Evert Augustus Duyckinck

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Evert Augustus Duyckinck: His Life, Writings and Influence (1879)
Samuel Osgood

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Boston: David Clapp & Son, pages BT–16
A Memoir

4744985Evert Augustus Duyckinck: His Life, Writings and Influence1879Samuel Osgood

Evert Augustus Duyckinck,

His

Life, Writings and Influence.

A Memoir

by

Samuel Osgood, D.D., LL.D

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Evert Augustus Duyckinck,

His

Life, Writings and Influence.

A Memoir

by

Samuel Osgood, D.D., LL.D

Reprinted from The New England Historical and Genealogical Register for April, 1879.

Boston:
David Clapp & Son, Printers.
564 Washington Street.
1879.

Evert Augustus Duyckinck,

His Life, Writings and Influence.

In drawing up this memoir of a prominent scholar and citizen of New York for a New England magazine, it is easiest and best to write from the given point of view, and to treat the life and service of Evert Augustus Duyckinck as they appear to a New England man who was his neighbor in New York for nearly thirty years. The facts of his career are already well known; and if a full and able and affectionate memorial is needed, the wisest course would be to transfer to these columns the admirable paper of William Allen Butler, read before the New York Historical Society at the January meeting. That paper at once allows us to be assured of knowing well Mr. Duyckinck's personal career and animating purpose, and enables us to go beyond the author's own plan, and to consider his friend's connection with history and literature during the important period in which he lived from 1816 to 1878.

I went to live in New York in the October of 1849, and soon made his acquaintance, as a neighbor and friend of letters. His home had been almost from the time of his marriage in 1840 at No. 20 Clinton Place, the home from which his body was borne last August to St. Mark's Church for the funeral service. Clinton Place, when I first knew him there, was a conspicuous and central resort of society, and many of its residents were distinguished for wealth and fashion, but he had at the beginning the same simple dignity and choice taste that he kept to the last, long after that gay street had been so far given over to business and boarding houses. Mr. Duyckinck was then thirty-three years old, and he had already made his mark in literature, as contributor to the New York Review and other publications, and as editor of the Literary World, which he began to edit in 1847.

New York was then in a transition state and just entering upon the new cosmopolitan era which was in some respects a matter of disappointment as well as of pride to men who were, like Duyckinck, born in the old provincial New York which ended with the completion of the Erie Canal and the virtual annexation of the great West in 1825, and who had grown up in what may be called the middle age of New York, from 1826 to 1850, during which the city had become the business metropolis of the country. The third stage of growth was a little too fast and too far for the comfort of many of the old residents, and when, in 1850, the Knickerbocker city, proud of her Croton water, her great daily papers, and her extending railways, established her own line of steamers to Europe, and started her own fleets to the Golden Gate of California, the fear was expressed that the new city was outgrowing her history and its landmarks, and falling into the hands of a new multitude, most of whose half million of people knew little and cared less for the old fathers of Manhattan. Mr. Duyckinck had much of the old fashioned sentiment, yet he kept up with the new progress, and at heart he was quite modern in his love of liberality in literature and politics as well as in religion.

It gives his position and career a certain definiteness to indicate his place and associations during the forming period of his career. His father, Evert Duyckinck, who was for about forty years a bookseller, and died in 1833, had his house at No. 9 Old Slip, and his store adjoined it in Water Street in the rear, far down town in Old New York; and there too, not far distant, was Columbia College, in College Place, at its intersection by Park Place, where the son Evert received his academical education, and became a graduate of 1835. He afterwards lived in the new quarter which the city occupied in its great start from its old home that began about the year 1826, the year when St. Thomas Church, which he afterwards attended, was built, at the corner of Broadway and Houston Street, and the congregation since known by the name of the Church of the Messiah, settled down at the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets near by. In 1849 he still worshipped at St. Thomas Church, although population was crowding upward, and Ascension Church was consecrated in Fifth Avenue in 1841, and Grace Church in Broadway, corner of Tenth Street, in 1846. My own ministry was for fifteen years within a stone's throw from his house (1849–1864), in the Church of the Messiah, which was consecrated in 1839, and abandoned for a more favorable site in 1864. No eyes watched more carefully than his the astonishing growth of the city since it began to pass upwards towards the Harlem river with such speed and grandeur; and the fact that he chose for the resting-place of his books the Lenox Library, so far up and midway in the line of the Central Park, is proof that this loyal Knickerbocker had no churlish quarrel with the spirit of the nineteenth century. The New York of 1849, when I first knew him, had some treasures which were not possessed by the magnificent city which he left in 1878. Among his associates then were Irving, Cooper, Halleck, Bryant, Charles King and William Kent, while new residents of high name and promise with George Bancroft at their head were enriching the growing metropolis with their culture and their society. It is not well to forget that Dr. William Adams had been in the Broome St. Presbyterian Church since 1834, that Dr. H. W. Bellows, then in his Broadway Church, had been over his parish since 1839; that Dr. E. H. Chapin had been in his Murray Street Church for a year, and Dr. Bethune, whose stout heart beat like a trip-hammer, could be felt from his pulpit in Brooklyn, to which he came from Philadelphia in 1849.

