Читать книгу Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations - Charles Hemstreet - Страница 6

Table of Contents

THERE is a fashion nowadays of trimming the fronts of brick houses by placing black bricks among the red in such a way as to form odd and unique designs. It is an attractive way of doing, for it varies the staid simplicity of the solid color. But for all it may seem original and new, it is a style that had its beginning long, long ago, even in the days when the stern Peter Stuyvesant governed with an iron hand over the Dutch colony of fifteen hundred people, the town that was one day to be New York, but which in his time was called New Amsterdam.

It was a tiny town then; picturesque, too, for the houses were low, irregular, with sloping roofs and gable ends to the street. They were built of wood—that is, all except the church, the Stadt Huys, the Governor's house, and some few dwellings of colonists who had brought much wealth with them from Holland. These were for the most part of stone. It was usual in them all—there were scarcely more than a hundred—whether of wood or stone, to have chimneys outside the walls, thus making less the danger of fire, and if any part of the house were of brick it was sure to be the chimney. All the brick had then to be brought from Holland, so it was an expensive building material and but sparingly used.

At this time when Stuyvesant held full sway there were two industrious colonists who held the idea that their short-cut to immense wealth lay in the way of making bricks at home and supplying them to their fellow colonists. So it came about, after long and slow deliberation, that the first brickyard was started. To be sure the venturesome fortune-hunters soon found that they were not to succeed all at once, for, owing to their lack of knowledge, they ruined so many of their bricks that the profits of the business were like to be consumed in the black-burned material that they threw aside as worthless.

But just at this time an odd thing happened. This was no less than the appearance of a colonist who agreed to buy—at a low price to be sure, but still to buy—all the black-burned and apparently useless brick. The brickmakers wondered very much at this, and without doubt thought the man a trifle unsound in his mind, but they agreed, and very soon the buyer had built himself a house, which when it was completed showed the burnt brick alternating with the red, prettily decorating the front and making of it the most attractive dwelling in the town. And at this they were filled with admiration and respect. All the townspeople went to look at the house, and while looking marvelled that Jacob Steendam could have thought out such a useful plan, for he was not known as a practical man. Anything but that, for was he not a poet? More than this, was he not the only poet in the colony? And still more than this, he was the first poet of New Amsterdam.

And in other ways, too, this first literary man of the colony was no ordinary man. He had come to New Amsterdam in the employ of the owners of the colony, the Dutch West India Company, and he worked in the Company's warehouse. But he had a mind which fixed itself on things above the beaver skins which it was his task to register before they were sent across the sea. He was clerk by day, poet by night. It was his custom while the townspeople slept, and they were early abed, to wander about in the moonlight. He could walk the length and breadth of the town with no great exertion, for it merely tipped the triangular point of the island of Manhattan, enclosed on two sides by rivers and on the land side by a wall of wood and soil which served to keep the Indians out—a wall stretching straight across the island quite from river to river, following the line that Wall Street was to take later when Indians should be no more and when the town itself should have burst its bounds. Here then the poet walked through the narrow streets—winding ways that had their birth as Indian trails, passed their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be irregular and vacillating.

While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may have guessed from the brickmaking venture, yet it was certainly not a literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of patient and persistent handling.

The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep Pasture—the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard, near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and so on to the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept.

THE STADT HUYS.

Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight, while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was Hoogh Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it was the first street to be paved with stone.

In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping town, the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses—the first verses ever penned in the colony, and called variously The Praise of New Netherland, The Complaint of New Amsterdam, The Thistle Finch, and others. Although these suggested true affection for the land of his adoption, it was the home of his youth and the never-fading remembrance of his childhood's days that haunted him and called to him. And at last, one day after thirteen years, the sight of a ship preparing to sail for Holland so overcame him that almost within the hour he had bidden farewell and had sailed with her, leaving to the townspeople his memory and his verse.

But by the time of his going there had come forward another poet to take his place, by name Nicasius De Sille. There was a vast difference between the first poet and the second. Steendam was a poor man, and in his verses sought always to touch those who had never grasped the skirts of fleeting Fortune. The second was a man of wealth, a kind of "society poet." For even in that small circle, in the first half-century of its existence, there were marked differences in wealth, birth, and reputation, which were to develop with the passing years into the distinctions of to-day.

The aristocracy of those times centred about the family of the Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Mrs. Stuyvesant had been, before her marriage, Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Paris divine. Mrs. Bayard, the sister of Peter Stuyvesant, had married Mrs. Stuyvesant's brother, and when left a widow with three infant sons she followed her brother when he became Governor of New Netherland. These two women had lived in ease and refinement, and in coming to the colony well knew that there they would find a life of comparative hardship. Yet they came willingly enough, following husband and brother, and brought with them an atmosphere of intellectual and social culture that left its impress for all time. By the time Steendam returned to his boyhood home, a few ambitious folk had gathered themselves about the Stuyvesants. There was Oloff Van Cortlandt, a thriving merchant and one of the richest men in New Netherland; there were Hendrick Kip and his three sons; there were Dr. La Montagne and his daughters, and Govert Loockermans, and others.

