Forty years ago, upon a pleasant afternoon, you might have seen tripping
with an elastic step along Broadway, in New York, a figure which even
then would have been called quaint. It was a man of about sixty-six or
sixty-seven years old, of a rather solid frame, wearing a Talma, as a
short cloak of the time was called, that hung from the shoulders, and
low shoes, neatly tied, which were observable at a time when boots were
generally worn. The head was slightly declined to one side, the face was
smoothly shaven, and the eyes twinkled with kindly humor and shrewdness.
There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in the whole appearance,
an undeniable Dutch aspect, which, in the streets of New Amsterdam,
irresistibly recalled Diedrich Knickerbocker. The observer might easily
have supposed that he saw some later descendant of the renowned Wouter
Van Twiller refined into a nineteenth-century gentleman. The occasional
start of interest as the figure was recognized by some one in the
passing throng, the respectful bow, and the sudden turn to scan him more
closely, indicated that he was not unknown. Indeed, he was the American
of his time universally known. This modest and kindly man was the
creator of Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle. He was the father
of our literature, and at that time its patriarch. He was Washington
Irving.
At the same time you might have seen another man, of slight figure and
rustic aspect, with an air of seriousness, if not severity, moving with
the crowd, but with something remote and reserved in his air, as if in
the city he bore with him another atmosphere, and were still secluded
among solitary hills. In the bright and busy street of the city which
was always cosmopolitan, and in which there lingers a tradition,
constantly renewed, of good-natured banter of the losel Yankee, this
figure passed like the grave genius of New England. By a little play of
fancy the first figure might have seemed the smiling spirit of genial
cheerfulness and humor, of kindly sympathy even with the foibles and
weaknesses of poor human nature; and the other the mentor of its earnest
endeavor and serious duty. For he was the first of our poets, whose
"Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among the primeval forests
of his native hills, and who, in his last years, sat at the door of his
early home and looked across the valley of the Westfield to the
little town of Plainfield upon the wooded heights beyond, whose chief
distinction is that there he wrote the "Waterfowl"; for this graver
figure was the poet Bryant.
If in the same walk you had passed those two figures, you would have
seen not only the first of our famous prose writers and the first of our
acknowledged poets, but also the representatives of the two fundamental
and distinctive qualities of our American literature, as of all
literature--its grave, reflective, earnest character, and its sportive,
genial, and humorous genius.
At the time of which I speak another figure also was familiar in
Broadway, but less generally recognized as it passed than either of the
others, although, perhaps, even more widely known to fame than they.
This was Cooper, who gave us so many of the heroes of our childhood's
delight, but who at this time was himself the hero of innumerable
lawsuits, undertaken to chastise the press for what he believed to be
unjust and libelous comments upon himself. Now that the uproar of that
litigation is silent, and its occasion forgotten, it seems comical that
a man for whom fame had already rendered a favorable judgment should
be busily seeking the opinion of local courts upon transitory newspaper
opinions of him-self and his writings. It is as if Dickens, when the
whole English-reading world--judges on the bench and bishops in their
studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables--were all
laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the _Eatanswill Gazette_ for
calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin
one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the
chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits
to vindicate himself, and who cares? When Cooper died there was a great
commemorative meeting in New York. Daniel Webster presided, and praised
the storyteller; Bryant read a discourse upon him, while Irving sat by
his side. One of the triumvirate of our early literature was gone, and
two remained to foresee their own future in the honors paid to him.
Indeed, it was to see them, quite as much as to hear of their dead
comrade, that the multitude assembled that evening; and the one who was
seen with the most interest was Irving, the one in whom the city of New
York naturally feels a peculiar right and pride, as the most renowned of
her children.
If I say that he made personally the same impression that his works
make, you can easily see the man. As you read the story of his life you
feel its constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary
man and a man of society--a life without events, or only the events
of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In
place of it there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be
seventy-six years old. At twenty-six he was engaged to a beautiful girl,
who died. He never married; but after his death, in a little box of
which he always kept the key, was found the miniature of a lovely girl,
and with it a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper on which was
written the name Matilda Hoffman, with some pages upon which the writing
was long since faded. That fair face Irving kept all his life in a more
secret and sacred shrine. It looks out, now and then, with unchanged
loveliness from some pensive passage, which he seems to write with
wistful melancholy of remembrance. That fond and immortal presence
constantly renewed the gentle humanity, the tenderness of feeling, the
sweet healthfulness and generous sympathy which never failed in his life
and writings.
He was born in the city of New York in 1783, the year in which the
Revolution ended in the acknowledgment of American independence. The
British army marched out of the city, and the American army, with
Washington at the head, marched in. "The patriot's work is ended just as
my boy is born," said the patriotic mother, "and the boy shall be named
Washington". Six years later, when Washington returned to New York to be
inaugurated President, he was one day going into a shop when the boy's
Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate
and said to him, "Please your honor, here's a bairn was named for you".
The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his
hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer.
The name of no other American has been so curiously confused with
Washington's as that of Irving. Many a young fellow puzzles over the
connection which the name seems vaguely to imply, and in other lands the
identity of the men is confounded. When Irving first went to Europe, a
very young man, well-educated, courteous, with great geniality of manner
and charm of conversation, he was received by Prince Torlonia, the
banker, in Rome, with unusual and flattering civility. His travelling
companion, who had been treated by the prince with entire indifference,
was perplexed at the warmth of Irving's welcome. Irving laughingly said
that it only proved the prince's remarkable discrimination. But the
young travellers laughed still more when the prince unconsciously
revealed the secret of his attentions by taking his guest aside, and
asking him how nearly he was related to General Washington.
Many years afterwards, when he had become famous, an English lady and
her daughter paused in an Italian gallery before a bust of Washington.
