later the written reminiscences of the two daughters unmistakably
impute the attentions of the brilliant American to something more than
friendliness. It is certain that he had a very warm feeling for
somebody or something in Dresden, which led to a temporary return of
his youthful delight in society. For his time was by no means given up
to the Fosters. He was received into the life of the little German
court, and evidently derived such pleasure as is proper to a
Republican from dancing with princesses, and acting in private
theatricals with Highnesses and Excellencies. On the whole it seems to
have been a peaceful, idle, rather trivial time of sojourn among
congenial people. He danced, he strolled, he wrote verses to little
Miss Emily; in short, he enjoyed himself as a youngish man may,
whether the muse is waiting for him, or some less high-flown customer.
"I wish I could give you a good account of my literary labors," he
wrote his sister after several months in Dresden, "but I have nothing
to report. I am merely seeing, and hearing, and my mind seems in too
crowded and confused a state to produce anything. I am getting very
familiar with the German language; and there is a lady here who is so
kind as to give me lessons every day in Italian [Mrs. Foster], which
language I have nearly forgotten, but which I am fast regaining.
Another lady is superintending my French [Miss Emily Foster], so that
if I am not acquiring ideas, I am at least acquiring a variety of
modes of expressing them when they do come." Very likely the confusion
of his mind was not lessened by the frequency of those French lessons.
There really seems to be no reason for doubting the testimony of the
elder sister's journal; "He has written. He has confessed to my
mother, as to a dear and true friend, his love for E----, and his
conviction of its utter hopelessness. He feels himself unable to
combat it. He thinks he must try, by absence, to bring more peace to
his mind.... He has almost resolved to make a tour in Silesia, which
will keep him absent for a few weeks." The tour in Silesia was
certainly made; and during the brief absence Irving wrote sundry
sentimental letters to Mrs. Foster. There are occasions when he seems
to imagine a pretty daughter looking over the admirable mother's
shoulder, and being much affected by the famous author's tenderness
for Dresden. Presently he comes back to be their escort, for they are
going home to England; and at Rotterdam the good-bys are said. They
met afterward in England, but the old intimacy was gone.
More than thirty years after, Irving had a letter from a Mrs. Emily
Fuller, whose name he did not know. Pleasantly and discreetly it
recalled those happy Emily Foster days in Dresden. "She addresses him
because she hopes that her eldest boy Henry may have the happiness and
advantage of meeting him." Poor Irving! Her eldest boy Henry.... Well,
the sting was all gone by that time, fortunately. His reply is all
that it ought to be, and nothing more.
Those first days in Paris were not cheerful ones for Irving. His
pleasant dream was over, and he had forgotten what to do with waking
moments. His memorandum-book records that he felt oppressed by "a
strange horror on his mind--a dread of future evil--of failure in
future literary attempts--a dismal foreboding that he could not drive
off by any effort of reason." "When I once get going again with my
pen," he wrote to Peter, "I mean to keep on steadily, until I can
scrape together enough to produce a regular income, however moderate.
We shall then be independent of the world and its chances." But he
could not manage to get going. For some time he could write nothing at
all. Fortunately, after an unprofitable month or two, he fell in with
John Howard Payne, now remembered only for his "Home, Sweet Home," but
then esteemed as an actor and dramatist. Irving had met him several
years before, and now became associated with him in some dramatic
translating and adapting. The results were nearly worthless from a
literary point of view, but served to keep him busy, and to put him
once more in the writing vein.
For some time Murray had been pressing him hard for copy, and in the
spring of 1824 the "Tales of a Traveler" were completed and sent to
press. After the task of proof-reading came a reaction of high spirits
which expressed itself in the most amusing letter Irving ever wrote:--
"BRIGHTON, August 14, 1824.
"My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea.
"I forget how the song ends, but here I am at Brighton just on the
point of embarking for France. I have dragged myself out of London,
as a horse drags himself out of the slough, or a fly out of a
honey-pot, almost leaving a limb behind him at every tug. Not that I
have been immersed in pleasure and surrounded by sweets, but rather up
to the ears in ink and harassed by printers' devils.
