attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of my country;
but I am a republican without gall, and have no bitterness in my
creed. I have no relish for puritans either in religion or politics,
who are for pushing principles to an extreme, and for overturning
everything that stands in the way of their own zealous career. I have,
therefore, felt a strong distaste for some of those loco-foco
luminaries who of late have been urging strong and sweeping measures,
subversive of the interests of great classes of the community. Their
doctrines may be excellent in theory, but, if enforced in violent and
uncompromising opposition to all our habitudes, may produce the most
distressing effects. The best of remedies must be cautiously applied,
and suited to the state and constitution of the patient; otherwise,
what is intended to cure, may produce convulsion. The late elections
have shown that the measures proposed by Government are repugnant to
the feelings and habitudes or disastrous to the interests of great
portions of our fellow citizens. They should not, then, be forced home
with rigor. Ours is a government of compromise. We have several great
and distinct interests bound up together, which, if not separately
consulted and severally accommodated, may harass and impair each
other. A stern, inflexible, and uniform policy may do for a small
compact republic, like one of those of ancient Greece, where there is
a unity of character, habits, and interests; but a more accommodating,
discriminating, and variable policy must be observed in a vast
republic like ours, formed of a variety of states widely differing in
habits, pursuits, characters, and climes, and banded together by a few
general ties.
"I always distrust the soundness of political councils that are
accompanied by acrimonious and disparaging attacks upon any great
class of our fellow citizens. Such are those urged to the disadvantage
of the great trading and financial classes of our country. You
yourself know, from education and experience, how important these
classes are to the prosperous conduct of the complicated affairs of
this immense empire. You yourself know, in spite of all the
commonplace cant and obloquy that has been cast upon them by political
spouters and scribblers, what general good faith and fair dealing
prevails throughout these classes."
At this time he was studying with increasing interest the shifting
spectacle of American life. The openings of the West especially caught
his imagination, and when the chance came to travel on what was then
the frontier, the trans-Mississippi territories, he was quick to
accept it. As guest of one of the members of a commission appointed to
treat with several Indian tribes, he went as far as Fort Gibson on the
Arkansas. The literary fruits of this journey were "A Tour on the
Prairies," and "The Adventures of Captain Bonneville."
In April, 1833, he bought the little estate of Sunnyside, near the
Sleepy Hollow which he had made famous. His first name for it was "The
Roost" (Dutch for "Rest"), which he changed for reasons which are not
recorded; possibly the little nieces who became regular inmates may
have thought the old name not dignified enough. This he regarded as
his home for the rest of his life. He set to work at once to enlarge
the old Dutch stone cottage which stood upon the place; and from this
time on he is continually "puttering" about the estate, building a
poultry-yard here, planting trees there, with the full zeal of the
rural landlord. His family letters are given to accounts of little
country doings: "The goose war is happily terminated: Mr. Jones'
squadron has left my waters, and my feathered navy now plows the
Tappan Sea in triumph. I cannot but attribute this great victory to
the valor and good conduct of the enterprising little duck, who seems
to enjoy great power and popularity among both geese and ganders, and
absolutely to be the master of the fleet.... I am happy to inform you
that, among the many other blessings brought to the cottage by the
good Mr. Lawrence is a pig of first-rate stock and lineage. It has
been duly put in possession of the palace in the rear of the barn,
where it is shown to every visitor with as much pride as if it was the
youngest child of a family. As it is of the fair sex, and in the
opinion of the best judges a pig of peerless beauty, I have named it
'Fanny.' I know it is a name which with Kate and you has a romantic
charm, and about the cottage everything, as old Mrs. Marthing says,
must be romance." This was during the vogue of Fanny Kemble.