"And who was Washington, mamma?" asked the daughter. "Why, my dear, I am
surprised at your ignorance," answered the mother, "he was the author of
the _Sketch Book_." Long ago in Berlin I was talking with some American
friends one evening at a café, and observed a German intently listening
to our conversation as if trying his ability to understand the language.
Presently he said to me, politely, "You are English, no?" But when
I replied "No, we are Americans"--"Americans!" he exclaimed
enthusiastically, grasping my hand and shaking it warmly, "Americans,
ach! we all know your great General Washington Irving."
Irving's father was a Presbyterian deacon, in whose heart the sterner
traditions of the Covenanters lingered. He tried hard to teach his son
to contemn amusement, and to impale his youth upon the five points of
Calvinism, rather than to play ball. But it was John Knox trying to curb
the tricksy Ariel. Perhaps from some bright maternal ancestor the boy
had derived his sweet gayety of nature which nothing could repress.
His airy spirits bubbled like a sunny fountain in that somewhat arid
household. He read at ten a translation of the _Orlando Furioso_, and
his father's yard, doubtless trim and well kept as beseemed a deacon's
yard, became at once a field of chivalry. Candles were forbidden him in
his chamber, but when he made the acquaintance of _Robinson Crusoe_
and _Sindbad the Sailor_, he secreted lights to illuminate his innocent
revels with those immortal playmates.
The amusements which were permitted were of too depressing a character
to be tolerated by the healthy boy, who, like the duck taking to the
water from under the wing of the astonished hen, sometimes escaped from
the serious house at night by dropping from a window, and with a delight
that must have torn his father's heart with anguish had he known it,
tasted the forbidden fruit of the theatre. It was a Presbyterian boy
who tasted it then; but in the same city many years afterwards it was a
Quaker boy whom I knew who was also enamoured of the play. "John," said
his grieved father, "is this dreadful thing true that I hear of thee?
Has thee ever been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?" "Yes,
father," answered the heroic John. "I hope thee has not been more than
once, John," said the afflicted father. "Yes, father," replied John,
resolved to make a clean breast of his sins, "more than thirty times."
It is useless to try to prevent blue-birds from flying in the spring.
The blithe creatures made to soar and sing will not be restrained.
The same kind Providence that made Calvin made Shakespeare. The sun
is higher than the clouds, and smiles are as heaven-born as tears. In
Emerson's poem the squirrel says to the mountain:
"You're not so small as I,
And not half so spry;
* * * * *
"If I cannot carry forests on my back
Neither can you crack a nut."
It was in vain to try to thwart the young Irving's genius. Yet the
boy who a little later was to light with rosy cheer the air which, as
Wendell Phillips said, was still black with sermons; who was to give to
our literature its first distinctly humorous strain, and innocently to
amuse the world, was somehow or other, as he said, "taught to feel that
everything pleasant was wicked".
If that were so, what a sinner Washington Irving was! If to make life
easier by making it pleasanter, if to outwit trouble by gay banter,
if with satire that smiles but never stings to correct foibles and to
quicken good impulses; if to deepen and strengthen human sympathy, is
not to be a human benefactor, what makes one? When Dr. Johnson said of
Garrick that his death eclipsed the gayety of nations, he did not mean
merely that the player would no longer make men laugh, but that he
could no longer make them better. "If, however," said Irving--and Willis
selected the words for the motto of his second volume of verse published
in 1827--"I can by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one
wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment
of sadness; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of
misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my
reader more in good-humor with his fellow-beings and himself, surely,
surely I shall not then have written entirely in vain."
That cannot be said to have been the spirit of any American author
before Irving. Our colonial literature was mainly political and
theological. You have only to return to the early New England days in
the stories of Hawthorne, the magician who restores with a shuddering
spell that old, sombre life, to understand the character of its reading.
The books that were not treatises upon special topics all seemed to say
with one of the grim bards of Calvinism:
"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead."
Literature, in its proper sense, there was none. There was no
imaginative creation, no play of fancy and humor, no subtle charm of the
ideal life, no grace and delight of expression, which are essential to
literature. The perpetual twilight and chill of the New England Puritan
world were an arctic winter in which no flower of poesy bloomed and
no bird sang. One of the French players who came to this country with
Rachel says, in his journal, with a startled air, as if he had remarked
in Americans a universal touch of lunacy, that he was invited to take a
pleasure-drive to Greenwood Cemetery. Evidently he was not familiar with
Froissart's epigram nor with the annals of the Puritan fathers, or he
would have known that their favorite pleasure-ground was the graveyard.
Judge Sewell's Journal, the best picture of daily New England life in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a portrait framed in black
and hung with thick crape. It is a register of funerals--a book which
seems to require a suit of sables for its proper reading.
The early Christians dwelt so often and so long in the catacombs that
when they emerged, accustomed to associate life with the tomb, they
doubtless regarded the whole world as a cemetery. The American Puritans
inherited the disposition from their early confessors, and so powerful
was the tendency that it laid its sombre spirit upon the earliest
enduring poem in our literature, and the fresh and smiling nature of the
new world was first depicted by our literary art as a tomb:
"The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty; and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man."
"Thanatopsis" is the swan-song of Puritanism. Indeed, when New England
Puritanism could sing, as for the first time it did in the verse of
Bryant, the great change was accomplished. Out of strength had come
forth sweetness. I am not decrying the Puritans. They were the stern
builders of the modern world, the unconscious heralds of wider liberty,
and a kindlier future for mankind. But
"God works in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform,"
and never more mysteriously than when he chose as the pioneers of
religious liberty in the New World those who hung Quakers, and as the
founders of civil equality those who permitted only members of their own
Church to vote.
