Part 2

After a stormy passage of sixty-four days, not lacking in serious perils, Irving landed in New York in the wake of a heavy snowstorm in February, 1806, in high spirits and ready for such pleasures as the little town afforded. One of his biographers has described it as a “handy” city; it was large enough to furnish ample variety of character studies and many opportunities for good-fellowship of an intimate, easy-going sort; there was an air of conviviality about the place, but there was little serious dissipation. It was a very pleasant moment in the growth of the metropolis which had become, in a quiet, provincial way, a town in the special sense in which that word connotes a group of people numerous enough to constitute a society, fond of the same pleasures, interested in local incidents and amusements, sufficiently intimate to have formed a code of social standards and manners. In a word, in the New York of Irving’s early maturity, as in the London of the time of Steele and Addison, there was an organized society, open to clever portraiture and brisk satire; supplying at the same time the material and the audience for local wit and humor. It was easy to know everybody in the society of the town, and easy to get about the place. The tone was not intellectual, though the city never lacked men and women of distinguished ability and social cultivation. It was a well-bred and hospitable society, with a keen relish for pleasure. There were numberless dinners and suppers, much less costly and elaborate than those of to-day, and more informal and merry. The country was convivial in all sections outside New England, and the social use of wine was over-generous. In America, as in England, getting under the table was an indiscretion, not a fault. One of Irving’s friends reported that, after a festive occasion, he had fallen through an open grating on his homeward way and was disposed to feel very much depressed by the darkness and solitude; but, one after another, several fellow-guests joined him in the same manner, and the hilarity was prolonged until dawn.

Like many other young men whose ultimate good or evil fortune it was to write books, Irving was admitted to the bar at about the same time that the sign, “William Cullen Bryant, attorney and counsellor at Law,” appeared in the little village of Cummington in western Massachusetts. In after years his estimate of his legal acquirements was indicated by his quoting the comments of two well-known lawyers who were examining students for admission to practise law. “Martin,” said one of these examiners, referring to an aspirant who had acquitted himself very lamely--“Martin, I think he knows a _little_ law.” “Make it stronger,” was the reply; “damned little.” Irving had loitered and dreamed on the water-front as a boy when he ought to have been at his books; and now, at the gateway of his career, the literary temperament turned him toward congenial fellowship rather than arduous study. There was plenty of material for comradeship in the town, and young men of spirit instinctively gathered about him. It was a very kindly and wholesome Bohemia in which they disported themselves in the halcyon days of a fleeting youth. They regarded themselves as “men about town” of the deepest dye, but it was a very innocent town in which they amused themselves, and they all bore honorable names in later and more serious years.

Henry Ogden, Henry Brevoort, James K. Paulding, John and Gouverneur Kemble, Peter and Washington Irving, the leaders of this vivacious company, were members of families who had long been foremost in the social life of the city, and they were far from being the “roistering blades” they fondly thought themselves to be. They were young men of spirit, generous tastes, and no little cultivation. They combined with great success devotion to literature and social activity. Irving speaks of himself as “a champion at the tea-parties,” and the “nine worthies,” or “lads of Kilkenny,” as he called them, shone in the society of what was then known as “the gentler sex” no less than on the festive occasions when they celebrated their youth in private revels. The old country house built by Nicholas Gouverneur, from whom it had descended to Gouverneur Kemble, was the favorite out-of-town haunt of these lively youths. It had a pleasant site on the banks of the Passaic not far from Newark, and is celebrated in the “Salmagundi” papers as Cockloft Hall. An old-time air hung about the place, with its antique furniture and generous endowment of family portraits. It was cared for by two old servants of long standing in the family, and a negro boy, and it afforded a well-set stage for the lively comedy which these vivacious youths made of life in the golden hour of coming into the heritage of youth and pleasure and Letters. “Who would have thought,” wrote Irving in his sixty-seventh year to the owner of the old Hall, “that we should ever have lived to be two such respectable old gentlemen?”, and many years after the curtain had fallen on the gaiety and fun of those hilarious days, Peter Irving often recalled the Saturdays at the Hall, when “we sported on the lawn until fatigued, and sometimes fell sociably into a general nap in the drawing-room in the dusk of the evening.” In town the “lads of Kilkenny” often assembled at Dyde’s, a tavern of good standing in Park Row; a convenient place for after-theatre suppers.