"I never have had such fagging in altering, adding, and correcting;
and I have been detained beyond all patience by the delays of the
press. Yesterday I absolutely broke away, without waiting for the last
sheets. They are to be sent after me here by mail, to be corrected
this morning, or else they must take their chance. From the time I
first started pen in hand on this work, it has been nothing but hard
driving with me.
"I have not been able to get to Tunbridge to see the Donegals, which I
really and greatly regret. Indeed I have seen nobody except a friend
or two who had the kindness to hunt me out. Among these was Mr. Story,
and I ate a dinner there that it took me a week to digest, having been
obliged to swallow so much hard-favored nonsense from a loud-talking
baronet whose name, thank God, I forget, but who maintained Byron was
not a man of courage, and therefore his poetry was not readable. I was
really afraid he would bring John Story to the same way of thinking.
"I went a few evenings since to see Kenney's new piece, the Alcaid. It
went off lamely, and the Alcaid is rather a bore, and comes near to be
generally thought so. Poor Kenney came to my room next evening, and I
could not believe that one night could have ruined a man so
completely. I swear to you I thought at first it was a flimsy suit of
clothes had left some bedside and walked into my room without waiting
for the owner to get up; or that it was one of those frames on which
clothiers stretch coats at their shop doors; until I perceived a thin
face sticking edgeways out of the collar of the coat like the axe in a
bundle of fasces. He was so thin, and pale, and nervous, and
exhausted--he made a dozen difficulties in getting over a spot in the
carpet, and never would have accomplished it if he had not lifted
himself over by the points in his shirt-collar.
"I saw Rogers just as I was leaving town. I had not time to ask him
any particulars about you, and indeed he is not exactly the man from
whom I would ask news about my friends. I dined tete-a-tete with him
some time ago, and he served up his friends as he served up his fish,
with a squeeze of lemon over each. It was very piquant, but it rather
set my teeth on edge....
"Farewell, my dear Moore. Let me hear from you, if but a line;
particularly if my work pleases you, but don't say a word against it.
I am easily put out of humor with what I do."
Surely no more delicious bit of nonsense was ever written than the
description of poor Kenney. Moore read it to a group of friends in the
presence of the victim--a situation which would have been too
"piquant" for Irving's taste.
Moore had only the desired praise for the "Tales of a Traveler," but
elsewhere it did not fare so well. Irving considered it on the whole
his best work; but though it had a large sale, its reception in
England was not quite what he had hoped for; and in America it was
received by the press with something like hostility. Unfortunately
some busybody in America made it his concern to forward to Irving all
the ill-natured flings which could be gleaned from American notices of
the new book. The incident--with all its unpleasantness--was trifling
enough, but to Irving's raw sensitiveness it was torture. He was
overwhelmed with an almost ludicrous melancholy, could not write,
could not sleep, could not bear to be alone. This petty outburst of
critical spleen, backed as it evidently was by personal antagonism on
the part of a few obscure journalists, actually left him dumb for more
than a year.
Of course the public was right in its general estimate of the "Tales
of a Traveler": they are not as good as the "Sketch Book." In kind
they are similar--that in itself would be enough to excite prejudice
against new work from an author who had been so long before the
public; but they are also undeniably inferior in quality. One or two
of the stories are distinctly morbid in tone, several give the
impression of being long drawn out. In some way the collection lacks
atmosphere; Italian scenery is painted with accuracy, but not Italian
life or character. Irving could draw the early Dutch in America, or
the mediaeval Moors in Spain, or the Englishman in England or Italy:
the modern Italian on his own soil he did not know except in his
melodramatic exterior.
Irving had now given his brother Peter a place in his little menage.
The steamboat scheme had failed utterly, and he had from this time on
no sort of regular employment. Irving set himself cheerfully to
provide for both. His goal at this time was less fame than
fortune--"by every exertion to attain sufficient to make us both
independent for the rest of our lives." Not for many years did he come
to perceive that a life of leisure was not only impossible, but
undesirable for him, and to express it as his fondest wish that he
might "die in harness." The profits of the "Tales of a Traveler" went
the way of most of his earnings--this time to help develop a Bolivia
copper mine.