Irving was not a studious boy. He did not go to college. He read some
law at sixteen, but he read much more literature, and sauntered in the
country about New York with his gun and fishing-rod. He sailed up the
Hudson, and explored for the first time the realm that was presently to
be his forever by the right of eminent domain of the imagination. New
York was a snug little city in those days. At the beginning of the
century it was all below the present City Hall, and the young fellow,
who was born a cosmopolitan, greatly enjoyed the charms of the modest
society in which the Dutch and the English circles were still somewhat
separated, and in which such literary cultivation as there was was
necessarily foreign. But while he enjoyed he observed, and his literary
instinct began to stir.
Under the name of "Jonathan Oldstyle", the young Irving printed in his
brother's newspaper essays in the style of the _Spectator_, discussing
topics of the town, and the modest theatre in John Street and its chance
actors, as if it had been Drury Lane with Garrick and Mrs. Siddons. The
little town kindly smiled upon the lively efforts of the Presbyterian
deacon's son; and its welcome of his small essays, the provincial echo
of the famous Queen Anne's men in London, is a touching revelation of
our scant and spare native literary talent. The essays are forgotten
now, but they were enough to bring Charles Brockden Brown to find the
young author, and to tempt him, but in vain, to write for _The Literary
Magazine and American Register_, which the novelist was just beginning
in Philadelphia, a pioneer of American literary magazines, which Brown
sustained for five years.
The youthful Addison of New Amsterdam was a delicate lad, and when he
came of age he sailed for France and the Mediterranean, and passed two
years in travelling. Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor, and at war with
England, and the young American, despite his passport, was everywhere
believed to be an Englishman. Travelling was hard work in those days of
war, but the cheery youth proved the truth of the proverb that a light
heart and a whole pair of breeches go round the world. At Messina, in
Sicily, he saw Nelson's fleet pass through the strait, looking for the
French ships; and before the year ended the famous battle of Trafalgar
had been fought, and at Greenwich in England Irving saw the body of the
great sailor lying in state, wrapped in his flag of victory. At Rome he
made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and almost resolved to be a
painter. In Paris he saw Madame de Staël, who overwhelmed him with eager
questions about his remote and unknown country, and in London he was
enchanted by Mrs. Siddons. Some years afterwards, when the _Sketch Book_
had made him famous, he was presented to Mrs. Siddons, and the great
actress said to him, in her deepest voice and with her stateliest
manner, "You've made me weep." The modest young author was utterly
abashed, and could say nothing. After the publication of his
_Bracebridge_ Hall he was once more presented to her, and again with
gloomy grandeur she said to him, "You've made me weep again." This time
Irving received the solemn salute with more composure, and doubtless
retorted with a compliment magnificent enough even for the sovereign
Queen of Tragedy, who, as her niece Mrs. Fanny Kemble said of her, never
laid aside her great manner, and at the dinner-table brandished her fork
and stabbed the potatoes.
Irving returned from this tour with established health--a refined,
agreeable, exceedingly handsome and charming gentleman; with a confirmed
taste for society, and a delightful store of interesting recollection
and anecdote. With a group of cultivated and lively friends of his own
age he dined and supped and enjoyed the town, and a little anecdote
which he was fond of telling shows that the good old times were not
unlike the good new times: One morning, after a gay dinner, Irving met
one of his fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way home, after
draining the parting bumper, he had fallen through a grating in the
sidewalk, which had been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath.
It was impossible to climb out, and at first the solitude was rather
dismal, he said; but several of the other guests fell in, in the course
of the evening, and, on the whole, they had quite a pleasant time of it.
In the midst of this frolicking life, and growing out of it, Irving's
real literary career began. With his brother William, and his friend
James K. Paulding, who afterwards wrote the _Dutchman's Fireside_, and
was one of the recognized American authors of fifty years ago, he issued
every fortnight a periodical, which ran for twenty numbers, and stopped
in the midst of its success. It was modelled upon the _Spectator_ and
Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, describing and criticising the
manners and morals of the town with extravagant humor and pungency,
and a rollicking independence which must have been both startling and
stimulating.
Perhaps, also, the town was secretly pleased to discover that it was
sufficiently important to be worthy of such bright raillery and humorous
reproof. _Salmagundi_ was only a lively _jeu d'esprit_, and Irving was
never proud of it. "I know," said Paulding, writing to him in later
life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope,
belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless,
Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for
flight. _Salmagundi_ undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and
cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our
earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at
a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, Irving
and his brother began the _History of New York_, which was originally
designed to be a parody of a particular book. But the work was
interrupted by the business difficulties of the brother, and at last
Irving resumed it alone, recast it entirely, and as he finished it the
engagement with Matilda Hoffman ended with her death, and the long arid
secret romance of his life began.
Knickerbocker's _History_ was published just before Christmas, 1809,
and made a merry Christmas for our grandfathers and grandmothers eighty
years ago. The fun began before the book was published. In October the
curiosity of the town of eighty thousand inhabitants was awakened by
a series of skilful paragraphs in the _Evening Post_. The art of
advertising was never more ingeniously illustrated. Mr. Fulkerson
himself would have paid homage to the artist. One day the quid-nuncs
found this paragraph in the paper, It was headed,
"DISTRESSING.
"Left his lodgings, some time since, and has not since been heard
of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and
cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons
for believing that he is not entirely in his right mind, and, as
great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning
him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the
office of this paper, will be thankfully received.
"P. S.--Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity
by giving an insertion to the above.
"_October 25th._"
This was followed within a fortnight by another ingenious lure:
"_To the Editor of the Evening Post:_
"Sir,--Having read in your paper of the 26th October last a paragraph
respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was
missing from his lodgings, if it would be any relief to his friends,
or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform
them that a person answering the description was seen by the passengers
of the Albany stage early in the morning, about four or five weeks ago,
resting himself by the side of the road, a little above Kingsbridge.
