Part 6

Fourteenth Street! It must be difficult for the New Yorkers of to-day who have not passed the half-century mark to realize that only fifty years ago it was really “up-town.” It is easier to imagine the present Thomas Street as it was in 1815, a spot to be reached only after a bucolic journey through country lanes which my grandfather used to traverse on his way to the New York Hospital where he studied medicine. We think of that condition of things in about the same state of mind as that in which we contemplate the Roman Forum or the stony avenues of Pompeii. It amuses me to recall the period of the fifties and early sixties when the Hudson River Railroad had its terminus in Thirtieth Street near Tenth Avenue, but sent its cars, horse-drawn, to Chambers Streets and College Place just opposite old Ridley’s, whose pictures were on those familiar inverted cones of never-to-be-forgotten candies, the virtues whereof have been proclaimed sonorously on railway trains from time immemorial, and that Chambers Street station will always live in the memory of old-fashioned people who used to “go to town” from rural neighborhoods. My aforesaid grandfather took me often, much to my joy, to visit his son in West Nineteenth Street, and the conservative old gentleman, who served as a surgeon under Commodore Charles Stewart on the good ship “Franklin,” always went to Chambers Street and thence by the Sixth Avenue horse-railway to Nineteenth Street, which caused the pilgrimage to be unduly protracted, but we always reached our destination sooner or later—generally later. I remember that an idiotic notion possessed me that we were confined to traveling on West Broadway because country people were not allowed to encumber the real, the glorious Broadway, of whose omnibus-crowded splendors I caught but furtive glimpses by peering up the cross-streets. Another gentleman of the old school, whom I loved sincerely, invariably proceeded from Thirtieth Street—and after the genesis of the Grand Central Station, from Forty-second Street—to the Astor House, from which venerable house of cheer he wended his way serenely to Union Square, or to Madison Square, or to any quarter where his business or his pleasure led him, however remote it might be from City Hall Park. To him the Astor House was practically the hub of the metropolis. These details may seem to be trivial, but they are characteristic of the old-fashioned men of half a century ago who still clung to the swallow-tailed coat as a garment to be worn by daylight. It never occurred to them to “take a cab,” possibly because there was no cab which a decent person would willingly occupy unless it had been ordered in advance from a livery stable. There are many reasons why this land of freedom—modified freedom—is preferable to any other land; but when we come to cabs, we must, in all fairness, admit the superiority of the London hansom over a New York “growler,” the hansoms now vanishing, we learn, before the all-conquering horde of motor-cars.

The old-fashioned magazines—how few ever turn their pages now, and yet how much in them is of interest, even to a casual reader. Far be it from me to whisper the slightest word of disparagement about our gorgeous and innumerable “monthlies,” with their pomp and pride of illustration, extending from text to the copious advertisements, those soul-stirring and lucrative adjuncts to a magazine of the present. Do not tell me that a man who buys the thick, paper-covered book does not read the advertisements; he pretends that he does not, but he does. According to my experience he follows them from soap to steam-yachts, from refrigerators to railway routes, but he would rather die than confess it. Much as I admire these products of our later civilization, I nevertheless maintain that there is more charm in an ancient number of any worthy periodical than is to be found in the latest issue. Time seems to add a mellow flavor to the good things of the past. There is not much to say in praise of the solemn _Whig Review_ or of O’Sullivan’s portentous _Democratic Review_, but take from the shelf a shabbily bound volume of _Graham’s Magazine of Literature and Art_, published in the forties, and there will be discovered a wilderness of delights. The fashion-plates alone are dreams of comical beauty, and the steel plates of “The Shepherd’s Love,” “The Proffered Kiss,” and “Lace Pattern with Embossed View” far surpass—in a sense—the boasted work of Pyle and of Abbey. What soul will decline to be thrilled at the lovely skit entitled “Born to Love Pigs and Chickens” by that butterfly of literature, Nathaniel Parker Willis, which you will find in the number of February, 1843. Consider the portrait of Charles Fenno Hoffman, with his exquisite coatlet, his wonderful legs attired in what appear to be tights, and his mild but intellectual countenance beaming upon us as he sits, bare-headed, upon a convenient stage rock, holding in one hand an object which may be a pie, a boxing-glove or a hat, according to the imagination of the beholder. Contemplate the list of contributors, including Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, and “Edgar A. Poe, Esq.,” the “Esq.” adding a delicious dignity to each of the illustrious names. It was only “sixty years since,” but can any magazine of to-day rival that catalogue? Almost every one knows that Poe was editor of _Graham_ for a year and that _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_ as well as Longfellow’s _Spanish Student_ first appeared in that magazine. Coming to a later day, recall the _Harper_ of the fifties. No pleasure of the present can equal that which we felt when we revelled in Abbott’s Napoleon, which turned us lads into enthusiastic admirers of the great Emperor; or when we enjoyed the jovial Porte Crayon, whose drawing was consistently as bad as Thackeray’s, but whose fascinating humor had a quality peculiarly its own. Not long ago Mr. Janvier, to the gratification of the surviving members of the brotherhood of early _Harper_ readers, gave to Strother the tribute of his judicious praise.