He had been studying Spanish for a year or two, and had an increased
desire to see Spain. As a mere aid in traveling, he asked for the
nominal post of attache to the American legation at Madrid. Alexander
H. Everett, then minister to Spain, at once granted the request, and
in replying suggested a possible literary task--the translation of a
new Spanish work, Navarrete's "Voyages of Columbus," which was shortly
to make its appearance. Murray, who was then in some difficulties, did
not think favorably of the project.
Irving went to Madrid, and by good fortune got lodgings with the
American consul Rich, who had made an extensive private collection of
documents dealing with early American history. Presently Navarrete's
work was published, and found to be "rather a mass of rich materials
for history than a history itself." This was in February, 1826. Irving
at once began to take notes and sift materials for an original history
of Columbus. For six months he worked incessantly. "Sometimes," says
his biographer, "he would write all day and until twelve at night; in
one instance his note-book shows him to have written from five in the
morning until eight at night, stopping only for meals."
IV
MAN OF LETTERS--SECOND PERIOD
There is something interesting, and in a sense pathetic, in this
sudden steady diligence from the man of desultory habits, who had
never written but by whim, whose finger had always been lifted to
catch the lightest literary airs. Here, at last, was the firm trade
wind, and the satisfaction of steady and methodical progress. The
qualified success of the "Tales of a Traveler" had led him to feel
that his vein was running out. The prospect of producing a solid work
gave him keen pleasure. One cannot be always building castles in the
air; why not try a pyramid, if only a little one? Since the world is
perfectly delighted with our pretty things, very well, let us show
that we can do a sublime thing. As for history--"Whatever may be the
use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly," says
Walter Bagehot, "it is certainly of great use relatively and to
literary men. Consider the position of a man of that species. He sits
beside a library fire, with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital
style--every means of saying everything, but nothing to say. Of course
he is an able man; of course he has an active intellect, besides
wonderful culture: but still, one cannot always have original ideas.
Every day cannot be an era; a train of new speculation very often will
not be found: and how dull it is to make it your business to write, to
stay by yourself in a room to write, and then to have nothing to say!
It is dreary work mending seven pens, and waiting for a theory to
'turn up.' What a gain if something would happen! then one could
describe it. Something has happened, and that something is history."
There is no doubt that Irving's early delicate sallies in literature
represent his best. In a single department of belles-lettres he had
shown mastery. During the remainder of his life he continued to work
at intervals in that field with similar felicity; and, for the rest,
to write amiably and respectably upon many topics foreign to his
natural bent. But his greatest work was done in odd moments and at a
heat; all the method in the world could not increase his real stature
by a cubit.
A word may perhaps be said here of Irving as an historian and
biographer. Of course he could not write dully; his histories are just
as readable as Goldsmith's, and rather more veracious. But he plainly
had not the scholar's training and methods which we now demand of the
historian; nor had he the larger view of men and events in their
perspective. Generalization was beyond him. Fortunately to generalize
is only a part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim
historic figure, and give it life and color,--this power he had. And
it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as
Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington had begun to loom vaguely
and impersonally in the mind, a mere great man, when Irving with a
touch turned him from cold bronze into flesh and blood again.
During the years of Irving's stay abroad other American writers had
come into notice. Bryant's poetry had become well known. Cooper had
produced "The Spy," "The Pilot," "The Pioneers," and "The Last of the
Mohicans." In 1827 appeared the first volume of poems by Edgar Allan
Poe. In this year, too, Irving's diary records a meeting with
Longfellow, who was then twenty-one, and came abroad to prepare
himself for his professorship at Bowdoin. Longfellow's recollection of
the incident is worth quoting: "I had the pleasure of meeting Mr.
Irving in Spain, and found the author, whom I had loved, repeated in
the man. The same playful humor; the same touches of sentiment; the
same poetic atmosphere; and, what I admired still more, the entire
absence of all literary jealousy, of all that mean avarice of fame,
which counts what is given to another as so much taken from one's
self--
"'And trembling, hears in every breeze
The laurels of Miltiades.'"