He had in his hands a small bundle, tied in a red bandana handkerchief.
He appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and
exhausted.
"_November 6._ A Traveller."
Ten days after came a letter signed by Seth Handaside, landlord of the
Independent Handaside:
"Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street.
"Sir,--You have been kind enough to publish in your paper a paragraph
about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely from his
lodgings some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard from the
old gentleman since, but a very curious written Book has been found in
his room in his own handwriting. Now, I wish you to notice him, if he
is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill for
board and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his Book to satisfy me
for the same."
This is very simple jesting, but at that time it was very effective in
a town that enjoyed the high spirits of _Salmagundi_. Moreover, the book
which was announced in this lively strain was as unprecedented as the
announcement. It was a very serious time and country, and the work of
the small elderly gentleman who carried a little bundle tied in a
red bandana handkerchief appeared in the midst of the sober and dry
effusions of our Puritan literature, and of an eager and energetic life
still engrossed with the subjection of a continent and the establishment
of a new nation. It was the work of a young man of twenty-six, who lived
fifty years afterwards with constantly increasing fame, making many
and admirable contributions to literature. But nothing that followed
surpassed the joyous brilliancy and gay felicity of his first book,
which was at once acknowledged as the wittiest book that America had
produced.
Knickerbocker's _History_ is a prolonged and elaborate and audacious
burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of
the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more
ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave
ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful
light of blameless fun. To pass the vague and venerable traditions of
the austere and heroic founders of the city through the alembic of
a youth's hilarious creative humor, and to turn them out in forms
resistlessly grotesque, but with their identity unimpaired, was a stroke
as daring as it was successful. But the skill and power with which this
is done can be best appreciated by those who are most familiar with the
history which the gleeful genius burlesques.
Irving follows the actual story closely, and the characters that
he develops faithfully, although with rollicking caricature, are
historical. Indeed, the fidelity is so absolute that the fiction is
welded with the fact. The days of the Dutch ascendency in New York are
inextricably associated with this ludicrous narrative. It is impossible
not to think of the forefathers of New Amsterdam as Knickerbocker
describes them. The Wouter Van Twiller, the Wilhemus Kieft, the Peter
Stuyvesant, who are familiarly and popularly known, are not themselves,
but the figures drawn by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In comical despair,
the historian Grahame, whose _Colonial History_ is still among the
best, says of Knickerbocker: "If Sancho Panza had been a real governor,
misrepresented by the wit of Cervantes, his future historian would have
found it no easy matter to bespeak a grave attention to the annals of
his administration."
The gayety of this blithe genius bursting in upon our staid literature
is irresistible. Irving's temperament, his travels, his humor, gave him
a cosmopolitan point of view; and his little native city, with its local
sense of importance, and its droll aristocratic traditions springing
from Dutch burgomasters and traders, impressed his merry genius like
a complacent Cranford or Tarascon taking itself with a provincial
seriousness, which, to his sympathetic fancy, was an exhaustless
fountain of fun. Part of the fun to us, and perhaps to Irving, was the
indignation with which it was received by the descendants of the Dutch
families in the city and State. The excited drawing-rooms denounced
it as scandalous satire and ridicule. Even Irving's friend, Gulian
Verplanck, nine years afterwards, deepening the comedy of his remark by
his evident unconsciousness of the drollery of his gravity, grieved that
the author's exuberance of genuine humor should be wasted on a coarse
caricature. Irving, who was then in Europe, saw Verplanck's strictures
just as he had written _Rip Van Winkle_, and he wrote to a friend at
home that he could not help laughing at Verplanck's outburst of filial
feeling for his ancestors, adding, in the true Knickerbocker vein,
"Remember me heartily to him, and tell him that I mean to grow wiser
and better and older every day, and to lay the castigation he has given
seriously to heart."
The success of Knickerbocker's _History_ was immediate, and it was the
first American work of literature which arrested attention in Europe.
Sir Walter Scott, who was then the most famous of English poets, and was
about to publish the first of the Waverley Novels, was delighted with a
humor which he thought recalled Swift's, and a sentiment that seemed
to him as tender as Sterne's. He wrote a generous acknowledgment to
the American friend who had sent him the book, and in later years he
welcomed Diedrich Knickerbocker at Abbotsford, and the American has
given a charming and vivid picture of Scott's home and its master.
But the success of his book did not at once determine Irving's choice
of a career. He was still a gilded youth who enjoyed the gay idleness of
society, and who found in writing only another and pleasant recreation.
He had been bred in the conservative tradition which looked upon
livelihood by literature as the deliberate choice of Grub Street, and
the wretchedness of Goldsmith as the necessary and natural fate of
authors; but it is droll that, although he recoiled from the uncertainty
of support by literary labor, he was willing to try the very doubtful
chances of office-holding as a means of securing leisure for literary
pursuits. He offered himself as a candidate for appointment as the clerk
of a court in the city. By tradition and sympathy he was a Federalist,
but he had taken no active part in politics, and his chance was slight.
He went to Albany, however, and in a lively letter he paints a familiar
picture of the crowd of office-hunters who, he says, "like a cloud of
locusts, have descended upon the city to devour every plant and herb and
every green thing." He was sick with a cold, and stifled in rooms heated
by stoves, and was utterly disgusted, as he says, "by the servility
and duplicity and rascality I have witnessed among the swarms of scrub
politicians who crawl about the great metropolis of our State like so
many vermin about the head of the body politic."