In this quiet retreat the next five uneventful years were passed, with
occasional excursions to New York or farther, which only served to
make the seclusion of the country home more inviting. Peter Irving
spent his last days at the Roost; and Ebenezer Irving and his family
gave up their New York house to make their home with the now famous
brother. While this arrangement greatly increased Irving's
satisfaction in life, it made heavy demands upon his purse. One cannot
be a country gentleman for nothing. The cottage had to be enlarged
repeatedly, the grounds cared for; and the mere running expenses were
a considerable matter for a man without dependable income. Irving had
by this time received a great deal of money for his books, but an
unfortunate "knack of hoping" had locked up most of it in unprofitable
land speculations.
In 1835 the three volumes of the "Crayon Miscellanies," were
published. The "Tour on the Prairies" was especially palatable to
Americans. Edward Everett said of it, in the highly colored style of
the period: "We are proud of Mr. Irving's sketches of English life,
proud of the gorgeous canvas upon which he has gathered in so much of
the glowing imagery of Moorish times. We behold with delight his easy
and triumphant march over these beaten fields; but we glow with
rapture as we see him coming back, laden with the poetical treasures
of the primitive wilderness, rich with spoil from the uninhabited
desert."
The second volume, containing "Abbotsford" and "Newstead Abbey,"
naturally gained special praise in England; the third, "Legends of the
Conquest of Spain," had comparatively little success.
Of "Astoria" (1836) it is hard to know what to say; on the whole, it
seems the most doubtful of his works in motive and quality. John Jacob
Astor, now an old man, was anxious to perpetuate the fame of his
commercial exploits, and was lucky enough to subsidize for this
purpose the most prominent American writer of the day. The adventures
of the various expeditions sent out to found an American trading
company on the Pacific coast are interesting; but one puts down
Irving's account of them with the feeling that it reflects rather more
credit on Mr. Astor than on the writer. The truth is, Irving, like
many less successful literary men, was constantly in need of money;
and he had begun to be in some difficulty for subjects upon which to
exercise his craft. The "Adventures of Captain Bonneville" (1837) was
also a piece of skillful book-making rather than an original creative
work; and after that nearly two years passed without his writing
anything.
At last, toward the close of 1838, he hit upon a subject which
attracted him greatly--a "History of the Conquest of Mexico." He began
at once upon preliminary studies, and had made considerable progress
when he learned by chance that Prescott, who had recently made a name
for himself by his "Ferdinand and Isabella," was at work upon the
same subject. Irving immediately retired from the field, and conveyed
a courteous assurance to Prescott of his satisfaction in leaving the
theme to such hands. He felt this sacrifice keenly, however; the
project had appealed to him peculiarly, and he had no other in mind to
take its place. For lack of other literary work, therefore, he
presently engaged to write a monthly article for the New York
"Knickerbocker," at a salary of $2000 a year. The arrangement was just
not too irksome to continue for two years.
It is easy to see, then, that at fifty-five Irving was pretty well
written out. In the twenty years that remained to him he produced
nothing of account except the "Life of Washington," which, like his
other works in biography and history, may be regarded as a _tour de
force_ rather than a spontaneous outcome of his genius.
V
A PUBLIC CHARACTER
The data of Irving's literary achievements have been brought near a
conclusion; what remains to be said may now deal less with what he
wrote, and more with what he did and was. It is luckily unnecessary to
try for a sharply drawn distinction between his popularity as a writer
and as a man. In his home, in society, and in literature the single
charm of his personality had made him beloved in the same way. And he
had become, in the best sense of the term, a public character. For
many years his name had been better known abroad than that of any
other living American; and his reception at home after an absence of
seventeen years showed in what regard his countrymen had come to hold
him. Their pride in his success and gratitude for the new fame he had
given a country which was still felt to be on probation, can hardly
account for it; only the confidence of affection could have excused so
prolonged an absenteeism.
His peculiar hold upon popular affection cannot be better suggested
than by the tone of a letter written by the only Englishman who during
Irving's life could pretend to rival him in his peculiar field. In
1841, Irving wrote to Dickens, expressing pleasure in his work.
