticated public, which had had too much of Jacksonism, was bored by stories of woodsmen and sailors also, and it preferred the “elegant polish of the female pen” and what it called “fashionable intelligence” and news from Paris. It was true that Cooper knew more about Paris than anyone else in New York, save Irving, who had also lived and worked there, but the Paris that Irving and Cooper knew, in terms of their masculine tastes, was not the town the new age wished to hear of. It was not the milliners’ paradise or, as another writer said, the “yolk of the world’s egg of pleasure”; and this was the Paris of bonnets and scarves and royal entertainments which the new age could not hear enough of.

For the new age was largely in the hands of women. The cultivated statesmen of the days that followed the Revolution had given place to leaders of another type, and the interests of the new men were narrow and special, engrossed as they were in local affairs and trade. They had lost the wide horizons of the men of ideas of an earlier day, and they left questions of taste to the other sex, while the new wealth fostered luxurious living and turned the minds of women abroad to the magic circles of “foreign counts” and fashion. These women were keenly aware as well of the national faults and foibles, which the rise of the humbler classes had brought to the fore, and they scanned every book of travels in which their manners were discussed and longed for a closer knowledge of the wider world.

34

MEANWHILE, in this age of sensibility, the female mind spread through the press and filled the annuals and the magazines, the “Souvenirs” and “Tokens.” The effusions of “Ianthe,” “Viola,” “Ellen,” “Amelia,” “Singing Sibyl,” — “Heart Questionings,” odes to the moon, and mothers’ laments, — were interspersed with steel engravings, fanciful tales of Naples and Venice, and echoes of Silvio Pellico and the troubadours. Sometimes these poetesses aspired to an astral communion. There was “Ione S.,” for instance, — the pen-name of Miss Phoebe Jones, — who wrote the poem addressed to her spirit-husband, the masculine essence, all soul and romance, whom she was to find in the regions of space and with whom she would finally soar to their native star.

These tendencies of the new generation, the Bulwerism and “elegant polish,” the feminine sensibility and the hankering for Europe, were all expressed in a writer of the thirties who might also have appeared at Mrs. Legend’s. Another transplanted New Englander, like Bryant and Halleek, and, like Cooper, an offspring of Yale, Nathaniel Parker Willis described himself as a “hereand-there-ian” and a “constant servant of the ladies.” Tall, good-looking, lively and clever, always in good spirits and always a little overdressed, Willis had come to New York from Boston in 1829 and had presently gone abroad as a foreign correspondent. He was connected with George P. Morris, who had established the New York Mirror, and his letters from Europe, later collected as Pencilings by the Way, were perfect responses to various demands of the moment.

He had called upon Cooper in Paris, where he was meeting all the lions, rejoicing in all the “lures to pleasure” there, at the opera, on the boulevards, in the shops, as indifferent to the serious interests of Cooper as he was to the romantic past that charmed the imagination of Washington Irving. Light of heart, as of hand and head, he preferred the immediate and the present to the past or the future, captivated by what he called " the good things as they go along,” in the spirit of the Cyrenaic “happiness is motion.” Everybody liked him and gave him letters of introduction, the ladies who were painted by Lawrence, and earls and dukes, and he floated about on magic carpets from the Countess of Blessington’s drawing room to the Florentine house of the poet Landor, who gave him a beautiful picture by CuYp. He dined with Jeffrey and Christopher North, went shooting with the Duke of Gordon, and stayed for weeks at the castle of the Earl of Dalhousie; and he breakfasted in the Temple with Charles and Mary Lamb and hobnobbed with Barry Cornwall, who wrote a preface for his poems.

Two nieces of Sir Walter Scott copied his manuscripts for him, and “good old Thorwaldsen" told him tales in Rome, where he shed an appropriate tear at the grave of Shelley. He followed the footsteps of Childe Harold through Italy and the Isles of Greece and called on the Maid of Athens, Teresa Makri, the lovely lady whom Byron had begged to give him back his broken heart and who was now living at Egina as Mrs. Black. Willis’s letters abounded in morsels for every taste, “sketches of the whims of the hour,”ephemeral trifles, glimpses of living celebrities and the “magic circles of fashion and genius” that delighted romantic souls in the “interior" at home.

He was the joy of the Hajjis, too, for he had an ever so knowing way of referring to French society behind the scenes, and he told them all about Lady Jersey and the beautiful Lady Clementina, whose portraits they had seen in the annuals, no doubt.⁴ Then he spoke of the Honorable Mrs. Norton, the poetess who had been “tried by fire” and whose sorrows were so touchingly present in her fugitive pieces, and he pictured the glorious abandon with which Tom Moore sang “Fly not yet!" with the glass brimming in his hand. Once, at the piano, as the last words faltered out, Moore swiftly rose and pressed Lady Blessington’s hand and was gone before a word could be uttered. Willis had, from a source “no less than second hand,” the most amusing storiesof the King of Holland and all manner of anecdotes also about other men of mark who were held in affectionate veneration in many a village at home.