Again the good old times were apparently very much like the good new
times. Thirty-nine years after Irving's discomfiture in trying to get a
public office, Hawthorne was turned out of one that he held, and wrote
to a friend: "It seems to me that an inoffensive man of letters, having
obtained a pitiful little office on no other plea than his pitiful
little literature, ought not to be left at the mercy of these
thick-skulled and no-hearted ruffians." The language is strong, but the
epithets are singularly well-chosen. The distinctive qualities of the
ringleaders, whether of high or low degree, in the degradation of public
trusts into private and party spoils, have never been more accurately
or effectively described than by the words "thick-skulled" and
"no-hearted".
The story of the sturdy beggar who asked General Jackson to give him the
mission to France, and finally came down to a request for an old coat,
well illustrates a system which regards public office not as a public
trust, but as private alms. The service of the State, whether military
or civil, is an object of high and generous ambition, because it
involves the leadership of men. But if Irving and Hawthorne thought
that what is called office-seeking is disgusting, it was not because
the public service is not noble and dignified, but because we choose to
allow it to be so often dependent, not upon fitness and character,
but upon the personal or political favor of the "thick-skulled" and
"no-hearted".
But the problem of a career was soon solved. In the year 1810 Irving
formed a business connection with two of his brothers, and the next five
years were passed in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, forming
various literary plans, looking out for his business interests,
sparkling in society; and when war with England began, serving upon the
governor's military staff as Colonel Washington Irving. In the spring
of 1815 he sailed to roam again through Europe, but the illness of his
brother compelled him to remain in England in charge of the business.
"London," as a shrewd and celebrated American recently said, "was then
as it is now, the social centre of the world." Irving saw famous men and
women, and his charming sweetness and humor opened all doors and hearts.
But the business fell into distress, then into disaster, and in the
beginning of 1818 the house failed. He was now thrown wholly upon his
literary resources, which did _not_ fail, and in the spring of 1819,
when he was thirty-six years old, the first number of the _Sketch Book_
was issued in New York.
The merry, exuberant, satirical Diedrich Knickerbocker was transformed
into the genial, urbane, and tender-hearted Geoffrey Crayon. Our fathers
and grandfathers knew him well. They had been bred upon Addison and
Goldsmith, the essayists and the poets of the eighteenth century, and
in Geoffrey Crayon they recognized and welcomed another member of that
delightful literary society. He was all the more welcome that he was an
American--one of themselves. The bland and courteous Geoffrey, indeed,
had few rivals among his countrymen. In our little American world of
letters at that time he came and conquered. Bryant's "Thanatopsis", had
been published only two years before; Halleck's and Drake's lively but
strictly local "Croakers" were still appearing, and Edward Everett had
just hailed Percival's first volume as authorizing great expectations.
But prophecy is always dangerous. The year before, Sydney Smith had
said, in the _Edinburgh Review_, "Literature the Americans have none--no
native literature we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin,
indeed, and may afford to live half a century on his fame. There is,
or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal name was
Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia by Jefferson, and
an epic poem by Mr. Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr.
Irving. But why should Americans write books, when a six weeks' passage
brings them, in their own tongue, _our_ sense, science, and genius, on
bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills are their natural
objects for centuries to come. Then, when they have got to the Pacific
Ocean, epic poems, plays, pleasures of memory, and all the elegant
gratifications of an ancient people who have tamed the wild earth,
and sat down to amuse themselves. This is the natural march of human
affairs." As the sarcastic Yorkshire canon, sitting on the Edinburgh
Olympus, wiped his pen, the _Sketch Book_ was published. The good canon
was right as to our small literary product, but even an _Edinburgh
Review_ could not wisely play the prophet.
This Mr. Everett also discovered, for his "great expectations" of
Percival were not fulfilled. A desponding student of our poetry recently
sighs that Percival is a forgotten poet, and then, seizing a promiscuous
assortment of names, exclaims that Charles Sprague, William Wirt,
Washington Irving, and Jack Downing may be referred to as forgotten
authors. But this is the luxury of woe. Why should not Percival be a
forgotten poet? That is to say, what is there in the verse of Percival
that should command interest and attention to-day? He was a remarkably
accomplished man and a most excellent gentleman, and his name is very
familiar in the reading-books of the time when grandfathers of to-day
were going to school. But he was a noted poet not because he took rank
with his contemporaries--with Byron and Scott and Keats and Shelley and
Coleridge and Wordsworth--but because there were very few Americans who
wrote verses, and our fathers patriotically stood by them.
Yet because the note of a singer of another day is not heard by us, it
does not follow that he did not touch the heart of his time. Grenville
Mellen is a forgotten poet also, and Rufus Dawes and John Neal and James
G. Eastburn. If the gentle reader will turn to the pages of Kettell,
or any early American anthology, he will seem to himself to be walking
among tombs. Upon each page might be suitably inscribed, "Sacred to the
memory" of almost every one of the singers. But can we say with honest
reproach, "forgotten poets"? The loiterer in the wood hears the song
of the wood-thrush, but is the hermit-bird wronged, or is his song less
sweet, because it is not echoed round the world? Is Fame to be held
responsible for not retaining the name of every minstrel who loiters by
and touches his harp lightly, and sings a sweet song as he passes on? Is
it a hard fate to give pleasure to those who listen because those out of
hearing do not applaud?
Many an author may have a tone and a touch which please the ear and
taste of his own day, and which, as characteristic of a time, may be
only curious to a later taste, like the costumes and dances of our
great-grandmothers. But young America, sauntering at the club and at
Newport, would not willingly wear the boots of Beau Nash, nor even the
cloak of Beau Brummel. The law which provides that nothing shall be
lost is equally observable in the realm of literary fame. Is anything of
literature lost that deserves longer remembrance? or, more properly, can
it be lost? A fair answer to the question can be found in the reply to
another, whether delving in Kettell, or in any other anthology, reveals
treasures dropped by Fame as precious as those she carries.
