The papers are still full of Sumter and Pickens. The reports
that they are or are not to be relieved are stated and contradicted in each
paper without any regard to individual consistency. The “Tribune” has an
article on my speech at the St. Patrick's dinner, to which it is pleased to
assign reasons and motives which the speaker, at all events, never had in
making it.
Received several begging letters, some of them apparently
with only too much of the stamp of reality about their tales of disappointment,
distress, and suffering. In the afternoon went down Broadway, which was
crowded, notwithstanding the piles of blackened snow by the curbstones, and the
sloughs of mud, and half-frozen pools at the crossings. Visited several large
stores or shops — some rival the best establishments in Paris or London in
richness and in value, and far exceed them in size and splendor of exterior.
Some on Broadway, built of marble, or of fine cut stone, cost from £6,000 to
£8,000 a year in mere rent. Here, from the base to the fourth or fifth story,
are piled collections of all the world can produce, often in excess of all
possible requirements of the country; indeed I was told that the United States
have always imported more goods than they could pay for. Jewellers' shops are
not numerous, but there are two in Broadway which have splendid collections of
jewels, and of workmanship in gold and silver, displayed to the greatest
advantage in fine apartments decorated with black marble, statuary, and plate
New York has certainly all the air of a “nouveau riche.”
There is about it an utter absence of any appearance of a grandfather — one
does not see even such evidences of eccentric taste as are afforded in Paris
and London, by the existence of shops where the old families of a country cast
off their “exuviӕ”
which are sought by the new, that they may persuade the world they are old;
there is no curiosity shop, not to speak of a Wardour Street, and such efforts
as are made to supply the deficiency reveal an enormous amount of ignorance or
of bad taste. The new arts, however, flourish; the plague of photography has
spread through all the corners of the city, and the shop-windows glare with
flagrant displays of the most tawdry art. In some of the large booksellers'
shops — Appleton's for example — are striking proofs of the activity of the
American press, if not of the vigor and originality of the American intellect.
I passed down long rows of shelves laden with the works of European authors,
for the most part, oh shame! stolen and translated into American type without
the smallest compunction or scruple, and without the least intention of ever
yielding the most pitiful deodand to the authors. Mr. Appleton sells no less
than one million and a half of Webster's spelling-books a year; his tables are
covered with a flood of pamphlets, some for, others against coercion; some for,
others opposed to slavery, — but when I asked for a single solid, substantial
work on the present difficulty, I was told there was not one published worth a
cent. With such men as Audubon and Wilson in natural history, Prescott and
Motley in history, Washington Irving and Cooper in fiction, Longfellow and
Edgar Poe in poetry, even Bryant and the respectabilities in rhyme, and Emerson
as essayist, there is no reason why New York should be a paltry imitation of
Leipsig, without the good faith of Tauchnitz.
I dined with a litterateur well known in England to many
people a year or two ago — sprightly, loquacious, and well informed, if neither
witty nor profound — now a Southern man with Southern proclivities, — as
Americans say; once a Southern man with such strong anti-slavery convictions,
that his expression of them in an English quarterly had secured him the
hostility of his own people — one of the emanations of American literary life
for which their own country finds no fitting receiver. As the best proof of his
sincerity, he has just now abandoned his connection with one of the New York
papers on the republican side, because he believed that the course of the
journal was dictated by anti-Southern fanaticism. He is, in fact, persuaded
that there will be a civil war, and that the South will have much of the right
on its side in the contest. At his rooms were Mons. B–––, Dr. Gwin, a
Californian ex-senator, Mr. Barlow, and several of the leading men of a certain
clique in New York. The Americans complain, or assert, that we do not
understand them, and I confess the reproach, or statement, was felt to be well
founded by myself at all events, when I heard it declared and admitted that “if
Mons. Belmont had not gone to the Charleston Convention, the present crisis
would never have occurred.”
SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and
South, p. 24-6
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