With his views of the lordly parks of England, with his constant eye on the “husband market,”with his pictures of Anne Hathaway’s cottage and Kenilworth and Warwick, and the room in which Scott died at Abbotsford, Willis combined a tone that was singularly winning, for his veins were so full of the pleasure ot health, his fancy was so bright and gay, and he was so amiable and genial and stirring and vivid. There was something infectious in his appetite for novelty and adventure, and he gave so much pleasure because he was so ready to be pleased.

35

IT WAS easy to make fun of NYillis, but he was an artist, nevertheless, in spite of his flowery mannerisms ⁵ and his fripperies and fluff. Save here and there for a lapse of taste, his style was almost as good as Irving’s, with the natural flow and amenity and elegance of the Sketch Book, and a handful of his later stories proved that he was a writer born and one that a careless country should not have forgotten. Nor was he quite the “heartless puppy whom his sister “Fanny Fern” ⁶ described, when she wrote her novel Ruth Hall in the middle of the fifties. This pet of the periodicals, who married James Parton, the author of the biographies of Jefferson and Jackson, satirized Willis as the editor Hyacinth, a toady and a cad who would not publish a line of his sister’s writings. He told the humble little Ruth to seek “some unobtrusive employment” that would not bring her into his glittering circle.

Now, Willis was a good-hearted man, as he showed in his treatment of Poe and others, but this picture was partially true, beyond a doubt, and Willis perhaps described himself in the youthful artist Paul Fane, who went abroad smarting from a social slight. A cold girl had rejected him because he was not her social equal, and Paul rushed off to Europe with “ a fever in his blood": he was bent on placing himself on a level with “the rarest and proudest in older countries” and perhaps bringing home the daughter of a hundred earls. Willis’s career and marriage in Europe suggested the reality of both these tales, and the “cold girl” might well have been Boston, where Willis had grown up obscurely and experienced a broken engagement for some such reason. He was probably snubbed all round in Boston, where he might have been thought a little cheap, and he had taken this to heart because he was ambitious and acutely aware of social distinctions and values.

Besides, his family disapproved of his worldly tastes and his theater-going and his light-hearted drives to Nahant for a spin on the beach. His father, a journalist who had established the Youth’s Companion, was a deacon of the church at “Brimstone Corner,”and Willis had been sent to Yale precisely because of the brimstone there and to save him from the frivolities and corruptions of Harvard. Naturally, he became more frivolous than ever; and if he was not the proverbial minister’s son, he behaved for the rest of his life as if he had been. The steep and thorny ways were not for him: he preferred the dalliance and the perfumes of the primrose path. Long before he left Yale he knew the fashionable watering-places where the belles and the beaux philandered in the big hotels, and he was planning stories already about young men at these resorts, wandering from one to another, dancing and flirting.

During his vacations, he went to Saratoga, where Congress Hall sparkled in the dim old forest, the smart hotel with the long wings and spacious vine-covered colonnade and the band that played for the nightly balls in a style to make the candles quiver. On one of the Erie canalboats, with its drawing room and library, luxurious with sofas and curtains and Venetian blinds, he made a little trip to Niagara and beyond, stopping on the way at Trenton Falls. This new resort, fourteen miles from Utica, had first been discovered, like Paestum, by a wandering artist, and there already another huge hotel stood, with a French chef, olives and soda water, and still more belles. He passed large cities that had risen overnight to vindicate the title of the Empire State, and he saw Colonel Rochester sitting at his front door in the twelve-year-old metropolis that bore his name.

Already an observer and traveler, with a keen eye for the picturesque, he visited the Saint Lawrence and the Thousand Islands, and he missed nothing in New Haven, with its sunny gardens and leafy streets, which Anne Royall called the “Eden of the Union.” At least, he never missed a pretty girl. He had begun to write for the giftbooks, and his though somewhat watery verses were known all over the country while he was in college. Some of them were Biblical tales, prettified in the current style, entangled with eglantine, jessamine, and the rose of Sharon; others were lines composed on a balcony at daybreak while a ball was still going on within. With his harps and lyres and his fays and bowers and Ermengardes and Melanies, Willis stood for a hundred poets of the day. His specialties were moonlight on the Jake and twilight in the vale and the love that did not wish to livein a cottage.

Already a favorite in feminine circles, this dashing young man, just out of Yale, had reconnoitered New York, where he met Halleck, finding his natural habitat there, and his subject too, in the “upper ten thousand,” a phrase that Willis coined a few years later.⁷ He learned his editorial craft, picturing himself at a rosewood desk, with ever fresh japonicas, in a crimson-curtained sanctum; then he set out on the pilgrimage that he “pencilled” in his letters, returning to New York in 1837. He became what another young poet described as the “topmost bright bubble on the wave of the town.” It was true that he lived for several years in the country. On an excursion up the Mohawk, he found a spot on Owego Creek, not far from the valley of Wyoming of which Campbell had written, and there, at “Glenmary,” among the hills, he set out trees and planted corn, while his pen, as everywhere else, “capered nimbly away.” There he wrote Letters from Under a Bridge, on a stone seat by the stream, sketching the rustic scenes about him, the wild life of the lumber men, the rafts gliding through the meadows along the creek and the Susquehanna.