In the following summer the "History of Columbus" was finished, and
sold to Murray. It won high praise from the reviewers, especially from
Alexander H. Everett, his former diplomatic chief, and at this time
editor of the "North American Review."
Early in the following year he made his first visit to Andalusian
Spain. In the course of his grubbing among the Columbus archives, he
had found a good deal of interesting material about the Moorish
occupancy. The beauty of the country and the grandeur of its Moorish
relics took strong hold upon him. In April, 1828, he settled in
Seville, and there the "Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada" were
written. By this time the market price of his wares had gone up very
much. There is no doubt that his historical work had increased his
temporary reputation. Murray gave him 2000 guineas for the "Conquest
of Granada;" he further offered him L1000 a year to edit a new
literary and scientific magazine, as well as L100 an article for any
contribution he might choose to make to the "London Quarterly." He
refused the first offer on the ground that he did not care to be tied
in England, the second because the "Quarterly" had always been hostile
to America. He continued to take an interest in affairs at home.
Impatient as he was of political methods, he had opinions of his own
as to candidates and measures. The election of Jackson called forth
the following comment in a letter to Mr. Everett: "I was rather sorry
when Mr. Adams was first raised to the presidency, but I am much more
so at his being displaced; for he has made a far better president than
I expected, and I am loth to see a man superseded who has filled his
station worthily. These frequent changes in our administration are
prejudicial to the country; we ought to be wary of using our power of
changing our chief magistrate when the welfare of the country does not
require it. In the present election there has, doubtless, been much
honest, warm, grateful feeling toward Jackson, but I fear much pique,
passion, and caprice as it respects Mr. Adams.
"Since the old general was to be the man, however, I am well pleased
upon the whole that he has a great majority, as it will, for the
reasons you mention, produce a political calm in the country, and lull
those angry passions which have been exasperated during the Adams
administration, by the close contest of nearly balanced parties. As to
the old general, with all his _hickory_ characteristics, I suspect he
has good stuff in him, and will make a sagacious, independent, and
high-spirited president; and I doubt his making so high-handed a one
as many imagine."
The "Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada" were well treated by
critics, but never very popular. The humor of the mythical Fray
Antonio's narrative was too sly and covert; the public was mystified,
and had half a notion it was being made game of. But Irving was not
yet done with Granada. Presently he went back, and in the course of a
solitary two months in the Alhambra, got together the materials for
the most characteristic work he had published since the "Tales of a
Traveler" and the strongest since the "Sketch Book." His idyllic stay
in the Alhambra was one of the pleasantest episodes of his life. When
it was cut short by his appointment as secretary of legation at
London, he made up his mind to leave the quiet breathing-spot with
real regret. One cannot help seeing from the tone of his letter to
Peter that the years have given him as much as they have taken away:
"My only horror is the bustle and turmoil of the world: how shall I
stand it after the delicious quiet and repose of the Alhambra? I had
intended, however, to quit this place before long, and, indeed, was
almost reproaching myself for protracting my sojourn, having little
better than sheer self-indulgence to plead for it; for the effect of
the climate, the air, the serenity and sweetness of the place, is
almost as seductive as that of the Castle of Indolence, and I feel at
times an impossibility of working, or of doing anything but yielding
to a mere voluptuousness of sensation."
At London he found himself associated with congenial men, but tied so
closely to the legation that he could not even get away to visit his
sister at Birmingham. The constraint chafed him at first, but before
long his letters show him reconciled, and even interested in the
practical business of diplomacy. They complain, however, of his
growing stout. This, indeed, he had a perfect right to do. He was now
forty-seven years old, and a man of solid reputation; weighty honors
were being heaped upon him. Before leaving Spain he had been made a
member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History; and in England he had
just received a medal from the Royal Society of Literature, and the
degree of LL. D. from Oxford. His leisure for literary work was not
great in London, but he was making some progress with the Alhambra
stories, and had begun to think seriously of the "Life of Washington,"
which was to hold the main place in his thoughts for the rest of his
life.