It was to this well-to-do-set that Nicasius De Sille belonged, and after the going of Steendam he became the only literary man in the colony. He also had come over in the service of the Dutch West India Company, but in a far different capacity from Steendam. For he came, when Stuyvesant's rule had run eight years of its course, as a Councillor in the provincial government, and his life was thenceforth closely connected with that of the Governor. He came, heralded as a statesman, as a lawyer, as a man of deep learning, as a man of wealth. But with not one word of his being a poet—yet only by reason of his poems has his name lived. He built for himself a house beside the little canal where Steendam walked in the night, just where now Exchange Street touches Broad, and here, with his two motherless daughters and one son, he lived more luxuriously than had yet been seen. For he had brought with him from Holland heavy plate of rich design, more plate than was in all the town beside; solid, carved furniture and rare hangings; and on winter nights his guests sat down to a table laden with blue and white china ornamented with strange Chinese pictures, and drank their tea, alternately biting lumps of sugar, from the tiniest china cups, and altogether were entertained with all the pomp and circumstance he had known in The Hague. At these evening entertainments De Sille read his poems in such perfect style as to win much applause, and doubtless it was the reading of these, as well as his courtly manner and great wealth, that very soon won for him the love of fair Tryntie Croegers.

And then one day there was a grand gathering in the stone church inside the fort—on the wedding-day of Nicasius De Sille and Mistress Tryntie Croegers. Into the church went the friends: women, some with petticoats of red cloth, some with skirts of blue or purple silk set off with rare lace, all with silken hoods over much befrizzled hair, and their fingers covered with glittering rings, and with great lockets of gold on their bosoms. Each had a Bible fastened to her girdle by links of gold—not the plain, strongly bound Bibles used by Jacob Steendam and his friends, but elaborately wrought in silver, with golden clasps. The men were just as gaily dressed as the women, for they wore long coats adorned with shining buttons and pockets trimmed with lace, and colored waistcoats, knee-breeches of velvet, silk stockings, and low shoes set off by silver buckles. Outside the fort among the townspeople of lower degree it was, too, quite a holiday. Men with coarse frocks and leather aprons, women in homespun gowns, turbaned negresses, swarthy negro slaves, dusky Indians—all made merry in their several ways as though glad of an excuse. And the motley throng outside the fort and the elegant gathering within all made way for the wrinkled little bell-ringer, who carried the cushions from the Stadt Huys for the burgomasters and the schepens, who insisted on every bit of their dignity, come what would, on this day or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the good Dominie Megapolensis.

But for all such a fair starting off this married life had an untimely ending. Though Nicasius De Sille might win a wife by his poetry, it seemed that he could not hold one. There were no poetic readings in the house by the canal after the marriage, and the literature of the town which had started out so bravely fell into a decline with the languishing of De Sille's connubial bliss. Before the third year had gone by, a commission of their friends was trying to tell the pair how happy their lives should have been. But all the reasoning had no effect, and the friends were forced to give it up and submit to a decision, in very quaint wording, the tenor of which was that it was acknowledged that there was no love between the two, and that the only recommendation that could be made was that the property should be divided equally and they go their several ways—which they did. But the earlier readings of poetry had sown the seed of still another marriage. For at those readings, Anna, the youngest daughter of the poet, had sat by her father's side, and young Hendrick Kip had sat by his father's side, and about the time the commission of friends was announcing its failure to patch up matters, Anna De Sille and Hendrick Kip, all undismayed by the bad example, had decided to sit side by side through the remainder of their lives.

All this time De Sille was growing more and more rich, when there came a great change. Of a sudden one day the English ship sailed into the bay, and the English soldiers took possession of the town, and the rule of the Dutch in New Amsterdam had passed, and the English became governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village, which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet.

It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the quaint, slow-going town it had been. Certainly no English brain or hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing which survives is the work of a Dutch minister.

In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church where Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the fearfulness of the after-life.

For quite twenty years the good Dominie lived to aid in fostering the infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery, through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the village church he preached of an afternoon—the church which Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried—the church which was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, in turn, two centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found standing in the core of a great metropolis.

Dominie Selyns lived long enough to see many changes. He lived to see a Dutch prince become England's king; he lived to see New York rent asunder through the overzealousness of one Jacob Leisler, who feared lest the town should not recognize a king of Dutch blood; he lived to see Lord Bellomont made Governor and riding through the streets in a coach the gorgeousness of which astounded all; he lived to see Captain William Kidd sail out of the harbor in the ship Adventure Galley, with never a thought that a few years more would see him executed as a pirate. And when Dominie Selyns died, bequeathing his poems to swell the scanty literature of his times, the era of the Dutch had well-nigh ended.