These letters had a fragile charm, like many of the other miscellaneous writings that Willis produced in his “scenery-hunts" and travels, for he was a tireless gadabout and everything served him for copy — inaugurations at Washington, observations along the way. He wrote about the West Indies, Kentucky and the Mammoth Cave, the hedges and majestic elms of rural Stockbridge, and the old Virginia houses on the Rappahannock, with clever pensketches of well-known men⁸ interspersed with stories of artists and bandits in Venice, Palermo, Vienna, Florence, and Rome.

But Willis’s element was Broadway and the gay procession there, along with the watering-places and springs that had risen and spread all over the country. With an eye on his lady subscribers, he kept them informed of changes in fashions, observing, as Cooper had observed when he returned to Cooperstown, that the modes of Paris were instantly followed even in frontier hamlets. Willis reported all the events of the theater and the opera and the progress uptown in New York, where “Friend, go up higher” had become the motto, and he watched and described Broadway at all times and seasons, in its various fluxes and refluxes.

He followed the morning tide downtown, the countryfolk at their early shopping, the old merchants and junior partners and the lawyers bound for Nassau Street, the errand boys and newsboys, the ladies in their close veils, the side-streets that were tributaries of silks and velvets, feathers and flowers. In the late afternoon Broadway was thronged with carriages moving towards the ferries for a drive in the country. Willis delighted in Niblo’s Garden, with its labyrinth, mirrors, shrubberies, and fountains, the greenhouse full of rare plants and the glitter of the lights. He haunted the French theater there, and the Battery, too, with its nursemaids and children and shops of French bootmakers and German toymakers, looking over at the Jersey shore that was fringed with willows and islands, and at the bright and verdant heights of Brooklyn.

On a Sunday he strolled along the river, where the bowsprits projected over the street and the long line of carved figureheads looked down upon him and ships rubbed noses against the piers that had nudged the tropics and the Poles and felt the breath of icebergs and far spice-islands. There were superb French packet-ships and Swedish and Norwegian tramps and vessels from the North Sea unloading hemp and iron, and the sidewalks were lumbered with pitch and molasses, flour and red ochre, barrels and bales. New York was all fresh, buoyant, new, or so it seemed to the casual eye, and travelers were surprised by the absence there of raggedness and poverty, but Willis knew the Five Points, between the Bowery and Broadway, where the wretched population starved in a chaos of rubbish and dirt. The broken, filthy staircases between the dingy brick walls connected crowded cellars with floors that were covered with sleepers in rags.

36

YOUNG America already had its city proletariat, together with its somewhat disheartening jeunesse dorée, though the “dandies in idleness,’ Willis observed, lasted only a summer or so before they went “into a store" or went to Paris. They were mostly pale and narrow-chested, weaklimbed and undersized, and they were as vapid mentally as they were puny: they knew that Cellarius invented the polka, that Derby and Corraz could cut a coat, and that Asia Minor was also a part of the planet, but they left all other knowledge to the baldheads. Inasmuch as work was the only pleasure that New York made any provision for, the wonder was that they could exist at all, and, largely owing to the national distaste for manly exercise, they looked like invalids beside young Englishmen.⁹

Willis remarked that inherited wealth caused them to dwindle physically, as Englishmen seemed to grow healthier and taller under the same conditions. Was this not partly because in America they had lost their function as social beings whereas in England the political system absorbed them? Their main concern had come to be merely the art of making money, not farming or learning or statecraft, as in earlier times, and Cooper had been struck by the trivial aims of this younger generation, of which Willis was a frequently shrewd observer. The physical advantage was all with the mechanics and the farmers.

But Willis, like later American writers who were drawn to the world of gilded youth, was much more concerned with the women than he was with the men — the belles of New York and the Southern beauties from the “latitudes of lovely languor” whose characters he sometimes studied by examining their hands. His stories were full of them“Such belles! Slight, delicate, fragile-looking creatures, elegant as Retzscli’s angels, warm-eyed as Mohammedan houris.”Then he observed the growth of luxury, which had come in like a flood since the first, wave round 1835, when there were only three musicians at the most distinguished ball in New York and the fine houses were bleak and stiffly formal. What a change overnight, with ottomans and draperies and frescoed ceilings and colored chandeliers and doors that were painted to look like marble or bronze.

The settings that Willis chose for his stories were sometimes parlors in New York, or dwellings of the “Knickerbocracy,” as he called it, — perhaps some old house on the Hudson, clinging to a dell, — or one of the gayly painted steamers, long, shallow, graceful, and swift, with fringed white awnings and streaming flags, that sped towards Albany up the river. Albany was the point of departure for Saratoga and Sharon Springs, while for Lebanon one left the boat at the village of Hudson.

These spas and springs and watering-places were Willis’s happy hunting grounds. He made an annual trip to Saratoga, while he celebrated Nahant, too, Ballston Spa and Rockaway and Harrodsburg Springs, near Lexington, in far-away Kentucky. Nahant, with its vast, unsheltered pagoda on the long, pointed, windy cape, was already the most fashionable resort near Boston, and Harrodsburg Was the growing center for the Southern and the Western belles who had come in earlier times to Saratoga.