There are two ways in which authors survive: one by the constant reading
of his works, the other by his name. Is Milton a forgotten author? But
how much is he read, compared with the contemporary singers? Is Plato
forgotten? Yet how many know him except by name? Irving thus far holds
both. Time, like a thrifty husbandman, winnows its wheat, blowing away
much chaff, but the golden grain remains. This is true not only of the
whole multitude of authors, but of the works of each author. How many
of them really survive in the anthology only? _Astoria_ and _Captain
Bonneville_ and _Mahomet_ and other books of Irving will disappear; but
_Knickerbocker_ and _Rip Van Winkle_ still buffet the relentless wave of
oblivion, and their buoyancy is undiminished.
As for Sprague--a mild, genial, charming gentleman, who carried his
simple freshness of nature and of manner to the end, and about whose
venerable head in State Street always shone the faint halo of early
poetic renown--his literary talent was essentially for a day, not for
all time. But what then? On Christmas Eve we hear the passing music
in the street that supplies for us the song of the waits. Distant and
melodious, it pensively recalls the days and the faces and the voices
that are no more. But the singers are not the same waits that we heard
long ago; still less are they those that the youth of a century ago
heard with the same musing melancholy. But the substance of the
song, and the emotion which it awakens, and the tender pathos of
association--these are all the same. Sprague was a wait of yesterday, of
last year, of fifty years ago. Others sing in the street the song that
he sang, and, singing, they pass on, and the sweet strain grows fainter,
softer, and fainter and fainter, and the echoes answer, "Dying, dying,
dying," and it is gone.
See how tenderly Mr. Stedman speaks of the troubadours who are singing
for us now, whose names are familiar, who trill and twitter in the
magazines, and in tasteful and delicate volumes, which seem to tempt
the stream of time to suffer such light and graceful barks to slip along
unnoted to future ages. But the kindly critic's tone forecasts the fate
of the sparkling ventures.
Moore tells us of the Indian maids upon the banks of the Ganges who
light a tiny taper, and, on a frail little chip, set it afloat upon the
river. It twinkles and dwindles, and flashes and expires. Mr. Stedman
watches the minor poets trimming their tapers and carefully launching
their chips upon the brimming river. "Pleasant journey," he cries
cheerily from the shore, as if he were speaking to hearty Captain Cook
going up the side of his great ship, and shaking out his mighty canvas
to circumnavigate the globe. "Pleasant journey," cries the cheery
critic; but there is a wistful something in his tone that betrays a
consciousness of the swift extinction of the pretty perfumed flickering
flame.
So scant, indeed, was the blossom of our literature when the _Sketch
Book_ was published, that even twenty years later, when Emerson
described the college Commencement Day as the only tribute of a
country too busy to give to letters any more, Geoffrey Crayon, with the
exception of Cooper, had really no American competitors. Long afterwards
I met Mr. Irving one morning at the office of Mr. Putnam, his publisher,
and in his cordial way, with a twinkle in his eye, and in his pleasant
husky voice, he said, "You young literary fellows to-day have a harder
time than we old fellows had. You trip over each other's heels; there
are so many of you. We had it all our own way. But the account is
square, for you can make as much by a lecture as we made by a book."
Then, laughing slyly, he added, "A pretty figure I should make lecturing
in this voice." Indeed, his modesty forbade him to risk that voice in
public addresses.
Irving, I think, made but one speech. It was at the dinner given to
him upon his return from Europe in 1832, after his absence of seventeen
years. Like other distinguished Americans who have felt the fascination
of the old home of their ancestors, and who have not thought that a
narrow heart and a barbaric disdain of everything foreign attested the
truest patriotism, he was suspected of some alienation from his country.
His speech was full of emotion, and his protestation of love for his
native land was received with boundless acclamation. But he could not
overcome his aversion to speech-making. When Dickens came, and the great
dinner was given to him in New York, Irving was predestined to preside.
Nobody else could be even mentioned. He was himself conscious of it, and
was filled with melancholy forebodings. Professor Felton, of Harvard,
compared Irving's haunting terror and dismay at the prospect of this
speech to that of Mr. Pickwick at the prospect of leading that dreadful
horse all day.
Poor Irving went about muttering, "I shall certainly break down. I know
I shall break down." At last the day, the hour, and the very moment
itself arrived, and he rose to propose the health of Dickens. He began
pleasantly and smoothly in two or three sentences, then hesitated,
stammered, smiled, and stopped; tried in vain to begin again, then
gracefully gave it up, announced the toast--"Charles Dickens, the
guest of the nation"--then sank into his chair amid immense applause,
whispering to his neighbor, "There, I told you I should break down, and
I've done it."
When Thackeray came, Irving consented to preside at a dinner if speeches
were absolutely forbidden. The condition was faithfully observed, but it
was the most extraordinary instance of American self-command on record.
Whenever two or three Americans are gathered together, somebody must
make a speech; and no wonder, because somebody always speaks so well.
The custom is now so confirmed that it is foolish and useless to oppose
it.
I remember a few years since that a dinner was given to a famous
American artist long resident abroad, and, as the condition of the
attendance of a distinguished guest whose presence was greatly desired,
the same agreement was made that Irving required at the Thackeray
dinner. It was a company of exceedingly clever and brilliant men, but
the gayety of the feast was extinguished by the general consciousness
that the situation was abnormal. It was a fruit without flavor, a flower
without fragrance, a symphony without melody, a dinner without speeches.
But the dinner of which I speak, when the condition of Irving's presence
was that there should be no speeches, was the great exception. It was
the only dinner of the kind that I have ever known. But Irving's cheery
anecdote and gayety, the songs and banter of the company, the happy chat
and sparkling wit, took the place of eloquence, and I recall no dinner
more delightful.
However scant was our literature when the _Sketch Book_ appeared, it is
a mistake to suppose that Irving owes his success to English admiration.
