moving freely in society, and "not missing a single performance" of
the opera. "One meets all one's acquaintances at the opera, and there
is much visiting from box to box, and pleasant conversation, between
the acts. The opera house is in fact the great feature of polite
society in New York, and I believe is the great attraction that keeps
me in town. Music is to me the great sweetener of existence, and I
never enjoyed it more abundantly than at present." Clearly, the old
social instinct was by no means dead in him, however he might express
himself in less buoyant moods.
Two years after his return from Spain the house of Putnam agreed to
publish the revised edition of his works on very liberal terms--a
twelve and a half per cent. royalty. The result of the enterprise was
a surprise to author and publisher, for during the ten remaining years
of his life the royalties amounted to more than $88,000. The
arrangement brought about an immediate accession of courage and power,
and he returned with fresh zeal to the "Life of Washington." "All I
fear," he said, "is to fail in health, and fail in completing this
work at the same time. If I can only live to finish it, I would be
willing to die the next moment. I think I can make it a most
interesting book. If I had only ten years more of life! I never felt
more able to write. I might not conceive as I did in earlier days,
when I had more romance of feeling, but I could execute with more
rapidity and freedom." The consciousness of approaching age grew
stronger in him, but without weakening his capacity for enjoyment or
his turn for humorous expression. Early in 1850, George Ticknor sent
him a copy of his "History of Spanish Literature." Irving dipped into
it, liked it, and "When I have once read it through," he wrote, "I
shall keep it by me, like a Stilton cheese, to give a dig into
whenever I want a relishing morsel. I began to fear it would never
see the light in my day, or that it might fare with you as with that
good lady who went thirteen years with child, and then brought forth a
little old man, who died in the course of a month of extreme old age.
But you have produced three strapping volumes, full of life and
freshness and vigor, that will live forever." This sounds well for
Ticknor; but it needs only a glance at Irving's recorded
correspondence to see that he was inclined to overestimate the work of
others. That kind heart must needs assume the functions of a head
which was very well able to take care of itself.
In larger matters his judgment was often colored, but seldom warped,
by feeling. The line between sentiment and common sense is clearly
drawn in his comment upon the Kossuth obsession which held New York in
1852. "I have heard and seen Kossuth both in public and private, and
he is really a noble fellow, quite the beau ideal of a poetic hero....
He is a kind of man that you would idolize. Yet, poor fellow, he has
come here under a great mistake, and is doomed to be disappointed in
the high-wrought expectations he had formed of cooperation on the part
of our government in the affairs of his unhappy country. Admiration
and sympathy he has in abundance from individuals; but there is no
romance in councils of state or deliberative assemblies. There, cool
judgment and cautious policy must restrain and regulate the warm
impulses of feeling. I trust we are never to be carried away, by the
fascinating eloquence of this second Peter the Hermit, into schemes of
foreign interference, that would rival the wild enterprises of the
Crusades." The letter concludes in a minor strain: "It is now
half-past twelve at night, and I am sitting here scribbling in my
study, long after the family are abed and asleep--a habit I have
fallen much into of late. Indeed, I never fagged more steadily with my
pen than I do at present. I have a long task in hand, which I am
anxious to finish, that I may have a little leisure in the brief
remnant of life that is left to me. However, I have a strong
presentiment that I shall die in harness; and I am content to do so,
provided I have the cheerful exercise of intellect to the last."
By this time some of his Western investments had begun to make
handsome returns. With an easy pocket, and a single congenial task for
his leisure, it seemed that Irving's last years were certain to be
peacefully rounded. Unfortunately his health did not hold; all his
former ailments came back upon him, and the "Life of Washington"
became an Old Man of the Sea, which one wishes heartily he might have
been rid of. A visit to Saratoga in the summer of 1852, and the
company of many pretty women, seemed for the moment to lift the years
from his shoulders. "No one seemed more unconscious of the celebrity
to which he had attained," wrote one of his Saratoga acquaintances,
long after. "In this there was not a particle of affectation. Nothing
he shrank from with greater earnestness and sincerity and (I may add)
pertinacity, than any attempt to lionize him." His name was used to
conjure with too often for his comfort. An "Irving Literary Union" had
been formed in New York. Irving's attitude toward it was amusing and
characteristic; he was always invited to attend the anniversary
meeting, always accepted, and always stayed away.
