Text: Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “Reminiscences,” an unknown periodical, ca. August 1874, p. ?, cols. ?-?

[page ?, column ?, continued:]

I think there is a great contrast between the manners, to say nothing of the genius, of the writers twenty years ago and those of to-day. There was less of pretension to smartness, and more of culture and gentleness. Conversation — certainly one of the fine arts — was better appreciated, and there was a higher tone of courtesy also. Indeed, elegance of manners is held quite in contempt now-a-days, while to be a lady or gentleman in the highest sense was considered an essential passport to good society formerly; for at the time of which I speak, there was a prestige attached to genius and authorship — fast passing away. To enhance the authority of the pen, by the graces of conversation, was not considered beneath the attention of an author. I remember many of the friends of twenty years ago as particularly distinguished for the excellence of their colloquial powers — fluent or reserved, as the inspiration of the house might prompt, they were genuine, earnest. Their convictions and their prejudices strong; they had no toleration for shams, nor for dulness either, unless it were the “good dulness” created by the wand of a Propsero. I have found very few women good conversers: all are more or less fluent, but their self-consciousness is a bar to the continuation of ideas, and they are apt to lack that variety of incident, suggestion, and illustration, so essential to prolonged discourse. Mrs. Embury, at one time a favorite, and the wife of a highly cultivated, wealthy banker, and a Knickerbocker, was full of a capricious wit, with occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm. Mrs. Kirkland was simply commonplace; Miss Sedgwick was genial, a good listener, and clever, without brilliancy; Miss Lynch (now Mrs. Botta,) had all the grace, tact, and resource of a French woman, with a fine glow and repartee quite charming. Margaret Fuller was dogmatic and pedantic, exceedingly self-conceited, but with an under-current of thought and heroism sufficient to justify these disagreeable qualities. The women authors of my time were less Bohemian than those of to-day; were less self-assertive, but more artistic; less audacious, but more discriminating; less smart, but more just. Many, who at that time were in a high degree rural, have since risen to a deserved celebrity. Their mistakes of manner were always treated forbearingly, though sometimes not a a [[sic]] little embarrassing; and as introductions occurred only at the request of the parties concerned, these rural gossips made occassional very awkward blunder.

For instance, everybody that knows me, knows that [column 1:] I have great toleration and love for dumb animals, and that the symbol of the snake has been a subject of much thought and investigation with me. This characteristic of mine has led my friends to present me with great numbers of pets in the shape of animals of different kinds, even to living serpents! The latter I placed in a capacious jar, into which I inserted a cross covered with moss, the top protected by the meshes of a strong lace, or wire frame. I confess I took a mischievous pleasure in witnessing the surprise, sometimes horror, with which a guest looked upon this strangely beautiful and revoltingly fascinating creature. But the thing, it seems was an unconscious injury to me, of which I had evidence one evening at Miss Lynch's.

A young author from the rural districts, alive with curiosity to learn all about the distinguished people present, was talking with several persons in the vicinity of myself. I was engaged in an animated conversation at the time, but hearing my own name, more than once pronounced by the young lady, I carried on a double mental process, that of listening to her and taking my own part in the subject under discussion. At length, I heard he say: “But you must point out Madam Oakes Smith to eme. I am told she is a dreadful woman — loves toads and snakes, and all such ugly creatures!”

A dead pause ensued on every side, and there was a general movement, so that she, not perceiving the cause, turned to me, and repeated the request.

“You think she is a dreadful woman,” I said.

“Oh, yes, or she wouldn't like such creatures.”

I replied: “Do you see anything dreadful about the person you are talking with? It is not honorable for me to let you go on, for I am the one you wished pointed out to you.”

She stammered, colored, and drew aside. Had she been generous minded we might have been friends from that time forth.

Perhaps no one, twenty years ago, received more marked attention that Edgar Poe. He was living in a little band box of a house at Fordham, adjoining the Jesuits’ College, and where his wife died. He was military in his bearing, contracted by his temporary training at the West Point Academy. His slender form, pale, intellectual face, and weird expression of eye, never failed to arrest the attention of even the least observant. Always, everywhere he seemed out of place — a Hamlet amid the toils of fashion; and there was an unmistakable, cynical something about him that said: “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as now, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery;” a suppressed egotism, a scarcely endured tolerance a self-involved abstraction — native, not artificial. He spoke in a low voice, without any sympathetic vibration; yet it was one you listened to hear again. He did not affect the society of men, choosing rather that of highly intellectual women, with whom h liked to fall into a sort of eloquent monologue, half dream, half poetry. Men were intolerant of all this, but women fell under its fascination and listened in silence. I have seen the childlike face of Fannie Osgood suffused with tears under this wizard spell. I think Poe was utterly incapable of judging of any action from a moral point of view; thousands are in the same away devoid of moral sense, but having no intellectual preponderance, the fact may or may not become noticeable. If

“The proper study of mankind is man,”

the race have a most complicated and multitudinous subject before them.