At this time England was suffering under the double discomfort of
cholera and the Reform Bill. A letter from Irving to his brother
shows that even in the midst of his successes the popular author was
subject to moods of mental gloom, and even to business difficulties:
"The restlessness and uncertainty in which I have been kept have
disordered my mind and feelings too much for imaginative writing, and
I now doubt whether I could get the Alhambra ready in time for
Christmas.... The present state of things here completely discourages
the idea of publication of any kind. There is no knowing who among the
booksellers is safe. Those who have published most are worst off, for
in this time of public excitement nobody reads books or buys them."
In 1831, Van Buren was nominated as Minister to the Court of St.
James, and at once took charge of his diplomatic duties. His
nomination was rejected by the Senate, however; and Irving determined
to take advantage of the incident to make his own escape from the
service, and return at last to America.
In May, 1831, he arrived in New York. He had been a young man when he
left America; he was now leaning toward the farther verge of his
prime. In character he had refined and sobered greatly; and he had
more than fulfilled his promise of literary excellence. He had still
twenty-six years to live, and was to do much useful service in life
and letters; but he could do nothing in that time to alter his
reputation; he could merely confirm it. Irving had grown immensely,
too, in the favor of his countrymen. He was welcomed back with
extravagant effusion by his old friends and by the country at large.
He had in fact come to be regarded as one of the chief glories of
America; for he had been the first to make her a world-power in
literature.
During those seventeen years New York had changed almost beyond
recognition in size, in appearance, in the tone of its life; but
Irving was delighted with everything and everybody. All that he had to
regret was the ordeal of a great public dinner in his honor, at which,
after a great deal of preliminary nervousness, he made the one speech
of his life. It was a good speech, but he could never be prevailed
upon to repeat the experiment. He was always at his worst in a large
company. The sight of a great number of unknown or half-known faces
confused his thoughts and clogged his tongue. His intimates knew him
for a brilliant and ready talker, full of easy fun and unaffected
sentiment.
Not long after his return, the "Tales of the Alhambra" were published.
In the somewhat florid concert of critical praises which greeted the
book, a simple theme is dominant. Everybody felt that in these stories
Irving had come back to his own. The material was very different from
that of the "Sketch Book," yet it yielded to similar treatment. The
grace, romance, humor, of this "beautiful Spanish Sketch Book," as the
historian Prescott called it, appealed at once to an audience which
had listened somewhat coldly to the less spontaneous "Tales of a
Traveler," and had given a formal approbation to the "History of
Columbus," without finding very much Irving in it.
A visit to Washington to clear up various odds and ends of his
diplomatic experience resulted in an interview with President Jackson,
which he reported in a letter to Peter Irving, now living alone in
Paris: "I have been most kindly received by the old general, with whom
I am much pleased as well as amused. As his admirers say, he is truly
an _old Roman_--to which I could add, _with a little dash of the
Greek_; for I suspect he is as _knowing_ as I believe he is _honest_.
I took care to put myself promptly on a fair and independent footing
with him; for, in expressing warmly and sincerely how much I had been
gratified by the unsought but most seasonable mark of confidence he
had shown me, when he hinted something about a disposition to place me
elsewhere, I let him know emphatically that I wished for nothing
more--that my whole desire was to live among my countrymen, and to
follow my usual pursuits. In fact, I am persuaded that my true course
is to be master of myself and of my time. Official station cannot add
to my happiness or respectability, and certainly would stand in the
way of my literary career." This disinclination to take office he
never got over, although he was frequently approached with offers of
place. In 1834, he was offered a nomination for Congress by the
Jackson party; in 1838, he was offered the Tammany nomination as mayor
of New York, and the secretaryship of the navy by Van Buren. And when
three years later he was given a still more important post, it was
only the evident spontaneity of the choice, and the feeling that in
taking the office he should be representing country rather than party,
which led him to accept it.
Impatient as he was of political methods, he had opinions of his own
on specific questions, and a broad political platform which he once
stated in a letter to his old friend Kemble:--