Events abroad continued to interest him. His sister had sent an
account from Paris of the marriage of Louis Napoleon. "Louis Napoleon
and Eugenie Montijo, Emperor and Empress of France!" he wrote. "One of
whom I have had a guest at my cottage on the Hudson; the other of
whom, when a child, I have had on my knee at Granada! It seems to cap
the climax of the strange dramas of which Paris has been the theatre
during my lifetime."
In 1855, "Wolfert's Roost" was published. Most of its contents had
figured years before in the "Knickerbocker Magazine." It is one of the
best of his miscellaneous collections, and should be better known to
the modern reader of Irving. Thereafter, his work was over, except for
the "Life of Washington," which was to appear in parts during the next
three years. Its merits were perhaps exaggerated at the time; to the
modern critic they lie chiefly in its possession of the lucid
simplicity of method without which its author could not write, and in
the life which it infuses into a cold abstraction. If this is not
Washington, it is at least a living and breathing person, whose
interest for us lies not altogether in his career.
These closing years were sadly clouded by sleeplessness and depression
of spirits, from which at times he roused himself to bursts of his old
brilliancy and humor. A year before his death he said to one of the
innumerable inquiries about his health, "I have a streak of old age.
Pity, when we have grown old, we could not turn round and grow young
again, and die of cutting our teeth." A few months later, when he had
begun to be troubled with difficulty of breathing, he had a long and
prosy letter from a total stranger, who proposed a call. "Oh, if he
could only give me his long wind," gasped Irving, "he should be most
welcome."
We need not follow here the rather pitiful struggle of those last
months. "I do not fear death," said he, "but I would like to go down
with all sail set." The thoughts of the gradual loss of his faculties
haunted him with curious insistency. He conceived a dislike for his
own room, could not bear to be alone, and hung with pathetic eagerness
to the companionship of the few whom he held dearest. His fear was
groundless. To the end his mind remained clear; and on the 29th of
November, 1859, he "went down with all sail set."
VI
THE MAN HIMSELF
One is tempted to ask himself, in concluding a review of this man's
life and work, what it was that he peculiarly stood for; what new kind
of excellence he brought into being, and how far it survived him.
Oddly enough, the accident of his birthplace is made at once his chief
merit, and the subtle derogation of that merit; he is the first
distinguished name in American letters, and he is "the American
Addison." From the outset one who wishes to study his work is hampered
by the fact of place. One must be always considering solemnly,
"Although he was an American, he succeeded in doing this," or,
"Because he was an American, he might have done that," till one is
fairly inclined to wish that his English parents had not happened to
marry and settle in New York. As a matter of fact, there are few
writers against whom the point of nationality may be pushed with less
pertinence.
It is plain that earlier American writing interests us only in a local
and guarded sense. The critical microscope discovers certain merits;
but the least shifting of the eye-piece throws the object out of
field. We value what these men wrote because of what they did as
Americans, or stood for in American life. Of Irving and a few later
writers this is not true. And our regard for them may lead us to
suspect that from the literary point of view, it is better to be great
than American; or at least that there is no formula to express the
ratio between a writer's Americanism and his literary power. The
historian esteems a flavor of nationality in literature; to the lover
of pure letters, it is only a superior sort of local color. Irving's
distinction is that he was the first prophet of pure letters in
America. This is to speak thickly; and it will not help matters
greatly to say that the mark of pure letters is style. The application
of that foggy term to such a writer as Irving is likely to be
particularly unfair; it has not been spared him. He has had more
praise for his style than for anything else; indeed, it has been
commonly suggested that there is little else to praise him for. This
is, of course, a survival of the old notion that style is a sort of
achievement in decorative art; that fine feathers may do much for the
literary bird, at least. The style of a writer like Irving--a mere
loiterer in the field of letters--is at best a creditable product of
artifice. To him even so much credit has not been always allowed; the
clever imitator of Addison--or, as some sager say, of Goldsmith--has
not even invented a manner; he has borrowed one.