That was, undoubtedly, very agreeable to him and to his countrymen. But
it is well to correct a misapprehension which is still cherished. Many
years ago an English critic said that Irving was much more relished
and admired in England than in his own country, and added: "It is only
recently critics on the lookout for a literature have elevated him
to his proper and almost more than his proper place. This docility to
English guidance in the case of their best, or almost their best, prose
writer, may perhaps be followed by a similar docility in the case of
their best, or almost their best, poet, Poe, whom also England had
preceded the United States in recognizing." This comical patron is all
the more amusing from his comparative estimate of Poe.
If it were true that Irving's countrymen had not recognized and honored
him from the first, it might be suspected that it was because they were
descendants of the people who showed little contemporaneous appreciation
of Shakespeare. But it is certainly creditable to the literary England
which was busy idolizing Scott and Byron, that it recognized also the
charming genius of Irving, and that Leslie, the painter, could truly
write of him, "Geoffrey Crayon is the most fashionable fellow of the
day."
But while the English appreciation of Irving is very creditable to
England, English conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was
that appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the time
when Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted there
was apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and
the professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor
Lounsbury says in his admirable _Life of Cooper_, undoubtedly greatly
affected by English opinion. But there was an American reading public
independent of the few literary periodicals, as was shown when Cooper's
_Spy_ was published at the end of 1821, the year in which Bryant's first
volume of poems and Dana's _Idle Man_ appeared. Cooper had published
his _Precaution_ in 1819, a book which Professor Lounsbury is one of the
very few men who are known to have read. He was an unknown author. But
the _Spy_ was instantly successful. Some of the timid English journals
awaited the English opinion, for Murray had declined, upon Gifford's
advice, to publish the book. But a publisher was found, and England
and Europe followed America in their approval. Cooper always said,
and truly, that it was to his countrymen alone that he owed his first
success, and his biographer concedes that the success of the _Spy_ was
determined before the opinion of Europe was known.
Nearly three years before, in May, 1819, the first number of Irving's
_Sketch Book_ was published. He sent the manuscript to his brother, who
had regretted Irving's refusal of a government place in the Navy Board,
and to whom he wrote, "My talents are merely literary, and all my habits
of thinking, reading, etc., have been in a different direction from that
required for the active politician.... In fact, I consider myself at
present as making a literary experiment, in the course of which I only
care to be kept in bread and cheese. Should it not succeed--should my
writings not acquire critical applause--I am content to throw up the
pen, and that to any commonplace employment. But if they should succeed,
it would repay me for a world of care and privation to be placed among
the established authors of my country, and to win the affection of my
countrymen."
The first number of the _Sketch Book_ was published simultaneously
in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its success was
immediate. In September, 1819, Irving wrote: "The manner in which the
work has been received, and the eulogiums that have been passed upon it
in the American papers and periodical works, have quite overwhelmed me
... I feel almost appalled by such success." The echo of the acclamation
reached England. Murray at first declined to publish it, as he had at
first declined Cooper's _Spy_. But when England ascertained that the
American judgment was correct, and that it was a popular work, Murray
was willing to publish it.
The delightful genius which his country had recognized with joy it never
ceased proudly and tenderly to honor. When, in 1832, he returned to his
native land, as his latest biographer, Mr. Warner, records, "America
greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love
and admiration." It was in his own country that he had published his
works. It was his own countrymen whose applause apprised England of the
charm of the new author; and it is a humorous mentor who now teaches us
that it was our happy docility to English guidance which enabled us to
recognize and honor him.
Was it docility to the same beneficent guidance which enabled us to
perceive the genius of Carlyle, whose works we first collected, and
taught England to read and admire? Did it enable us, also, to inform
England that in Robert Browning she had another poet? Was it the
same docility which enabled us to reveal to England one of her most
philosophic observers in Herbert Spencer, and to offer to Darwin his
most appreciative correspondents and interpreters in Chauncey Wright,
John Fiske, and Professors Gray and Wyman? There are many offences to
be scored against us, but failure to know our own literary genius is not
one of them.
Indeed, there is not one great literary fame in America that was not
first recognized here. Not to one of them has docility to English
literary opinion conducted us, as is often believed. Bryant and Cooper
and Irving, Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, Emerson and Channing,
Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes were authors whom
we were content to admire and love without knowing or asking whether
England had heard of them, or what she thought of them. The "greatness"
of Poe England may have preceded us in recognizing. That is an assertion
which we are not disposed to dispute. But Walter Scott was not more
immediately popular and beloved in England than was Washington Irving
in America; and American guidance led England to Scott quite as much as
English guidance drew America to Irving.
The first number of the _Sketch Book_ contained the tale of _Rip Van
Winkle_, one of the most charming and suggestive of legends, whose hero
is an exceedingly pathetic creation. It is, indeed, a mere sketch, a
hint, a suggestion; but the imagination readily completes it. It is the
more remarkable and interesting because, although the first American
literary creation, it is not in the least characteristic of American
life, but, on the contrary, is a quiet and delicate satire upon it. The
kindly vagabond asserts the charm of loitering idleness in the sweet
leisure of woods and fields against the characteristic American
excitement of the overflowing crowd and crushing competition of the
city, its tremendous energy and incessant devotion to money-getting.
It is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or to justify the morality of
his example. It is the imagination that interprets him; and how soothing
to those who give their lives to the furious accumulation of the means
of living to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or finding nuts
with the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset! Later figures of
our literature allure us--Hester Prynne, wrapped in her cloak of Nersus,
the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline, Uncle Tom, and Topsy--but
the charm of this figure is unfading. The new writers introduce us to
their worlds, and with pleasure we make the acquaintance of new friends.