One may not gossip lightly about the _Atlantic_, but the _Knickerbocker_ is distinctly old-fashioned. Longfellow’s _Psalm of Life_ first saw the light in its pages; immortal, even if Barrett Wendell does truthfully say that it is full not only of outworn metaphor but of superficial literary allusion. Old New York, adds Professor Wendell, expressed itself in our first school of renascent writing, which withered away with the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. But there was a Knickerbocker school, and the brothers Willis and Gaylord Clark helped to sustain its glories. The magazine began in 1832, faded in 1857 and died in 1864; and out of it sprang many of the authors whose names are inseparably associated with a golden period of our literature.

It was only a short time ago that one of the men of those by-gone times departed this life, and the scanty mention of him in the public press compelled a sad recognition of the familiar truth that in order to retain popular attraction one must pose perpetually under the lime-light. Parke Godwin, who belonged to the order of scholarly, high-minded Americans, had outlived his fame, except among the Centurions of West Forty-third Street and a few old people of the same class. Perhaps he did not concentrate his powers sufficiently. Editor, writer of political essays, author of _Vala, a Mythological Tale_, biographer of his father-in-law, William Cullen Bryant, and by virtue of his _History of France_, historian,—but he published only one volume more than forty years ago and then abandoned the task—he had that broad culture which sometimes disperses itself and fails to win for its possessor the highest place in the literary hierarchy. He was a delightful example of what we now regard as the old-fashioned, and his address on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Century Club is a mine of good things for one who is interested in the past of New York. “I have stood once more” said he “beside the easel of Cole as he poured his ideal visions of the Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire in gorgeous colors upon the canvas. I have seen the boyish Kensett trying to infuse his own refinement and sweetness into the wild woods of the wold. I have watched the stately Gifford as he brought the City of the Sea out of its waters, in a style that Cavaletto and Ziem would envy and with a brilliancy of color that outshone even its native Italian skies. I have stood beside the burly Leutze as he portrayed our Washington among the ice of the Delaware, or depicted the multitudinous tramp of immigrants making their western way through the wilderness to the shores of the Oregon, that ‘hears no sound save its own dashings.’ All have come back for a moment, but they are gone, oh whither? Into the silent land, says Von Salis; yet how silent it is! We speak to them, but they answer us not again.” He brought back to us the beginning of things, when he told us of the incipient conditions of the Academy of Design. “They took a room—was it suggestive?—in the old Alms House in the Park, and they worked under a wick dipped in whale-oil which gave out more smoke than light.” He spoke of Halleck, of Gulian Verplanck, of Bryant, of Charles Fenno Hoffman, of Robert C. Sands, and of old Tristam Burges, “who had swallowed Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary;” and he closed with a brief flight of eloquence such as in these days of new-fashioned chilliness it is seldom vouchsafed to us to hear.