Fortunately, novelty of form is a very different thing from literary
excellence. Irving wrote like a well-bred Englishman, brought up in
the sound traditions of the days of good Queen Anne. Whatever local
merit his work may have, belongs to theme rather than to treatment.
Its delicate humor is as far as possible from what has come to be
known as American humor. His only conscious Americanism in motive--to
speak of him merely as an artist--was to show England that "an
American could write decent English." At that time, it seems,
Englishmen considered this to be a good thing for an American to do;
and the poet Campbell's remark was thought to be high praise: that
Washington Irving had "added clarity to the English tongue." This was
a service of which the language just then stood sadly in need. There
are always men ready enough to make English turbid, to wreak their
ingenuity upon oddities of phrase and diction. At that moment,
certainly, the anxious courtier of words was not so much needed as the
easy autocrat, whose style, however cavalier, should have grace and
firmness and clarity to commend it. When Irving began to express
himself, there was very little straightforward simple writing being
done, either in America or in England. The stuffed buckram of
Johnsonese had been succeeded by the mincing hifalutin of Mrs. Anne
Radcliffe and her like. It is at least to Irving's credit that his
taste led him back half a century to the comparative simplicity and
purity of the prim Augustan style. But it is odd that it should have
been for this acquired manner that the world thought it liked him
while he lived, and has chiefly praised him since he died.
But after all, as was said of Milton in a different connection, Irving
has worn "the garb, but not the clothes, of the ancients." His kinship
to them in temper of thought and feeling was closer than his
resemblance in manner. Like Addison and Goldsmith, he wins his
audience through sheer charm of personality. To open one of his books
is like meeting a congenial stranger. You like his looks at first
glance, you feel somehow that he likes yours; and while you may be
hesitating about advances, he is at your side, and there is nothing
more to be said. You do not care whether he is American or English,
you are not particular what he talks about, but you do not willingly
part with him.
The charm of creative genius is less the charm of mind than of
feeling. And it is to feeling refined and colored by temperament, that
the more delicate modes of belles-lettres owe their whole power. That
is, a writer in this sort is admirable as he subdues language and
subordinates thought to his own temper, not as he gives elegant
utterance to thought or feeling in their abstracted and general
estate. Through a surface artificiality of style, which is far more
marked in his earliest work, and from which at times he quite escapes,
Irving's personality shines clearly. He has so employed a conventional
medium as to make it serve his original purposes. He possessed, to be
sure, a faculty of strong vernacular speech, which is little suggested
in his to-be-published writing, or even in his private letters. The
Oregon embroilment had led certain British journals into gross speech
about America. Irving was much disturbed. What he wrote was, "A
rancorous prejudice against us has been diligently inculcated of late
years by the British press, and it is daily producing its fruits of
bitterness." What he said was: "Bulwer,"--then English minister to
Spain,--"I should deplore exceedingly a war with England, for depend
upon it, if we must come to blows, it will be serious work for both.
You might break our head at first, but by Heaven! we would break your
back in the end!"
But one need not write in the vernacular to be sincere and effective;
personality may utter itself through different media, whether in
different tongues or in distinct strata of the same tongue. Just now
we have a bent toward colloquialism on paper; it was not the bent of
Irving's day.
As far as the external features of his style are concerned, he has had
praise enough, and more than enough. Clearness, ease, a certain Gallic
grace it has; the ink flows readily, the thing says itself without
crabbedness or constraint. On the other hand this ready writer is
often conventional; a set phrase contents him, why should he labor to
escape the usual formula? He knew nothing of the struggle or the
reward of the artist in words, who wrestles for the exact _nuance_,
and will not let a sentence go till he has obtained its blessing.