In his preface to Tales of Glauber Spa, which he wrote with Paulding and one or two others, Bryant had mildly satirized this rage for springs. An old farmer, Sharon Clapp, was supposed to have written this preface when his life had been turned upside down—a doctor discovered that his spring had “saline and gaseous properties" in it and the old farmer was obliged to find refuge in the barn. For his wife and daughters took up the cry, and Sheep’s Neck became Glauber Spa, while the name of Ram’s Alley was changed to Epsom Walk, and the girls reformed the house and added wings for the fashionable guests, along with at least one Congressman, who came to board there.

Many of the spas had begun, no doubt, in some such way as this, and even now the dim old wilderness stood looking down on most of them, and one drove to Saratoga through stump-thickets and clay-pits and mile after mile of woods that were still primeval. The dark forest at Lebanon Springs threw shadows over the colonnades. Three miles away the Lebanon Shakers worked in their fields in the summer months, and Indians camped in clearings around the springs, selling sweet-grass baskets, bows and arrows, while the devotees of gavety and mineral water dawdled about the porticoes and under the trees.

But Saratoga, the “Bath of America,” was Willis’s special delight, with its flaunting shops and sprawling hotels, riddled with windows like honeycombs, where swarms of fashionable idlers lounged in swings and piazza chairs and lovers philandered through the woods on horseback. Old ladies gathered on the steps, and dandies perched on the balustrades, and young men lay on the grass beside lovely young ladies with the laps of their flowing dresses full of flowers. They turned to look when some charming creature in a big straw picture hat sped past with her two bay ponies in a phaeton, and there was a stir when the driver’s horn announced the coming of the huge red coach and still more lovely young ladies emerged with green veils and parasols. There were fathers and mothers and uncles, too, and the halls were a-bustle with ladies’ maids and bellboys running hither and thither and cries for mint juleps and sangarees and woodcocks to be dressed for dinner. Then the band broke into a polka or a gallopade.

For Willis there were amusing stories wherever one looked at Saratoga, and he observed the various types one saw at Congress Hall and the new promiscuous hotel, the United States. There were aging bachelors, for instance, sighing for the Southern young ladies of old who talked so well on subjects that interested men, and there were Knickerbocratic old maids who were foils for these Julias of long ago, for they seemed to be nothing but family noses walking about in petticoats. There were types of the plebeian million who were breaking into this upper ten thousand, and country girls who were eager to see the world, emulating the high-born creatures whose never varied face one saw in all the fashion plates, pale and disdainful. Sometimes they were much embellished, as if they wished to unite in one dress all the fashions of all the magazines, and their voices were like C-sharp on a new piano.

There were worldly uncles who advised their nieces about the sort of ammunition with which to enter the field at Saratoga, suggesting the charms of a leaning head, a voice that was pitched a few notes lower, and the value of ruining their fathers in gloves and shoes. “Primroses should not be fresher.”Above all, there were belles in white dresses and rosebuds, “belles than the bluebell slighter and fairer,” luxuriously flexible, graceful as a curl of smoke, — or perhaps “cool, dangerous and dressy,” — with voices of clouded contralto and hair that was worn like the chains on the shoulders of hussars. There were moments in Willis’s clever stories ¹⁰ that suggested the younger Henry James, alike in their characters and settings and lightness of touch, while Willis conveyed, as no one else, the glamor of youth in this earlier time. He might have been described three generations later as the Scott Fitzgerald of the belles of Saratoga.

37

THE eighteen-forties were called in later times the “mad,” the “roaring,” the “fabulous” forties, and this was indeed a singular decade in which, as Cooper said, the nation was passing “from the gristle into the bone.” It was unique as a time of reforms and razes, of Abolition and Fourierism, of “esoteric anthropology,” of spiritualism, mesmerism, pathetism, phrenology, and what not. The nervous and mental interior turmoil implied in these various phrases—the battle-cries and banners of the forties — was matched by the turmoil of the outward life of this decade of “Manifest Destiny,” the Mexican War, the Mormon trek, the settlement of Oregon. The most tumultuous years in the history of the country were those that led up to the climax of 1849; and yet their most notable aspect perhaps was the national mood of selfrealization for which the American writers had prepared the way. For was it not largely thanks to these writers that Americans had become aware of their country, its woods and fields, its rivers and mountains, and its intellect and history too?

Young as it was, American literature already had much to be proud of, though the most intelligent foreign visitors were scarcely aware that it even existed.!¹¹ It was fulfilling a rule in the evolution of nations and peoples, that poets appear at the stage of progress following great struggles for the freedom and the shaping of the state. But men still living recollected the first American novel and the first American professional man of letters. They could almost recall the first American play. There had been many writers of verse in colonial New England especially, and who could have named the first American poem? But only one of two or three men whom everyone remembered could ever have been called the first of the American poets.

The relatively eminent writers, moreover, who had appeared in this first generation were still transitional figures in the American scene. They reflected and represented a world that had cut its political ties with England while retaining colonial modes of thinking and feeling, and Irving was virtually an English writer in every important characteristic as Cooper retained to the last the stamp of the Old World feudal order. Irving in his bestknown tales embodied the lingering traces of European history and legend on American soil, while Bryant remained an English provincial poet.