Of the same order was William Allen Butler, the friend of Halleck and of Duyckinck, of Andrew Jackson and of Martin Van Buren, who knew Samuel Rogers and visited him in London. He was nine years the junior of Godwin. He might have won the highest eminence in the world of books if he had not made the law his chief occupation and literature only his recreation. The bar does not among its rewards number that of enduring fame, unless occasionally some great political or criminal trial perpetuates the name of the advocate chiefly concerned in it. Of course, Mr. Butler’s early essay in verse, “Nothing to Wear,” will never be entirely forgotten. A humorous skit as it was, its enduring merit is shown by the fact that in spite of the old-fashioned terms descriptive of woman’s dress and of the fashionable life of fifty years ago, in its general tone it is curiously contemporaneous. Scarcely less witty and amusing were his poems, “General Average” and “The Sexton and the Thermometer,” the former being more highly esteemed by many than its popular predecessor. I suppose that he left it out of the later collection of his poems because, with his gentle and kindly nature, he feared that a few of its passages might give offense to some of his friends of the Jewish faith whom he esteemed and respected. His translations of Uhland are marked by graceful and poetic fervor, and his prose style was lucidity itself. His humor, always attractive and appropriate, lightened even his most serious work, from an address on Statutory Law to an argument in the Supreme Court in Washington City. It was well said of him by a jurist now living, that “no man of his time, either in England or America, held an equally high rank both as a lawyer and a literary man.”

Another of the old-fashioned literary men, who was, however, considerably the senior of both Godwin and Butler, was George Perkins Morris, who died in 1864. He was at once a general of militia, an editor, a favorite song-writer, and the composer of an opera libretto. His title to immortality rests mainly upon the sentimental verses known as “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” which had a flavor about them very dear to our grandparents. To look at his manly countenance in the portrait engraved by Hollyer (who at the present writing is still extant and vigorous) after the Elliott painting, we can scarcely imagine him as the author of such lines as “Near the Lake Where Drooped the Willow,” “We Were Boys Together,” “Land-Ho,” “Long Time Ago” and “Whip-poor-will.” But James Grant Wilson says that for above a score of years he could, any day, exchange one of his songs unread for a fifty dollar cheque, when some of _literati_ of New York (possibly Poe) could not sell anything for the one-fifth part of that sum. In the presence of Morris, I confess I cannot quite give myself up to adoring admiration of the taste of our predecessors. This stanza indicates his ordinary quality:

The star of love now shines above, Cool zephyrs crisp the sea; Among the leaves, the wind-harp weaves Its serenade for thee.

Notwithstanding this rather trifling vein, admirably satirized by Orpheus C. Kerr, and a certain tone of commonplace, Morris had a genuine lyrical quality in his verse, although it was devoid of startling bursts of inspiration, and English literature affords many examples of less deserving poesy. Morris was an industrious editor, appreciative of others, and he had a personal charm which endeared him to those who had the good fortune to come within the pale of his friendship, and particularly to those who were permitted to enjoy the generous hospitality of his sweet and dignified home at Undercliff opposite West Point. Smile as we may at his little conceits and his obvious rhymes, we must recognize the sincere and genial nature of the kindly General, so long conspicuous in the social and literary life of old New York.

These men, it may be said, do not prove the permanent value of the literature of the fifties. Godwin and Morris were editors and Butler a busy lawyer, none of them able to give their undivided attention to authorship. I suppose that Irving and Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne and Bayard Taylor were more distinctly the ornaments of the time, and there are other names which more judicious and discriminating men might substitute for some of those I have chosen. Bayard Taylor’s greatest work was done in later years, but he had already won his first fame—not a giant, but a poet with “the spontaneity of a born singer,” as Stedman said. Irving, the most charming and amiable of writers, had not the most forceful intellect, but he was calm and graceful, with a gentle and bewitching humor and a strong appreciation of the beautiful—a good man, beloved and honored at home and abroad. His fame is paler now than it was forty years gone by, but he has the immortality of a classic. Emerson had a powerful influence over the minds of men, but, viewed in the perspective of time, he does not loom so largely now. I am not competent to venture far into the territory of criticism, having only the equipment of a general reader who timidly expresses his personal feelings and leaves to trained and experienced judges the task of scientific analysis; but we general readers are the jury, after all.