Consequently he is never finicking in his phraseology, and seldom
final. The subtle artfulness of Stevenson is beyond him; but he has a
rarer quality--that subtler artlessness which has belonged in some
measure to all the greater writers of sentiment. It is a quality
independent of the mechanics of writing; whether the author echoes the
syntax of Addison or the diction of Goldsmith is an indifferent
question. All that we know is that, through his use of words or in
spite of it, a new melody has come into being, a golden _motif_ which
is to ring in the world's ears nobody knows how long.
It seems idle to say of such a man that because he does not concern
himself with "the mystery of existence," and "the solemn eternities,"
he has nothing to say. Surely the simple-souled artist may leave such
matters for the philosophers and theologians to deal with. Surely his
"message" is as significant as theirs. Irving is admirable not mainly
because he "wrote beautifully," but because he said something which
no one else could say: he uttered the most meaning of all
messages--himself. And if literature is really a criticism of life,
such a message from such a man has, it would seem, dignity enough.
Evidently Irving, like Goldsmith and Oliver Wendell Holmes, owed his
amazing influence largely to his cheerful and wholesome
this-worldliness. He was a sentimentalist, but obviously different in
spirit from the two great English writers of sentiment who were most
nearly his contemporaries. Thackeray is sophisticated; fortune's
buffets have left him still a tender interest in life, but pity rather
than hopefulness gives color to his mood. Dickens's sentiment seldom
rings perfectly true; too often it is sharped to flippancy, or flatted
to mawkishness. The tone of Irving, in sentiment or in humor, is the
clear and even utterance of a healthy nature. It was a period of
sickly sentimentalism in which he began to write; men drew tears
frequently and mechanically then, as they drew corks. The
sentimentalist passed easily from broad mirth to unwinking pathos.
Fortunately that weakest mood of sentiment without humor came seldom
to Irving; he wrote only one "History of Margaret Nicholson."
It was his nature to be achingly considerate of others, so that he was
a better friend than critic; and he was as careful of their good
opinion as of their comfort. Always doubtful what treatment his work
would meet, and even what it deserved, he would ask his friends to say
nothing about it, unless they liked it. "One condemning whisper," said
one of them, "sounded louder in his ear than the plaudits of
thousands." Socially, on the other hand, he never had the least doubt
of himself. The tastes and manner of a gentleman did not need to be
acquired; there was no question of his fitness for any society. During
his whole career, thrown as he was into the choicest company of two
continents, there was evidently not the least suspicion of
embarrassment or awkwardness in his quiet bearing.
He was in the largest sense of the word a generous man; and even in
the smaller sense his generosity has distinction and significance.
Addison we know to have been a little on the hither side of
open-handedness. Goldsmith was by his own satirical confession the
"good-natured man," to whom giving was a conscious indulgence. Irving
was simply not aware that he gave; to share his best was a natural
function. And it is our sense of this, of being admitted as a matter
of course to share in all that he is and has, which largely explains
his delightfulness as man and author.
Citizen of the world as he was in his literary character, in practical
life his Americanism was real and potent. He deplored the War of 1812
and the war with Mexico, but believed firmly that it was no man's duty
to go back of the government's decision. In the conduct of his mission
to Spain he showed the utmost steadiness, loyalty, and self-possession
in many trying situations. He was, in short, a valuable citizen, to
whom honors came unsought, and who, out of office, and not desirous of
political power, was trusted by all parties, and tempted by none. The
mere existence of such a figure, calm, simple, incorruptible, honored
wherever he was known, and known prominently throughout Europe, was a
valuable stay to the young republic in that purgatorial first half of
the nineteenth century.
One fact about him will perhaps bear emphasis; that with all his
gentlenesses he was strong and firm and full of spirit. He was
susceptible to advice, yet nobody ever forced him to do a thing that
was against his mind or conscience. That he was amiable, congenial,
companionable--we do not forget these traits of his; we should
remember, too, that he never faced an emergency to which he did not
prove himself equal. His personal hold upon his contemporaries was
plainly due to the fact that their confidence in him as a man was as
perfect as their delight in him as an artist. What he did was, after
all, only a little part of what he was.
* * * * *