In their political-mindedness these writers were typically American, however, immediate heirs as they were of the Revolution. They were closely connected with public life in their writings and as friends and associates of statesmen, and they were generally sympathetic, along with the lesser writers and artists, towards all the republican movements of their day abroad. They were all, at one time or another, soldiers, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and Poe (who stood alone in every other way), while the navy was all but a nursling of American letters: Cooper and Irving wrote ardently about it, and Kennedy, Paulding, and Bancroft were Secretaries of the Navy.

The atmosphere these writers breathed was leisurely and spacious. They had some of the breadth and simplicity of patriarchal times, and they were emotionally uncomplicated and seemed singularly happy in comparison with certain of the writers of the following age. For their minds were focused on the outer world and they were extroverts, generally speaking, at home with men of enterprise and action. Even the meditative Bryant was never introspective, and he too liked to think of adventurers, explorers, sailors, pioneers, the Asturians, Captain Bonneville, Natty Bumppo, the figures of Cooper’s novels and the heroes of Simms. Moreover, all these writers were happy in their country, for even the censorious Cooper never lost his deep belief that America, the young republic, was to lead the world.

For the forest-philosopher Audubon it was always fair weather-the world for him was ever fresh and blooming; aud this, on the whole, was the frame of mind of the first generation of American writers in their vast, new, undefeated virgin homeland. They shared the buoyant confidence of the expanding nation, with its Jeffersonian freight of morning dreams, and Washington Irving’s life of Columbus was a symbol of this age, for most of these writers too were discoverers of the country. William Bartram, Timothy Dwight, and Lewis and Clark, the travelers, were only a few of the explorers of the American scene, while others, revealing aspects hitherto unknown, familiarized Americans with the land they lived in.

Thus Wilson and Audubon described the birds, and Catlin and Schoolcraft the Indians, while Bryant discovered for poetry the American flowers, and from Brockden Brown to Cooper and Simms the forest appeared in all these writers with its population of redmen, woodsmen, and scouts. Irving, Cooper, and Bryant alike celebrated the Western prairies and the pioneer types in whom Audubon also rejoiced, while Dunlap had shown that America had an art as well. Thanks to these writers, acting together, the nation wakened rapidly to a sense of its own imaginative and mental resources.

38

ALREADY, in the early forties, there was an eager movement of mind in virtually every corner of the country. This was especially marked in New England, in Boston, in Cambridge, in Concord, but Charleston had its flowering too, the mind of Virginia was astir, and Kentucky and Ohio were awake. In David Crockett’s pioneer Tennessee the people were rapidly emerging from the “forest state.” There was an interest in science at Nashville, in spite of the fundamentalists, who deplored this “prying into the Lord’s secrets,” while in the forties in Cincinnati there were three publishers of music who were prepared for the songs of Stephen Foster. As a bookkeeper there in the office of a steamboat agent, Foster heard the Negroes singing on the wharves, and he knew Kentucky across the river and the scenes of the plantation songs that were to follow “0, Susanna.”

In the West there was music on every side, along the rivers, in pioneer cabins, where fiddles were sometimes played to scare off wolves, and the Apollonian Society at Pittsburgh had offered as early as 1800 the music of Handel and Haydn, Mozart and Bach. Stephen Foster was born at Pittsburgh on the day on which Thomas Jefferson died, while there Thomas Cole had lived and another artist, Chester Harding, a soldier of the War of 1812, had made a living as a painter of houses and signs. Thence he had set out in a skiff to Kentucky, where he painted William Clark and Daniel Boone.

As for writers, the wildest regions had them now —Arkansas, for instance, the birthplace of the bowie-knife, where Albert Pike lived at Little Rock. This adventurous Yankee, the author of “Dixie,” had gone West on a trapping party and visited Santa Fe in 1831; then, setting up as an Arkansas lawyer, he let his hair grow loose and long and became the boldest of southrons and the most Byronic. He was one of those picturesque border characters who were soldiers, planters, and statesmen at once,

— as they were certainly actors all the time, — like the mighty duelist Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar, the poet, who was also president of Texas,

Pike was a friend of the Indians, another David Crockett who was even supposed to have been an Indian chief, and he wrote some of his poems in the saddle on the plains. Among these perhaps was “Isadore,” which appeared two years before “The Raven” and may indeed have had its effect on Poe. He had been a teacher of Greek before he left New England, and as a former Confederate general he studied Sanskrit in later years and made a translation of the Rig-Veda, but he was best known for his Hymns to the Gods, the Greek and Roman deities, which were published in Blackwood’s in 1839. These poems were greatly admired by Christopher North.

In writing and painting and music alike there were signs of life on every hand that were sometimes fresh, indigenous, and characteristic. They betokened something new under the sun. Cooper had written Precaution because it had never occurred to him that American readers would be interested in American life, in their own sailors and woodsmen, peddlers and scouts, as the poetasters had dwelt so long on the nightingales and the flowers of England, ignoring the trailing arbutus, the bobolink, the shadbush. But this interest was at last emerging, and Albert Pike’s “The Fine Arkansas Gentleman,” which might have appeared a hundred years later,

— it served perhaps as a model for Ogden Nash, — expressed a feeling for the native American scene that Stephen Foster’s songs presently matched.