I. There is much interest in tracing out the roots of a life so characteristic as Mr. Duyckinck's, and so closely connected with the history of New York and the development of American literature. We ask, therefore, what were the facts of blood and breeding that made him what he was and enabled him to do what he did.

We must not forget what he never forgot, yet never obtruded, that he was of Dutch lineage, and that his family can be traced back to the founders of New Amsterdam. We are not told what relation was borne to his race by the Evert Duyckinck, one of the little Dutch garrison at Hartford, in 1640, who while sowing grain was struck "a hole in his head with a sticke, soe that the blood ran down very strongly," but we do know that his ancestor Evert Duyckinck married Hendricke Simons, Sept. 9, 1646, and that the fourth Evert married Harriet June, Oct. 15, 1814, and in 1816, November 23, Evert Augustus was born, and seven years afterwards George Long, his brother and helper, was born October 17, 1823. Without going far into Dutch antiquities, a thoughtful student of history cannot but look upon a cultivated, genial, liberal, earnest and devout man like Evert Augustus Duyckinck, in connection with his race, and especially in contrast with the traits of theological rigidity so characteristic of its dominant powers. Before the island of Manhattan was bought from the natives in 1626, and the first governor Minuit arrived, the rigid Calvinistic party had triumphed over the Arminians or Remonstrants, Olden Barneveldt had been executed and Hugo Grotius had found safety in exile. When we ask for specific representatives of the civic wisdom and the generous theology of those Dutch martyrs among the magnates of New Amsterdam, from 1626 to 1664, the reply is not easy or satisfactory; yet the Remonstrant spirit must have been there, and it has shown itself in the whole subsequent history of the Dutch American race, and it has come to light conspicuously, like the fountain Arethusa of old, that reappeared in a distant river. Mr. Duyckinck's visit to the monument of Grotius in the new Kirk at Delft, his birth-place, in 1839, with his associates Bleecker and Beekman, is a good illustration of the survival of the essential spirit of that great jurist, moralist and theologian, after a quarter of a thousand years since his exile. Verplanck was also an admirer and student of Grotius, and the friendly relation which has existed for so many years between the Episcopal Church to which he belonged, and the Dutch Reformed Church which came so near to it in orthodox conservatism, and differed so far from it in Calvinistic dogmatism, illustrates the Remonstrant leanings of many men who came of the old Dutch race in America. The recent anniversary of the founding of the Dutch Reformed Church here in 1628, and the presence of the rector of Trinity Church, throw light not merely upon a historical fellowship, but upon a certain spiritual affinity.

Young Duyckinck evidently sympathized more with the Remonstrants who fell with Barneveldt and Grotius in 1619, than with their adversaries who triumphed at the synod of Dort. His whole education combined, with his gentle, devout and loyal nature, to make him love the spirit and the worship of the Church of England, which was brought so near to him at home, at college, and by the favorite books of his early years. There was apparently when he was born a certain drift away from the stern and ghostly old theology of the Dutch and English Puritans to more humanity, taste and culture in religion. The babies who made their appearance in the year that welcomed him to the light, may help out our study of the influences that attended him. In 1816 Daniel Huntington, Parke Godwn, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar and Robert Traill Spence Lowell, with other persons of much mark, came into the world to illustrate the art, the social science, the civic wisdom and the religious life of the new generation. It is well to remember that two years before that date, in 1814, Motley, the best interpreter of Holland, and the champion of its place in universal history, was born; and one year before it, in 1815, William Ellery Channing made his great protest, not for the sect that claimed him and for which he cared so little as a sect, but for the practical basis of religion in the Divine Nature and in human character, a protest which makes his name precious to all who love christianity and distrust human dictation. It is a fact worth recording, that the last sentence in Mr. Duyckinck's Diary in Holland, written April 7, 1839, is this: "Read this evening Channing's noble essay on the character of Fenelon, including his views on human nature." His companion, Harmanus Bleecker, of Albany, appears to have been a disciple of the Massachusetts liberalism of the conservative school, and to have been fond of quoting Buckminster and Channing in behalf of the christian principles of that school.