The new standards of another literary spirit are raised, a fresh
literary impulse surrounds us; but it is not thunder that we hear in
the Kaatskills on a still summer afternoon it is the distant game of
Hendrick Hudson and his men; and on the shore of our river, rattling
and roaring with the frenzied haste and endless activity of prosperous
industry, still Rip Van Winkle lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of
the imagination, the constant and unconscious satirist of American life.
He seems to me peculiarly congenial with the temperament of Irving. He,
too, was essentially a loiterer. He had the same freshness of sympathy,
the same gentleness of nature, the same taste for leisure and repose.
His genius was reminiscent, and, as with all humorists, its climate
was that of April. The sun and the shower chased each other. Irving's
intellectual habit was emotional rather than thoughtful. In politics
and public affairs he took no part, although office was often urged
upon him, as when the friends of General Jackson wished him to go as
representative to Congress, or President Van Buren offered him the
secretaryship of the navy, or Tammany Hall, in New York, unanimously and
vociferously nominated him for mayor, an incident in the later annals
of the city which transcends the most humorous touch in _Knickerbocker's
History_. He was appointed secretary of legation in England in 1829, and
in 1842, when Daniel Webster was secretary of state, minister to Spain.
But what we call practical politics was always distasteful to him. The
spirit which I once heard laugh at a young man new in politics because
he treated "the boys" with his own good cigars instead of buying bad
ones at the saloon--the spirit which I once heard assure a man of public
ability and fitness that he could never reach political office unless
he pushed himself, and paid agents to buy votes, because no man could
expect an office to be handed to him on a gold plate--the spirit which,
to my knowledge, displayed a handful of bank-notes in the anteroom of
a legislature, and exclaimed, "That's what makes the laws!"--this was a
spirit which, like other honorable men and patriotic Americans, Irving
despised.
He was a gentleman of manly feeling and of moral refinement, who had had
glimpses of what is called "the inside" of politics; and, as he believed
these qualities would make participation in politics uncomfortable, he
abstained. To those of us who are wiser than he, who know that simple
honesty and public spirit and self-respect and contempt of sneaking
and fawning and bribery and crawling are the conditions of political
preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this, must naturally seem to be a
queer, wrong-headed, and rather super-celestial American, who had
lived too much in the heated atmosphere of European aristocracies and
altogether too little in the pure and bracing air of American ward
politics and caucuses and conventions. To use an old New York phrase,
Irving preferred to stroll and fish and chat with Rip Van Winkle rather
than to "run wid der machine".
The _Sketch Book_ made Irving famous, and with its predecessor,
_Knickerbocker_, and its successor, _Bracebridge Hall_, disclosed the
essential quality of his genius. But all these books performed another
and greater service than that of winning the world to read an American
book: this was the restoration of a kindlier feeling between the two
countries which, by all ties, should be the two most friendly countries
on the globe. The books were written when our old bitterness of feeling
against England had been renewed by the later war. In the thirty years
since the Revolution ended we had patriotically fostered the quarrel
with John Bull. Our domestic politics had turned largely upon that
feeling, and the game of French and English was played almost as
fiercely upon our side of the ocean as upon their own.
The great epoch of our extraordinary material development and prosperity
had not opened, and, even had John Bull been friendlier than he was, it
would have been the very flattery of falsehood had he complimented our
literature, our science, our art. Sydney Smith's question, "Who reads
an American book?" was contemptuous and exasperating. But here was an
American who wrote books which John Bull was delighted to read, and
was compelled to confess that they depicted-the most characteristic and
attractive aspects of his own life with more delicate grace than that of
any living Englishman.
It was Irving who recalled the old English Christmas. It was his cordial
and picturesque description of the great holiday of Christendom which
preceded and stimulated Dickens's _Christmas Carols_ and Thackeray's
_Holiday Tales_. It was the genial spirit of Christmas, native to his
gentle heart and his happy temperament, which made Irving, as Thackeray
called him, a peacemaker between the mother-country and her proud and
sensitive offspring of the West. He showed John Bull that England is
ours as well as his.
"Old fellow," he said, "you cannot help yourself. It is the same blood
that flows in our veins, the same language that we speak, the same
traditions that we cherish. If you love liberty, so do we; if you will
see fair play, so will we. It is natural to you, so it is to us. We
cannot escape our blood. Shakespeare is not your poet more than ours.
If your ancestors danced round the Maypole, so did our ancestors in your
ancestors' shoes. If Old England cherished Christmas and New England did
not, Bradford and Endicott and Cotton were Englishmen, not Americans. If
old English life and customs and traditions are dear to you, listen
to my story, and judge whether they are less dear to us." Then, with
a merry smile, the young stranger holds out his hand to John Bull, and
exclaims, "Behold, here is my arm! I bare it before your eyes, and here
it is--it is the strawberry-mark; come to my bosom, I am your long-lost
brother."
It was an incalculable service which Irving rendered in renewing a
common feeling between England and America. It was involuntary, because
in writing he had no such purpose. He was only following the bent of his
own taste, and his works reflected only his individual sympathies. But
it was this very fact--it was the English instinct in the American, the
appreciation native in the heart of the Western stranger of the true
poetic charm of England--which was the spell of the magician. Irving had
the same imaginative enthusiasm for traditional and poetic England that
Burke had for political England. Indeed, it is an England which never
actually existed except in the English and American imagination. The
coarse, mercenary, material England which Lecky photographs in his
history of the eighteenth century was the same England in which Burke
lived, and which his glowing imagination exalted into the magnificent
image of constitutional liberty before which he bowed his great head. So
with the old England that Irving drew. He saw with poetic fancy a
rural Arcadia, and reproduced the vision with airy grace and called it
England. No wonder that John Bull was delighted with an artist who could
paint so fascinating a picture, and write under it John Bull's portrait.