The greatest discoverer of American life in all its unuttered abundance was soon to appear in the author of Leaves of Grass; and meanwhile a number of painters of the scenes and the types that delighted Walt Whitman were already at work in New York, in the country, in the West. William Sidney Mount was painting on Long Island in the manner of the little Dutch masters; at least, he believed he was following Teniers in his representations of rustic dances, banjo-players, horse-traders, the making of cider and the killing of hogs. What aspect of rural seaside life did one fail to find in these pictures of Mount, which united with an authentic charm the kind of faithful realism that seemed to be an American characteristic? They were sketches of haymaking, cornhusking, sleigh-riding, spearing for eels, fishing, the raffling of geese, drawing water, whetting a scythe, a breakdown iu a barn, a farmhouse in a meadow, a shed in a cove.

At the same time, in and about St. Louis, where he fell in with Chester Harding, George Caleb Bingham, the Missouri artist, had also been painting since 1830. Born in Virginia, the son of a tobacco farmer, he had been taken West as a boy of eight and had learned to paint with axle grease and brick dust mixed with oil, vegetable dyes, and perhaps a little ochre. He had used linen sheets for canvas and boards that he prepared himself, beginning in the usual way as a portrait painter, and he had broken away from this to paint the lively Missouri scenes he had known as a backwoods frontier boy, flatboatmen dancing, shooting for a beef, raftsmen floating down the Ohio, fur traders and trappers, and squatters building their cabins. His pictures might have been illustrations for the Episodes of Audubon, and they shared Audubon’s happy zest for these incidents of the place and the moment. They had much in common too with Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes and Baldwin’s Flush Times of Alabama and the growing body of stories and poems in which Americans everywhere were expressing a newborn interest in their own life.

39

IN AND about New York, meanwhile, two writers of genius were coming of age, Walt Whitman, a carpenter’s son. and Herman Melville; and the greatest of American travel-writers, John Lloyd Stephens, was often in New York during these years. A small, wiry, nervous man, he was in fact a lawyer there, a graduate of Columbia, born in New Jersey, whose favorite rendezvous was the bookshop in the Astor House where other writers gathered to hear him talk. It was this renowned storyteller who had brought up from Yucatan the sculptures that now reposed on the island in the Hudson, for he had explored twice the teeming forests of Central America between 1839 and 1841. Several years before this in 1834, he had traveled through Egypt, the Holy Land, and Arabia Petraea.

His letters had been published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, and Poe reviewed the book that made Stephens famous. He was the “wonderful Arabian traveller" whom Herman Melville saw in church and wished to follow home when he was a boy, for Melville too had read his book in its pale yellow cover and marveled over the author’s strange adventures. Melville’s own imagination was full of “remote and barbarous countries,”and the big eyes of Stephens long haunted him. He dreamed of the wanderer in Stony Arabia, famishing in the desert there, who suddenly caught sight of the date tree with its ripe fruit.

Stephens’s books passed rapidly through many editions. For this admirable writer was a popular writer as well, largely perhaps because of the contrast between the scenes that he portrayed and the nervous energy and bustle of American life. The people who liked the romantic effect of artificial ruins could scarcely hear enough of the ruined cities that Stephens’s majestic descriptions brought before them — the ruins of the conquered nations that were buried in the Central American forests as in Greece, Egypt, Arabia, and the Holy Land. The Americans had loved Volney’s Ruins, and as their cities multiplied, hopeful and busy and shining with fresh, bright paint, the more their imagination delighted in these desolate scenes of temples and tombs, lost in the deserts and jungles of the Old World and the New.

Besides, there was something extremely attractive in the character of John Lloyd Stephens, the frankness and manliness of feeling that one found in his books, traits that Poe noted in his review, together with the author’s freshness of manner and his freedom and sound feeling and good sense. He had traveled through Egypt and Arabia alone with wild tribesmen, beyond the reach of any help, well knowing that everything depended on his coolness and discretion, while he had an infectious feeling of awe, a sense of the sublime that made his account of these travels singularly impressive.

Thousands of years rolled through his mind as he gazed on the relics of faded kingdoms, recalling their mysterious uses and the men who built them and the poets, historians, and warriors who had looked upon them with a wonder like his own in ages past. First, however, he drove through Russia, in a traveling-carriage to Moscow, by way of Kiev, over the illimitable plains, where the road from Odessa was merely a track that was worn by caravans and long trains of wagons drawn by oxen. There were only occasional heaps of stones to guide the traveler along this road, which might almost have been the trail to Santa Fe, with a dusty village now and then consisting of a single street and a line of rude log-cabins on either side.

It was very like the prairies at home, as Odessa, where Stephens set out for Moscow, — and for Novgorod, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw later, — had grown more rapidly than Buffalo or Cincinnati; and Russia had its serfs too, as the Americans had their slaves, who were equally degraded, or seemed so, in mind and bearing. Stephens was convinced that this was wholly the result of circumstances, for he did not believe in the existence of inferior races. He had seen full-blooded African Negroes serving, in perfect equality, as officers in the Greek and Turkish armies. For he had visited Turkey before he entered Russia and had spent several weeks as well in Athens. Once more the capital of a kingdom, under a young Bavarian king, it was turning into a European city, with French and German restaurants flanking the bazaars. The busy talk about improvements, new streets, plans for railroads, carried one back to New York and its “uptown lots.”