If we examine thoughtfully the period in which Mr. Duyckinck was trained for his literary career, we shall see its important relations with the revival of letters, or with the American Renaissance in which he was to take so conspicuous a part. Our American history for a hundred years has been divided into three equal portions, which are named severally the period of the Grandfathers, 1776–1809; that of the Fathers, 1809–1842; and that of the Children, 1842–1876. Taking this ground, we may say that Duyckinck learned in the period of the fathers to do his work and to say his say for the children. Although he was a prolific writer from his youth, and we have publications of his as early as 1836, in a transient paper called The Literary, he began in 1840 as editor of the Arcturus, the serious work which in various forms he continued for nearly forty years to his death. To know what he was and what he thought at the interesting time when his mind was ripening for manly production, we cannot do better than to look through the two manuscript volumes of his Diary in Europe, for the year from November, 1838, to 1839, after studying the various scholarly articles which he previously contributed to the first two volumes of the New York Review in 1837 and 1838.

Looking at him from our New England point of view, and comparing his characteristic line of thought and culture with that of our own set of Massachusetts scholars at about the same time, we recognize the decided influence of the English type of literature and religion, under the lead of Washington Irving, as distinguished from the Transcendental and perhaps Germanic school of thinking, which is so strongly marked by the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose name we always speak with honor, whether in agreement or dissent. Massachusetts and New York, years before, both felt alike the first stir of the Renaissance in the rise of the spirit of citizenship against the old dictum of theology and the church; and in some respects the New York patriots were in advance of the men of Lexington and Bunker Hill, as well as more memorable contributors to the consolidated nation. New York, too, had led the way in elegant literature, especially in romance, history and popular essays, with the help of Cooper, Irving and others, whilst probably New England bore the palm in the culture that shines in the forum and the pulpit, and could hardly find rivals to the eloquence of Webster, Everett and Choate, or to preachers so classic in style and so thoughtful in habit as the masters of the orthodox and liberal puritan pulpit of fifty years ago. Duyckinck clung closely to the old English standards of culture, and went stoutly for a New York school of letters that should be a full match at least for the rising New England literature. In that spirit he wrote for the New York Review those fine, thoughtful articles upon George Herbert and men of that stamp, not in a narrow temper indeed, but rather with hearty and generous recognition of the new and startling school that was rising in Boston and Cambridge. In his travels it is plain that he had made up his mind, and that his path in life is clear before him, alike in his personal rectitude and his literary and religious views and habits.

He does not affect to be a saint in austerity, and he is willing to take a joke as well as make one, to see a fine play and a fine actress. Still he is at twenty-two a serious, devout young man, a hater of gloom and bigotry, but a lover of religion, rejoicing in an earnest sermon, an impressive worship, and apparently always ready to join devoutly in the Holy Communion. In Paris he thus wrote on the last night of the year 1838, after speaking of the profound sense of ignorance which the arts and learning of Europe impressed upon him: "The last moments of the year—that even now strikes as I write points upward, and so pray it may be with me and mine, that when time with us is latest, our thoughts may be highest. A Happy New Year to my friends at home, and the blessing of Heaven upon them. Amen." The very sentences which head his Diary, those ample and rich quotations from Bacon and Burton and Fuller, indicate well the spirit that carries him abroad to the shrines of ancient wisdom and modern culture and art; and these sayings from the fathers of English letters show how much his advisers differed from those of so many young Americans of his day who went abroad agog for the chance to kick up their heels and wag their tongues and ventilate their nonsense without restraint. He carries the same thoughtful spirit to the end of his travels, and he thus, September 23, 1839, sums up his impressions of the Peculiarities of England: "Foot-paths by the roadside, good roads, good hedges, cheerful rights of way through parks and by the side of rivers and cultivated fields, attentions of servants at inns, punctuality and attention of coachmen, no loiterers on Sunday about the doors of churches in London to see the fine women. Proper notions of economy, respect for the individual by letting him alone, better literary notices and theatrical criticisms. The little relics of old days still left—the landlady bringing in the first dish of the course at dinner at Stratford-upon-Avon was a delightful incident at the Red Horse. The custom of turning to the East in the creed in the churches. No mosquitoes. Per Contra—We have no common informers—are not law-ridden—are churchmen by choice under the voluntary system—have no powdered footmen. Treat an Irishman well."

This work was published before January 1, 1930, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

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