Dickens replied: "There is no man in the world who could have given me
the heartfelt pleasure you have, by your kind note of the 13th of last
month. There is no living writer, and there are very few among the
dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with
everything you have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and
in my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say so.... I wish I
could find in your welcome letter some hint of an intention to visit
England. I can't. I have held it at arm's length, and taken a bird's
eye view of it, after reading it a great many times, but there is no
greater encouragement in it this way than on a microscopic
inspection. I should love to go with you--as I have gone, God knows
how often--into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green Arbor Court,
and Westminster Abbey. I should like to travel with you, outside the
last of the coaches, down to Bracebridge Hall. It would make my heart
glad to compare notes with you about that shabby gentleman in the
oilcloth hat and red nose, who sat in the nine-cornered back parlor of
the Masons' Arms; and about Robert Preston, and the tallow chandler's
widow, whose sitting-room is second nature to me; and about all those
delightful places and people that I used to walk about and dream of in
the daytime, when a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of
boy. I have a good deal to say, too, about that dashing Alonzo de
Ojeda, that you can't help being fonder of than you ought to be; and
much to hear concerning Moorish legend and poor, unhappy Boabdil.
Diedrich Knickerbocker I have worn to death in my pocket, and yet I
should show you his mutilated carcass with a joy past all
expression."
Not long afterward Dickens visited America. Irving and he saw much of
each other, though they did not meet many times. Irving presided at a
great dinner given to Boz in New York, broke down in his introductory
speech, and otherwise endeared himself to his brother author. When
presently Dickens went back, he wrote, "I did not come to see you, for
I really have not the heart to say 'good-by' again, and felt more than
I can tell you when we shook hands last Wednesday."
Pretty soon Irving himself was leaving America. In February, 1842, he
was startled from the home quiet of Sunnyside by a summons which he
could not disregard. Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, had
secured his appointment as Minister to Spain. The Senate confirmed it
almost by acclamation, and letters came from various quarters urging
him to accept it. He could not doubt that the wish was general. But it
was very hard for him to leave home and America again. For some time
after accepting the post he was plunged into a dejection which seemed
laughable to himself. "The crowning honor of his life," he admitted,
had come to him, and he could only groan under it.
"'It is hard, very hard,' he half murmured to himself, half to me; yet
he added whimsically enough, being struck with the seeming absurdity
of such a view, 'I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the
shorn lamb'" (P. M. Irving).
In April he sailed from New York, and made a leisurely journey by way
of England and France, not reaching Madrid till the end of July.
Europe had lost its old charm. Many places reminded him painfully of
the favorite brother Peter who had shared his first impressions of
them, and whose loss was one of the keenest griefs of his life. "My
visit to Europe has by no means the charm of former visits," he wrote
from Paris; "scenes and objects have no longer the effect of novelty
with me. I am no longer curious to see great sights or great people,
and have been so long accustomed to a life of quiet, that I find the
turmoil of the world becomes irksome to me. Then I have a house of my
own, a little domestic world, created in a manner by my own hand,
which I have left behind, and which is continually haunting my
thoughts, and coming in contrast with the noisy, tumultuous, heartless
world in which I am called to mingle. However, I am somewhat of a
philosopher, and can accommodate myself to changes, so I shall
endeavor to resign myself to the splendor of courts and the
conversation of courtiers, comforting myself with the thought that the
time will come when I shall once more return to sweet little
Sunnyside, and be able to sit on a stone fence, and talk about
politics and rural affairs with Neighbor Forkel and Uncle Brom."
At Madrid he very soon found himself too much occupied for the
literary work he had counted on. He had accepted the place under the
impression that his duties would not greatly interfere with the
writing of the "Life of Washington," on which he was then fairly
launched. But from the beginning he found the situation in Spain
unexpectedly absorbing. It was the usual Spanish situation, to be
sure: a designing pretender, a child monarch, a court honeycombed with
intrigue, and a people ready for anything spectacular. When Irving was
presented to the young queen, she was closely guarded. "On ascending
the grand staircase, we found the portal at the head of it, opening
into the royal suite of apartments, still bearing the marks of the
midnight attack upon the palace in October last, when an attempt was
made to get possession of the persons of the little queen and her
sister, to carry them off.... The marble casements of the doors had
been shattered in several places, and the double doors themselves
pierced all over with bullet-holes, from the musketry that played upon
them from the staircase during that eventful night. What must have
been the feelings of those poor children, on listening from their
apartment to the horrid tumult, the outcries of a furious multitude,
and the reports of fire-arms, echoing and reverberating through the
vaulted halls and spacious courts of the immense edifice, and dubious
whether their own lives were not the object of the assault!" Such an
appeal to Irving's sympathy and chivalry was enough to deprive the
situation of its quality of opera-bouffe.