To riot at Dyde’s on imperial champagne, And then scour our city--the peace to maintain,

was an occupation which these gentlemen pursued with great success. When the financial resources of the revelers ran low they reduced the scale of expenditure by resorting to an unpretentious porter-house at the corner of Nassau and John Streets, not far from the theatre, where they indulged in what they depreciatingly called “Blackguard Suppers.” The modern misogynist habit of living in clubs and associating with one sex only had not come into vogue in those sociable and informal days, and the young men who formed the Knickerbocker group were on good terms with the belles of the day, and appear to have been much in evidence at social functions. Irving asked Henry Ogden, who had sailed for China, to “pick up two or three queer little pretty things that would cost nothing and be acceptable to the girls,” and there are hints of a Chinese supper later.

The first number of “Salmagundi,” the initial work of the so-called Knickerbocker School, was published on January 24, 1807, preceded by some clever and mystifying announcements in the “Evening Post.” It appeared fortnightly through the year, and came to an untimely end in January, 1808, not because its popularity was waning, but because its publisher was disposed to deal in an arbitrary fashion with its high-spirited editors. The idea of a periodical which would deal freely and frankly, in a satiric or humorous spirit, with the fashions and foibles of the town originated with Irving, who secured his brother William and his friend James K. Paulding as associates in what turned out to be a more extended and elaborate frolic than they had hitherto planned. They proposed to amuse themselves with the town, and they succeeded for a year in keeping the little city on tip-toe expectation, not unmixed with apprehension; for “Salmagundi,” while entirely free from personalities and scandal, was keen in its comments on manners and local social standards. It was written in the manner of the “Spectator”; but New York did not furnish the varied and brilliant material which London offered Steele and Addison, and the Irvings and Paulding lacked the sophisticated charm, the intimate and adroit skill of their predecessors. They were, moreover, very young apprentices, and must not be judged by the standards set by the masters of the art, whose comments on passing fashions have become contributions to literature. The banter was somewhat heavy-handed and the humor gave little promise of the lightness of Irving’s later manner, or of the clear-cut and nimble wit of Lowell and Holmes. It bore the stamp of a provincial society and was rollicking and hilarious rather than keen and pungent.

Irving had no illusions about its quality. The “North American Review,” however, described “Salmagundi” as a production of extraordinary merit. Eleven years after the last number appeared, Irving wrote to Brevoort that, while it was pardonable as a youthful production, it was full of errors, puerilities, and imperfections; and in a letter to Irving, Paulding said: “I know you consider old Sal. a sort of saucy, flippant trollope belonging to nobody and not worth fathering.” “Salmagundi” had the crudity of youth, but it also had its high spirits, its gaiety, and its audacious confidence in its own opinions. It was frolicsome and joyous and not devoid of literary grace and skill, and will remain the happiest contemporary record of old New York.

The old Government House, which had been built for the President of the United States, faced Bowling Green when “Salmagundi” published the chapter entitled “A Tour in Broadway.” This building passed through a period of great distinction as the residence of Governor George Clinton and of Chief Justice Jay, and then lost prestige as the local post-office. In its cellar were stored the statues of gods and goddesses belonging to the homeless Academy of Arts. The lead statue of George the Third, which formerly stood on Bowling Green, had been pulled down and run into bullets to be aimed at his Majesty’s troops, and the Green had been put to bucolic uses as a pasturage for cows. Cortlandt Street corner was a famous vantage-ground from which to see the belles go by in pleasant weather, on shopping bent. The City Hall, according to “Salmagundi,” was a resort for young lawyers, not because they had business there, but because they had no business anywhere else.

There was an advanced wing of society which practised the latest arts of pleasure imported from the Old World. The great god Style already had its votaries, and then, as now, many were the sacrifices of good taste and refined manners offered at its painted paste-board shrine. “Salmagundi” found a rich yield of satire in the imitative instinct which shaped many of the customs and social habits of the hour. It informs us that

Style, that with pride each empty bosom swells, Puffs boys to manhood, little girls to belles.

The waltz was a novelty in those days, and “Salmagundi” “views with alarm” its introduction into the social life of the town:

Scarce from the nursery freed, our gentle fair Are yielded to the dancing-master’s care; And, ere the head one mite of sense can gain, Are introduced ’mid folly’s frippery train. A stranger’s grasp no longer gives alarms, Our fair surrender to their very arms, And in the insidious waltz will swim and twine, And whirl and languish tenderly divine! O, how I hate this loving, hugging dance; This imp of Germany brought up in France!

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Let France its whim, its sparkling wit supply, The easy grace that captivates the eye; But curse their waltz,--their loose, lascivious arts That smooth our manners to corrupt our hearts!