The only school in Athens, which had once led the world in learning, was the school of the American missionaries, opened in 1831 on the site of the agora of old and partly constructed from its ruins. There one found a little Miltiades, a Leonidas, an Aristides, even a son of the former Maid of Athens, and the girls’ department was the first school for girls in Greece, established by women of Troy, not of Greece but New York. Emma Willard had labored for it, and in general the school expressed the sympathy that Americans felt with the Greeks in their war with the Turks. Stephens stopped at Missolonghi, where he talked with the widow of Marco Bozzaris, who, thanks to the poem of Fitz-Greene Halleck, was almost as famous in America as the heroes of its own Revolution.

Then he visited the ruins of Mycenae, which people had come to survey as ruins seventeen hundred years before him: Pausanius had beheld the Gate of Lions in the same state in which he saw it. His head hummed with Herodotus and Homer, and he saw the island of Scio and the Hellespont, which Leander swam for love and Byron for fun; and he spent further months in the valley of the Nile as well as among the ruins of Berenice. Arabs still rifled tombs and sold the mummies. They broke up mummy cases and used them for firewood, and a traveler might cook his breakfast with the coffin of a king.

It was from Cairo that Stephens, dressed as a merchant of Egypt, set out on his expedition to the Holy Land. He wore a gown of red silk, with a green and yellow turban, and carried a sword and a pair of Turkish pistols, and he pitched his tent with the Bedouins and followed the steps of the Israelites when they fled from their land of bondage and the wrath of Pharaoh. With his own private caravan, striking south from Suez, he visited Mount Sinai and then moved northward to the stony mountains of Arabia Petraea, crossing the borders of the ancient land of Edom against which the prophets had set their faces.

This was the blighted land of which Isaiah said that “none shall pass through it for ever and ever.”the dreary land, cursed by God, where only a few Bedouins roamed like Indians on the prairies of the American West. There were no trees in the desolate valley, but occasional relics of Arab villages were mingled with those of Roman towns. Beyond lay the city of Petra, with its amphitheater, triumphal arches, broken stairways, porticoes, and porches, and its splendid temples cut from the naked rock. Completely lost for a thousand years, it had only been rediscovered lately, and there were few records of any other travelers who had so much as entered the land of Edom.

Stephens’s “route obscure and lonely” might well have inspired the phrase of Poe, who borrowed other images from this capital writer. For in style, in the quality of his imagination, in his somber sense of the flight of time, Stephens was one of the few great writers of travels, and he presently found his best account among the ruins of Central America, of which no drawings or plans had ever appeared. Little had ever been written about them, they had scarcely been explored, and even the names of some of the cities had never been uttered by modern men. Humboldt had seen the great temple of Cholula, but he had never heard of these lost cities that lay beyond the vale of Mexico, buried in forests, desolate, overgrown, and no one believed that any high civilization had existed in America before the coming of the whites.

Yet some of the cities were described by the conquistadors, and it was their account of the buildings and temples “shining like silver” along the coast that attracted M ashington Irving to the theme of the conquest. He had magnanimously turned this over to Prescott, who was soon to throw light on this ancient American world. As for the skeptical Stephens, vague accounts of some of the less accessible cities had reached him. It was known that a few had been occupied at the time of the conquest, but Cortes had passed within a few miles of Palenque, and if it had been a living city he would have turned aside to lay it low. Even in those days all memory of it was probably lost, while only two modern men had seen Copán, a Spaniard in 1700 and a colonel in the army of the country who had written a report for the government about it.

The Indians were less accustomed to the sight of strangers and more suspicious than the Arabs around Mount Sinai, and they knew nothing of the history of the cities. They used them as quarries for building-stones, and one sometimes saw magnificent sculptures built into walls or employed as the platforms of wells, while the ruins themselves were left to struggle with the rank tropical vegetation, abodes of lizards, snakes, vultures, jackals, and bats. Savages never reared these structures, savages never carved these stones, but the dull answer of the Indians was “Quien sabe?” when one tried to penetrate the mystery that surrounded them. Yet these Indians, degraded and miserable, were descended from this ancient race that had once been so obviously cultivated, powerful, and proud.

40

WHEN Stephens traveled through them, the little republics of Central America were all in a state of anarchy and civil war, and he had to resort to threats and stratagems to make his way down the isthmus. He was dangerously ill with fever and had perilous adventures, but, used as he was to sleeping pellmell with Arabs, Greeks, and Turks, he was soon at home with the Indians in their forest hamlets. Following trails and bridle paths, he cut his way into the crowded ruins, among the sculptured stones that were strewn through the woods, stopping to remove the boughs and vines that concealed the face of a monument and digging out fragments that partly protruded from the earth.

He leaned over with breathless anxiety when the machete rang against chiseled stone and the Indians disentombed a foot, a hand, an ear, or a sculptured eye. There were monuments displaced from their pedestals by enormous roots or locked in the embrace of twisted branches or hurled to the ground and bound there by creepers and runners. Sometimes they still stood, with their altars before them, in the solemn stillness of the forest, rivaling in their beauty the finest sculpture of Egypt. Stephens and Catherwood ¹² swung their hammocks in the palaces of unknown kings, on terraces, covered with alamos and century plants, that towered over the tops of the loftiest trees, reached by gigantic flights of steps and often with paintings in the halls, red and green figures still bright on the crumbling stucco. The chattering of the parrots broke the silence, and the monkeys suggested the spirits of the departed race, watching over the ruins of their old habitations.