Presently an insurrection takes place in Barcelona. The regent hurries
off to quell it, and Irving's letters are full of the pomp and
circumstance of war. The regent is successful, and returns apparently
firmer than ever in power. But a few months later the trouble breaks
out again, more seriously; Madrid is placed in a state of siege, and
martial law declared. The life of the queen is thought to be in
danger, and the diplomatic corps, headed by Irving, offers its
services for her protection. Finally the regent is driven out of
power, and blows are once again succeeded by intrigue. Such, briefly,
was the character of the little drama in which the quiet American
author was to take a significant part, during his whole ministry. This
Spanish experience is fully recorded in his family letters. He was
always a voluminous letter-writer; during this period he is fairly
encyclopedic. A single letter to his sister fills thirteen closely
printed pages of his nephew's biography. His official dispatches, too,
were very full and thorough. Webster valued them particularly, and
remarked that he "always laid aside every other correspondence to read
a diplomatic dispatch from Mr. Irving." He had time, too, for many
charming chatty letters to the nieces at Sunnyside. Here is a
Thackerayish passage from one of them: "You seem to pity the poor
little queen, shut up with her sister like two princesses in a fairy
tale, in a great, grand, dreary palace, and wonder whether she would
not like to change her situation for a nice little cottage on the
Hudson? Perhaps she would, Kate, if she knew anything of the gayeties
of cottage life; if she had ever been with us at a picnic, or driven
out in the shandry-dan with the two roans, and James, in his slipshod
hat, for a coachman, or _yotted_ in the Dream, or sang in the
Tarrytown choir, or shopped at Tommy Dean's; but, poor thing! she
would not know how to set about enjoying herself. She would not think
of appearing at church without a whole train of the Miss ----s and the
Miss ----s, and the Miss ----s, as maids of honor, nor drive through
Sleepy Hollow except in a coach and six, with a cloud of dust, and a
troop of horsemen in glittering armor. So I think, Kate, we must be
content with pitying her, and leaving her in ignorance of the
comparative desolateness of her situation."
In 1842, Irving suffered another of those petty persecutions which he
was not thick-skinned enough to endure without suffering, nor
confident enough to ignore. The charges were of the most ordinary
sort, and advanced by men of little weight: he had appropriated
material without giving due credit for it, and he had puffed his own
work. Their only claim upon our notice lies in the fact that Irving
thought it worth while to confute them at length. He was perhaps
especially sensitive to critical attacks at this time. His income from
literary property had nearly ceased. Some of his books were out of
print, and the rest were having comparatively little sale. A wave of
indifference had overtaken his public. "Everything behind me seems to
have turned to chaff and stubble," he wrote. "And if I desire any
further profits from literature, it must be by the further exercise of
my pen." It is characteristic of his modesty that he was disposed to
accept this momentary neglect as final. He planned to revise all his
works, in the hope of finding a renewed market for them later, but
evidently expected little.