In the novel and play of the time “Salmagundi” found still more alarming evidences of a decline in morals and manners:

Where now those books, from which in days of yore Our mothers gained their literary store? Alas! stiff-skirted Grandison gives place To novels of a new and rakish race; And honest Bunyan’s pious, dreaming lore, To the lascivious rhapsodies of Moore. And, last of all, behold the mimic stage Its morals lend to polish off the age, With flimsy farce, a comedy miscall’d, Garnished with vulgar cant, and proverbs bald, With puns most puny, and a plenteous store Of smutty jokes, to catch a gallery roar. Or see, more fatal, graced with every art To charm and captivate the female heart, The false, “the gallant, gay Lothario” smiles, And loudly boasts his base seductive wiles-- In glowing colors paints Calista’s wrongs, And with voluptuous scenes the tale prolongs.

The stage of social development at which the town had arrived is indicated by the words “female heart.” Its old-fashioned virtue, assailed by “Lalla Rookh” and “The Penitents,” had, fortunately, no premonitions that its infancy in the dramatization of vice was to pass into the full and voluptuous maturity of these later days of the play of passion without a shred to its back.

“Salmagundi” had made the town smile, but “A History of New York” was so broad in its mock-heroic treatment of the local forefathers that it gave grievous offence to those members of the early Dutch families who lacked the sense of humor. An old gentleman who died twenty years ago once said to the writer of these lines, with perfect gravity, that Mr. Irving once confessed to him that the history was not entirely accurate! It appeared just before Christmas in 1809, preceded by cunningly devised hints and intimations in the form of letters, asking for information about a certain old gentleman who bore the name of Knickerbocker, who was last seen resting himself near Kingsbridge by the passengers in the Albany stage. He had a small bundle tied in a red bandana handkerchief in his hands, and appeared to be very much fatigued. Ten days passed without news of the whereabouts of this weary old gentleman, when it was announced that a book in his handwriting had been discovered in his room and would be disposed of to pay the arrears of his board and lodging!

The town became immensely interested, and when the History appeared it was eagerly read, laughed over, and denounced. Never was a book more cleverly announced even in this day, when advertising has become an art based on a deep study of the psychology of the crowd and the effect on the human mind of rhythmical recurrence, at short intervals, of skilfully phrased testimonials from eminent persons to the superiority of certain articles without which it is impossible to live. There were eighty thousand people in New York, and the society folk who constituted the “town” in the technical sense of the word were a comparatively small and homogeneous group, many of whom were of Dutch descent and bore names long honored in the city and now inscribed on the signs on the corners of the streets. The History, originally projected as a satire on a solemn and heavy-handed “Picture of New York” which had recently appeared, had widened its scope, and, like “The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews,” which started out to be a travesty on Richardson’s “Pamela,” took on the dimensions of an original contribution to literature. The dedication “To the New York Historical Society” struck the key-note of its burlesque gravity of manner and its audacious and rollicking fun. Its appearance was the signal for a blaze of wrath accompanied by a peal of laughter from New York to Albany. Mrs. Hoffman wrote to Irving, referring to one of his friends who was a social leader: “Your good friend, the old lady, came home in a great stew this evening. Such a scandalous story had got about town--a book had come out called a ‘History of New York’; nothing but a satire and ridicule of the old Dutch people--and they said you was the author; but from this foul slander, I’ll venture to say, she has defended you. She was quite in a heat about it.”

Ten years later, when its obvious burlesque intention ought to have filtered into the most solemn-minded, it was described by an eminent citizen of Dutch descent as “a coarse caricature.” Its humor was not lost, however, by a host of people in the town and elsewhere. “If it is true, as Sterne says,” wrote a correspondent in a Baltimore newspaper, “that a man draws a nail out of his coffin every time he laughs, after reading Irving’s book your coffin will fall to pieces.” Walter Scott wrote to Irving’s friend Henry Brevoort: “Looking at the simple and obvious meaning only, I have never read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests, and our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing.”

This audacious burlesque of the early history of the city and of its men of local fame and Dutch descent was the initial volume in American literature, the first book of what used to be called _belles-lettres_ published in this country, the first piece of American writing of literary quality which caught the attention of Europe. It also created the Knickerbocker Legend, and gave the earliest group of writers in New York a descriptive name. Diedrich Knickerbocker has long been the impersonation of old New York, and, with Rip Van Winkle and Brom Bones, forms the central group in our New World mythology; and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and the old-fashioned gentleman who was last seen on the Albany Post Road constitute our chief group of legendary characters and are all the creations of Irving’s imagination. While descriptions of the scenery and peoples of the New World had been written south of Manhattan Island and theological treatises abounded in New England, it was significant of the metropolitan spirit of New York that its earliest writers, who were also the earliest writers of literary spirit and purpose in the country, were men of humor and urbanity, and on easy terms with life.

