Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
conviction that Paulding in his _Letters from the South_ paid his
respects to[420]--that democracy is only a euphemism for mob-rule and
that it must speedily conduct to anarchy and despotism. All leveling
principles he repudiated without waiting to hear cause. Until necessity
counseled otherwise he looked with suspicion on the holders of liquid
wealth, as likely to prove wanting in the wisdom and goodness that came
naturally to the landed proprietor. He would have the many ruled by the
few, but those few he would have owners of great estates.
After all, the learned Chancellor was only a transplanted Yankee of the
Fisher Ames school, with something of the austerity and intellectual
vigor of his two Puritan grandfathers. An ardent admirer of Hamilton,
he early broke with the more liberal faith of his family and joined
himself to the extreme Federalists. He was advanced rapidly by Governor
Jay, enjoyed for years both office and distinction, and ably defended
the party of his choice. Fearful of agrarian laws and the sequestration
of property by the enfranchised poor, he fought stubbornly every
proposal for an extension of suffrage or a larger measure of
self-government for the cities. Defeated in the great constitutional
convention of 1821 he soon after lost his office and retired to write
his _Commentaries on American Law_, a work that was to exercise a
creative influence on the later development of our jurisprudence. That
American law came to be deeply colored by Federalist political theory,
that it upheld from the bench principles that had been repudiated at
the polls, was due in no little measure to the legal scholarship of
this last of the New York Federalists. What a recent historian has
borrowed to describe another applies with equal felicity to Chancellor
Kent--“his pigmy hope that life would some day become somewhat better,
punily shivered by the side of his gigantic conviction that it might be
infinitely worse” (Fox, _Decline of Aristocracy in New York Politics_,
p. 243). As he contemplated the ways of the triumphant Jacksonians, he
found such consolation as he could in turning back to an older century
with its narrow outlook and sober culture. Writing to his brother in
1835, he said:
There never was such misrule. Our Tory rich men are becoming
startled and alarmed at our downhill course. My opinion is that
the admission of universal suffrage and a licentious press are
incompatible with government and security to property, and that the
government and character of this country are going to ruin. This
suffrage is too great an excitement for any political machine. It
racks it to pieces, and morals go with it. It is probable England
is going the same way. We are becoming selfish, profligate,
crazy.... Give me the writings of Addison and Locke, and the
Presbyterianism of Dr. Ripley, Dr. Stiles, and old Dr. Rogers.
(Kent, _Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_, pp. 218-219.)
IV
With the extraordinary upheaval in economics and politics New York
unfortunately underwent no corresponding intellectual revolution. The
renaissance that a generation earlier had created a new Virginia, and
that was awakening in Massachusetts a many-sided intellectual activity,
touched the mind of New York only lightly. The ground was unprepared
for the new philosophies. To Virginia, French romantic theory had
come with the appeal of a new gospel for the reason that plantation
economics fell in with the major premises of Physiocratic liberalism,
and the old-world dogmas seemed to find new-world justification. To
New England, German idealism had come likewise with the appeal of a
new gospel, after Unitarianism had broken the fetters of Calvinism and
set free its traditional idealism. But among the young men of New York
in 1825 neither France nor Germany was a determining influence. With
an inadequate cultural background and no responsive economics, they
were attracted only casually to the current European liberalisms. They
were wanting in idealism and in consequence the major intellectual
and social movements of the times influenced the form and content of
the new Knickerbocker literature far less profoundly than was the
case in New England. New York was as insular as Charleston. That
the growing economic unrest would ultimately find expression in a
controversial or Utopian literature, was a matter of course; and that
the cosmopolitanism of the city should make for vigorous discussion,
was equally a matter of course. Nevertheless Albert Brisbane, William
Leggett, Parke Godwin and Horace Greeley were far less representative
of the dominant literary spirit than Irving and Halleck and Willis of
the earlier group, or Stedman and Stoddard later.
The Knickerbocker movement was inaugurated by four young men whose
clever sketches caught the provincial ear of polite society and set the
new fashion in prose and verse. Irving and Paulding in _Salmagundi_,
and Halleck and Drake in the _Croaker Papers_, were lucky adventurers
whose slight crafts made the most prosperous of voyages. Bright young
fellows with a charming literary swagger, they aspired to be wits and
exploit the amusing foibles of Broadway. Twelve years separated the
two ventures, and in the interval Byron and Scott had been supplanting
Moore and Campbell in the esteem of the Town, and the literary mode of
New York was changing. From their gay provincialism, happily Irving and
Paulding later freed themselves; Drake died at the age of twenty-five;
but Halleck retained to the end of a leisurely life the mannerisms of
the Croaker period--a crochety wit who affected persiflage, a brisk
young buck who gently slid into a _blasé_ old buck, a free lance in
verse who lived in state on the income of a small literary investment
made in his twenties.