As time slips by there is a tendency to merge the decades of the past, and to the young people of 1909 the period of 1850–1860 is every bit as remote as the period of 1830–1840. The university undergraduate does not differentiate between the alumnus of 1870 and him of 1855, as I know by experience. A melancholy illustration of this well-known fact was afforded of late in a popular play, the scene of which was laid in a time supposed to be exceedingly far distant, and the programme announced it as “the early eighties.” The representation was enlivened by such antiquated melodies as “Old Zip Coon,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Old Dan Tucker,” as well as “Pretty as a Picture,” “Ye Merry Birds,” and “How Fair Art Thou,” all as appropriate to the early eighties as Dr. Arne’s “Where the Bee Sucks” and “Rule Britannia.” It was almost as abominably anachronistic as the naive declaration of a pseudo-Princetonian who asserted a membership in the Class of 1879 and assured me that he had been, while in college, a devoted disciple of Doctor Eliphalet Nott. If I have mingled my old-fashioned decades unduly, it has been because of that tendency to merger which no Sherman Act can suppress.

Few there are who cling with affection to the memory of the old-fashioned. Most of us prefer to spin with the world down the ringing grooves of change, to borrow the shadow of a phrase which has itself become old-fashioned. The flaming sword of the Civil War severed the latest century of America in two unequal parts, and its fiery blade divided the old and the new as surely and as cleanly as the guillotine cleft apart the France of the old monarchy from the France of modern days. To stray back in recollection to the land of fifty years ago is almost like treading the streets of some mediæval town. But for some of us there is a melancholy pleasure in the retrospect and a lingering fondness for the life which we thought so earnest and so vigorous then, but which now seems so placid and so drowsy.

WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH

Reviewers, critics and students of literature are inclined to resent the assertion with respect to a writer once eminent, that he is substantially forgotten. But it is safe to say that if we regard the millions of readers in this country whose literary nutriment is made up chiefly of works of fiction or of biography of the lighter sort, as “the reading public of America”, the name of William Harrison Ainsworth is by no means familiar in the United States. There are many book-owners who keep his “Works” upon their shelves, and know the backs of the volumes, and some of the omnivorous have doubtless read “Jack Sheppard”, “Crichton”, “The Tower of London”, and perhaps “Rookwood”; yet thousands who are well acquainted with their Scott, their Dickens and their Thackeray would be sorely puzzled if they were asked to tell us who Ainsworth was, and exactly when he lived, or to give a synopsis of the plot of a single one of his numerous stories; and he has been dead not quite thirty years.

Allibone gives him but fourteen lines of biography, mostly bitter censure, with a few words of qualified praise for such historical tales as “St. Paul’s” and “The Tower”. The indifference to him is not limited to general readers or to America. Chamber’s _Encyclopædia of English Literature_ begrudges him twenty-nine lines of depreciative comment, conceding to him dramatic art and power, but denying to him “originality or felicity of humor or character”. He is not even mentioned in Mr. Edmund Gosse’s _Modern English Literature_, and Taine does not condescend to give his name. In the _History_ of Nicoll and Seccombe no reference to him can be found. In the pretentious volumes of the _History of English Literature_ edited by Garnett and Gosse a portrait of him is given with a rough draft of a Cruikshank drawing; and this is what is said of him: “A very popular exponent of the grotesque and the sensational in historical romance was William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882), a Manchester solicitor, who wrote _Rookwood_, 1834, _Jack Sheppard_, 1839, and _The Tower of London_, 1840. He was a sort of Cruikshank of the pen, delighting in violent and lurid scenes, crowded with animated figures”. This is rather an absurd mess of misinformation. One would scarcely believe that there was a time when he was esteemed to be a worthy rival of Charles Dickens, and when in the eyes of the critics and of the public he far outshone Edward Lytton Bulwer.