A letter to Brevoort from Bordeaux dated November, 1843, accounts for
the first break in his Madrid residence: "I am now on my way back to
my post, after between two and three months' absence. I set out in
pursuit of health, and thought a little traveling and a change of air
would 'make me my own man again'; but I was laid by the heels at Paris
by a recurrence of my malady, and have just escaped out of the
doctor's hands.... This indisposition has been a sad check upon all my
plans. I had hoped, by zealous employment of all the leisure afforded
me at Madrid, to accomplish one or two literary tasks which I have in
hand.... A year, however, has now been lost to me, and a precious
year, at my time of life. The 'Life of Washington,' and indeed all my
literary tasks, have remained suspended; and my pen has remained idle,
excepting now and then in writing a dispatch to Government, or
scrawling a letter to my family. In the mean time the income which I
used to derive from farming out my writings has died away, and my
moneyed investments yield scarce any interest.... However, thank God,
my health and with it my capacity for work are returning. I shall soon
again have pen in hand, and hope to get two or three good years of
literary labor out of myself."
After his return to Spain he was again laid by. He was disappointed,
but not discouraged, for the self-pity of the invalid never deprived
him of his strong man's humor. "When I drive out and notice the
opening of spring, I feel sometimes almost moved to tears at the
thought that in a little while I shall again have the use of my
limbs, and be able to ramble about and enjoy these green fields and
meadows. It seems almost too great a privilege. I am afraid when I
once more sally forth and walk the streets, I shall feel like a boy
with a new coat, who thinks everybody will turn around to look at him.
'Bless my soul, how that gentleman has the use of his legs!'" A few
days after this was written, he got word that one of his friends had
just undergone a successful surgical operation. "God bless these
surgeons and dentists!" he exclaims. "May their good deeds be returned
upon them a thousand fold! May they have the felicity, in the next
world, to have successful operations performed upon them to all
eternity!"
By this time he had come to take Spanish politics rather too
seriously. The insincerity and profligacy of the Spanish character,
the corruption of the court and state, fairly sicken him: "The last
ten or twelve years of my life," he writes, "have shown me so much of
the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of
my fellow men, and look back with regret to the confiding period of my
literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the
world through the medium of my imagination, and was apt to believe men
as good as I wished them to be." His sense of responsibility for the
young queen oppressed him, and he looked forward impatiently to the
hour of his release.
A year later he had gained far better health and spirits. On his
sixty-second birthday--"I caught myself bounding upstairs three steps
at a time, to the astonishment of the porter, and checked myself,
recollecting that it was not the pace befitting a minister and a man
of my years." His mental life had, however, caught the sober tone of
age. "I am now at that time of life when the mind has a stock of
recollections on which to employ itself; and though these may
sometimes be of a melancholy nature, yet it is a 'sweet-souled
melancholy,' mellowed and softened by the operation of time, and has
no bitterness in it.... When I was young, my imagination was always
in the advance, picturing out the future, and building castles in the
air; now memory comes in the place of imagination, and I look back
over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling,
which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a
soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through
which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all their asperity in
the distance."
In July, 1846, his successor arrived, and Irving was free to leave
Europe for the last time. His services in Spain had brought nothing
but honor to himself and his country; he had earned a right to the
quiet years that followed in his favorite home nook at Sunnyside.
Soon after his return he began to busy himself with the revised
edition of his works which he had projected in Spain. It was
disheartening to find his old publishers dubious about undertaking the
republication, and for a time the work went hard. "I am growing a sad
laggard in literature," he wrote to his nephew, "and need some one to
bolster me up occasionally. I am too ready to do anything else rather
than write." For more than a year his time was largely devoted to
overseeing an enlargement of the cottage, and a renovation of the
grounds, at Sunnyside. At last he got it all into satisfactory order.
"My own place has never been so beautiful as at present. I have made
more openings by pruning and cutting down trees, so that from the
piazza I have several charming views of the Tappan Zee and the hills
beyond, all set, as it were, in verdant flames; and I am never tired
of sitting there in my old Voltaire chair of a long summer morning
with a book in my hand, sometimes reading, sometimes musing, and
sometimes dozing, and mixing all up in a pleasant dream." As for New
York, "For my part, I dread the noise and turmoil of it, and visit it
but now and then, preferring the quiet of my country retreat; which
shows that the bustling time of life is over with me, and that I am
settling down into a sober, quiet, good-for-nothing old gentleman."