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Two years after the publication of “A History of New York,” Irving was living at No. 16 Broadway, near Bowling Green, with his friend Henry Brevoort. He had made various journeys to Albany and Washington by the tedious methods of travel in use at the time, and his letters showed conditions in political life which differed from those prevailing to-day chiefly in being more sordid and unscrupulous. The coterie who were to become known as the Knickerbocker group had become a little less boisterous in their convivialities, but not less persuaded that literature and jovial good-fellowship throve well together. They were often at the Hall on the Passaic or at the home of Captain Phillips in the Highlands of the Hudson, where spacious mansions and large estates had multiplied; and there were houses in town, like Mrs. Renwick’s, where these gay young men were at ease.

On the 25th of May, 1815, Irving sailed for Liverpool, and did not set foot on Manhattan Island again until 1832. He had given New York the Knickerbocker tradition, made the first important contribution to _belles-lettres_ in this country, and conferred on the metropolis the distinction of being the birthplace of American literature.

Between the publication of “Salmagundi” in 1807 and Irving’s return from Europe in 1832, the group of young men who belonged to his coterie and who formed the Knickerbocker group had their golden age of easy conditions so far as absence of competition was concerned. Long afterward Irving said to George William Curtis: “You young literary fellows to-day have a harder time than we old fellows had. You trip over each other’s heels; there are so many of you. We had it all our own way. But the account is square, for you can make as much by a lecture as we made by a book.” The “town” lasted well on into the Thirties, but it was no longer the undisturbed provincial city. Cooper, Bryant, Willis, and Poe had become residents, and there was a further progression toward cosmopolitanism. Moreover, the city was fast outgrowing its old-time metes and bounds, and complaints about the distances between sections and lamentations for the passing of “the good old times” began to be heard. While Irving was industriously transcribing the half-forgotten background of ripe landscape and ancient custom in the Old World and winning a reputation of the most enviable kind, the rollicking friends who had been young together were passing into maturity and making the most of the morning hours of reputation and position.

No more interesting face was seen in the streets of New York in the days of Irving’s long expatriation than that of James Kirke Paulding. The regular and clear-cut features, the smiling but penetrating eyes, the compact, well-poised head with its mass of hair worn with the picturesque carelessness of nature, gave him a look of distinction. He was a very companionable man, and there was no suggestion of the precision and preoccupation of the man of affairs about Paulding; his convictions were deep-set and never kept in the background if there was occasion for their expression; but, like all companionable men, he knew how to find common ground with a friend ample enough for the freest interchange of jest and idea. He was of colonial stock, as were all the men of his craft in New York. For many years before the Revolution the Pauldings had lived in Tarrytown, which is intimately associated with the Knickerbocker tradition; but that lovely shore of the Hudson was open to the ravages of both armies during the war, and the family removed to Dutchess County. This county lies north of Westchester, and both have fed New York with men of distinction. Dutchess claims to have been the mother of beautiful women as well, one of them of such surpassing loveliness that the Czar of Russia of that day pronounced her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The poet’s father was active in the American cause, and his cousin John was one of the captors of Major André. His boyhood was so ravaged by the uncertainties and hardships of war that he said later that he never wished to be young again.

He was in his nineteenth year when he came to New York, and, through his acquaintance with William Irving, met the group of young men who were making a business of pleasure and a recreation of literature. He and Washington Irving were soon fast friends, and the first number of “Salmagundi” was their joint production. Paulding, like Cooper, became involved later in controversies which gave sharp point to his pen, but in “Salmagundi” he shared with Irving the gaiety of spirit and urbanity of manner which made the keen satire of that quick-witted journal entertaining even to its victims. Duyckinck was of opinion that the papers in Oriental guise were from Paulding’s hand, and that he wrote many of the best descriptive passages; and characterized his style as stamped by feeling, observation, friendly truth, and genial sympathy. He was one of the first to state forcibly the American case in the long and at times acrimonious interchange of criticism between this country and England, and “The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” was so keen a piece of satire, but so free from malice, that it was reprinted in England. A later satire in the form of a parody on the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” made such stinging comment on the British raids on Chesapeake Bay as to be thought worthy of the attention of the “Quarterly Review,” an adept in the heavy-handed castigation in vogue at that time. A retort to the strictures of the “Quarterly Review” soon followed in pamphlet form, and raided English morals and manners with such effectiveness that it caught the attention of President Madison.