One marveled at these remains of a people who had reached their golden age and perished, entirely unknown, for there were no associations connected with these cities like those that hallowed Greece and Rome. The links were severed and broken that related them to the human family, and these were the only monuments of their people on earth; yet, wherever one moved, one saw evidences of a taste and a skill that indicated one of the world’s great races. Architecture, sculpture, and painting flourished in these forests, and orators, warriors, and statesmen, ambition and beauty, had once lived there and passed away, and one could imagine scenes of splendor there that realized the most brilliant visions of the Oriental poets. Nothing in all history could have impressed one more forcibly than the spectacle of these great cities, dismantled and lost, and the shrouding of the ruins by the forest created a wildness of interest in them that Stephens had never felt even in Petra.

In his own way, John Lloyd Stephens, like so many other artists and writers, was one of the discoverers, in the forties, of the American scene. He revealed, at least in part, the visible past of a Pan-America that was scarcely as yet aware of its own existence, although several writers had explored it in “America of the North.”

Meanwhile, Walt Whitman was exploring the America of the present and Herman Melville, his fellow New Yorker, was voyaging in the South Seas and living among the cannibals in the Marquesas. Melville and Whitman had much in common, although, spending their lives in the region of New York, they left no record of having seen each other: born in the same year, both by descent half Dutch, half English, ruddy, hardy, powerful, bigshouldered men, they possessed an emotional amplitude that was wholly new in American letters and a similar admiration for the “kingly commons.”

Melville, like Whitman, longed to see a “full-developed man,” instead of the “ parts of men ” that humanity knew, and had even had a glimpse of him in the radiant sailor Jack Chase, the master of seamanship, poetry, love, and war. Like Fenimore Cooper, whom he admired, he had gone to school in Albany, where his mother’s family, the Gansevoorts, were people of importance, and, like Cooper again, he had sailed as a boy to England, although Melville never stood on the quarter-deck. He shipped as an ordinary seaman both then and later, on a whaler and on the frigate United States, and he acquired in the forecastle the tragic sense of life that later suffused and dominated his mind and his writings.

Whitman had lived as a boy in Brooklyn, a quiet country village, and he returned to edit a newspaper there, but his real home was “Mannahatta,” where he worked as a journeyman printer and wandered, “amazed,” as he said, at his “lightness and glee. He liked to join the pilots in their cabins on the ferry boats and sit beside the drivers on the Broadway stages, for the presence of the hurrying crowds elated him, while he also had a passion for the sea. He haunted the theaters, the police courts, political meetings, delighting in the actors Edwin Forrest and Booth, and the Italian operas too with their arias and recitatives that played a part in the shaping of Whitman’s style. He had begun to write for George P. Morris’s Mirror, for Bryant’s Evening Post and Greeley’s Tribune, and he felt for his predecessor Bryant the kind of admiration that Melville felt and expressed for his predecessor Cooper. Whitman had written a paper in praise of loafing, and when he was working in Brooklyn, Bryant had several times come over in the ferry and joined him in the middle of the afternoon. They rambled for hours together in the country lanes.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, which Audubon called the “reading state,” — especially in the capital Boston, in Cambridge, and in Concord,—a literary movement was under way that spread its influence far and wide and even swayed minds in every part of the country. For all Cooper’s dislike of New England and Washington Irving’s indifference to it, not to speak of Poe’s hostility to “Frogpondium,” his birthplace, New England writers had played a large role in New York — Bryant, FitzGreene Halleck. N. P. Willis, and the founders of the New York Tribune and the New York Times, with Morse and John Trumbull, who established academies there; and now the Yankees on their home ground were already overshadowing the writers of all the other regions.

Whitman was to find in Emerson a master, as Melville found the mind he admired most in the author of TwiceTold Tales and The Scarlet Letter, while the appearance in 1840 of Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast had perhaps been responsible for Melville’s enlisting in a whaler. Melville was discharged from the navy in Boston in 1844, the year in which he seriously began to write, at a moment when Hawthorne was living in the manse at Concord and Henry Thoreau was planning to settle at Walden. Emerson’s first little book had appeared in 1836, the year of McGuffey’s First Reader, published in Ohio, and five years after Josiah Gregg set out for Santa Fe on the first of the treks he described in Commerce of the Prairies.

Brook Farm, which had just been opened when Stephens was in Yucatan, was flourishing in the months when Audubon ascended the Missouri. It was true that the North American Review preceded by ten years in Boston the founding of the Southern Review in Charleston, but Longstreet, David Crockett, and Catlin had published their distinctive work before Longfellow’s poems appeared in Voices of the Night, and Simms had also appeared before Hawthorne, and typical books of Irving and Cooper had long preceded the important New England authors. Perhaps it was true, as Poe said, that New York was the “focus of American letters,” as Philadelphia had been years before. There was to be no doubt about this in the future, but Boston had reasons at the moment for disputing the claim. Boston was unique indeed as a center of powerful minds in the generation that witnessed the flowering of New England.

(The End)

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