In a note to the sketch in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, Mr. W. E. A. Axon says that “no biography of Ainsworth has appeared or is likely to be published.” The fact is correctly stated, but the prediction may not be fulfilled. In 1902, Mr. Axon himself expanded the _Dictionary_ article and made it into an excellent memoir of forty-three pages, but only a few copies were printed. It contains five portraits. A devoted admirer of Ainsworth has been for some years engaged in the preparation of an extended biography. I do not give his name, for he probably prefers to make the announcement at his own time and in his own way. A few years ago I became the possessor of a considerable number of autographic relics of Ainsworth, including a memorandum book and a manuscript volume containing an account of his travels in Italy in 1830, dedicated to his wife, with a poem; some letters to him from Cruikshank; thirty-six pages of the draft of “Jack Sheppard”, and more than two hundred of his own letters. It is gratifying to know that my friend who is at work on the “Life” has been aided by this little collection.

The only published records of Ainsworth’s life, other than those to which I have referred, are, as far as I have been able to discover, a brief memoir by Laman Blanchard which appeared in the _Mirror_ in 1842 and was reproduced in later editions of “Rookwood”; a chapter in Madden’s _Life of Lady Blessington_; a sketch by James Crossley contributed to the Routledge edition of the _Ballads_ in 1855; and an account of him by William Bates, accompanying a semi-caricature portrait in the _Maclise Portrait Gallery_.

Ainsworth was born in his father’s house on King Street, Manchester, February 4, 1805. His family was “respectable” in the English sense, for his grandfather on his mother’s side was a Unitarian minister, and his father a prosperous solicitor. It was from the mother that he inherited in 1842 some “landed property” to use another distinctively English phrase, and it is amusing to observe the pride of Madden when he boasts that Ainsworth’s name appears in _Burke’s Landed Gentry_. He attended the Free Grammar School in Manchester, where it is said that he was proficient in Latin and Greek, and as he was expected to succeed to his father’s practice, he became an articled clerk in the office of Mr. Alexander Kay, at the age of sixteen. He was a handsome boy, full of ambition, but his ambition did not lead him in the dull and dusty paths which solicitors tread. He had already written a drama, for private production, which was printed in _Arliss’s Magazine_, and a number of sketches, translations and minor papers for a serial called _The Manchester Iris_, and he subsequently conducted a periodical styled _The Boeotian_, which had a short existence of six months. Before he was nineteen, he was a regular contributor to the _London Magazine_ and the _Edinburgh Magazine_. Some of these youthful efforts were collected in “December Tales” (1823), which also contained sketches by James Crossley and John Partington Aston. In 1822 he issued a pamphlet of “Poems, by Cheviot Tichborn”, which as Mr. Axon informs us, is quite distinct from another pamphlet called “The Works of Cheviot Tichborn”, printed in 1825, apparently for private circulation.

The Tichborn book of verses was dedicated to Charles Lamb. The author was a devoted admirer of Elia, and as early as 1822 Lamb had lent him a copy of Cyril Tourneur’s play or plays. On May 7, 1822, Lamb wrote to him a letter, (printed in _The Lambs_, by William Carew Hazlitt, 1897) referring to the book and saying, among other things, “I have read your poetry with pleasure. The tales are pretty and prettily told. It is only sometimes a little careless, I mean as to redundancy.” The letter mentions the proposed dedication deprecatingly and modestly.

Talfourd, Canon Ainger and Fitzgerald in their collections give two other letters, written respectively on December 9 and December 29, 1823, one thanking Ainsworth for “books and compliments,” and the other giving Lamb-like excuses for not leaving beloved London to pay a visit to Manchester.[6] It was something of an honor for a lad of seventeen to receive the praise of Charles Lamb, who appears to have discovered one of his young correspondent’s besetting sins—redundancy. But it may not have meant much, for in those days they exchanged compliments more profusely than is customary at the present time.