The very considerable reputation of Fitz-Greene Halleck resulted in
part from the literary sterility of New York in his early days, and in
part from the personal popularity of the man. A Connecticut Yankee,
descended on his mother’s side from old John Eliot, he was drawn to
the city as a promising field for an accountant, and eventually found
his way into the office of John Jacob Astor by whom he was later
pensioned. He accepted the views and shared the antipathies of his Wall
Street associates, but with a certain affectation of individuality that
took delight in shocking them by whimsical pronouncements in favor of
the Catholic church and the monarchical system. There is perhaps a
suggestion of seriousness in the remark that Bryant has preserved: “The
ship of state,” so he reports Halleck as saying, “must be governed and
navigated like any other ship, without consulting the crew. What would
become of the stanchest bark in a gale, if the captain were obliged to
call all hands together and say: ‘All you who are in favor of taking
in sail, will please to say ay’” (_Orations and Addresses_, p. 186).
His political affiliations were Federalist-Whig, and his satire exudes
much of the old prejudice against the democratic mass. The pompous
long-winded DeWitt Clinton was a fair mark for his shafts;[421] the
demagoguery of office-seeking politicians was a fruitful theme for
his wit;[422] and Halleck’s satire plays upon them with good-natured
raillery. But his gayety cannot hide a certain animus in dealing with
the tousled-headed democracy. When the labor movement was painfully
getting under way in New York Halleck contemplated the curious
phenomenon with a tolerant contempt--in something of the spirit of a
wit of pre-Revolutionary times who amused the Town with his couplet:
Down at night a bricklayer or carpenter lies,
Next sun a Lycurgus or Solon doth rise.
As an illustration of the attitude of polite society in New York a
hundred years ago towards the aspirations of the proletariat, Halleck’s
forgotten _Epistle to Robert Hogbin, Esq., Chairman of the Committee of
Working-Men, etc._, deserves quotation:
Mr. Hogbin,--I work as a weaver--of rhyme--
And therefore presume with a working-man’s grace,
To address you as one I have liked for some time.
Though I know not (no doubt it’s a fine one) your face.
There is much in a name, and I’ll lay you a wager
(Two ale-jugs from Reynolds), that Nature designed,
When she formed you, that you should become the drum-major
In that choice piece of music, the Grand March of Mind.
A Hogbin! a Hogbin! how cheering the shout
Of all that keep step to that beautiful air,
Which leads, like the treadmill, about and about,
And leaves us exactly, at last, where we were!
Yes, there’s much in a name, and a Hogbin’s so fit is
For that great moral purpose whose impulse divine
Bids men leave their own workshops to work in committees,
And their own wedded wives to protect yours and mine!...
When the moment arrives that we’ve won the good fight,
And broken the chains of laws, churches, and marriages,
When no infants are born under six feet in height,
And our chimney-sweeps mount up a flue in their carriages--
That glorious time when our daughters and sons
Enjoy a _blue Monday_ each day of the week,
And a clean shirt is classed with the mastodon’s bones,
Or a mummy from Thebes, an undoubted antique--
Then, then, my dear Hogbin, your statue in straw,
By some modern _Pig_malion delightfully wrought,
Shall embellish the Park, and our youths’ only law
Shall be to be Hogbins in feeling and thought.
In Halleck’s better work there is sometimes evident a certain critical
detachment that permitted him to see both sides of his theme. In
the lines to his native Connecticut he has taken pretty accurately
the measure of the Puritan and the Yankee. He rests under no awe
in presence of the old worthies, and he throws overboard the pious
fairy-tales of Cotton Mather--“that slanderer of the memory of our
fathers”--only to forgive the preacher who scolded his friends
“up from earth to heaven” because of the “sour grapejuice in his
disposition.” Unfortunately little of his work possesses the virility
of _Connecticut_. His most ambitious poem, _Fanny_, is a feeble and
discursive satire on the social climber. It was a great favorite at
the time and passed through several editions, but the sparkle is gone
out of its affected jauntiness and little has been lost in its being
forgotten. Halleck’s casual literary activity continued only for the
brief period between the years 1819 and 1828; thereafter for close on
forty years he was content to turn out an occasional _jeu d’esprit_,
enjoy the deepening twilight of his reputation, and watch his fellow
Yankee, Willis, invest his talents in the ephemeral. The day of the wit
was past in New York.
Footnotes
[420] See _Letters_, etc., Vol. I, p. 207.
[421] See _Governor Clinton’s Speech_.
[422] See _The Recorder_.
Chapter III • Two Knickerbocker Romantics
I • Washington Irving
Fortunately the stolid New York of earlier days was not to pass away
without bequeathing to posterity some fragments of its chronicles.
In the midst of a pleasant society of smallclothes and tie-wigs, of
feudalism and Federalism, appeared young Washington Irving at the
precise moment when Sansculottism was beginning to make a stir in
the land, and gentlemen were putting away their knee-breeches to
don a republican dress--a decline in taste to which he would not
easily reconcile himself. A boyish wit from the eighteenth century,
a genial loiterer in the twilight of the old, he found himself out
of humor with the ambitions that were making over the little city he
loved. The present seemed to him not so amusing as the past, nor so
picturesque. That he had any business with the world of trade and
speculation he could not believe. Its concerns were not his. Its