"He nothing common saw or mean
Upon that memorable scene."
Only an American could have seen England as he described it, and
invested it with an enchantment which the mass of Englishmen had
neither suspected nor perceived. Irving's instinct was that of Hawthorne
afterwards, who called England "Our Old Home". There is a foolish
American habit growing patriotically out of our old contentions with
England, and politically out of our desire to conciliate the Irish vote
in this country, of branding as servile and un-American the natural
susceptibility of people of English descent, but natives of another
land, to the charm of their ancestral country. But the American is
greatly to be pitied who thinks to prove the purity of his patriotism by
flouting the land in which he has a legitimate right, the land of Alfred
and Runnymede, of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, of Hampden and
Cromwell, of Newton and Bunyan, of Somers and Chatham and Edmund Burke,
the cradle of constitutional liberty and parliamentary government. If
the great body of the literature of our language in which we delight,
if the sources of our law and politics, if the great exploits of
contemporary scholarship and science, are largely beyond our boundaries,
yet are legitimately ours as well as all that we have ourselves
achieved, why should we spurn any of our just and hereditary share in
the great English traditions of civilization and freedom?
Irving returned to America in 1832, and here he afterwards remained,
except during his absence as minister in Spain. In an earlier visit
to that country he had felt the spell of its romantic history, and
had written the _Life of Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, and the
_Chronicles of the Alhambra_. During all his later years he was busy
with his pen, and, while the modest author had risen to the chief place
in American literature, its later constellation was rising into the
heavens.
But his intrinsic modesty never disappeared either from the works or the
character of the benign writer. In the height of his renown there was no
kind of presumption or conceit in his simple and generous breast. Some
time after his return from his long absence in Europe, and before Putnam
became his publisher, Irving found some disinclination upon the part of
publishers to issue new editions of his books, and he expressed, with
entire good humor, the belief that he had had his day.
It is doubtless true, as _Blackwood_ remarked, with what we may call
_Blackwood_ courtesy, when Mr. Lowell was American minister in England,
that Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and so many more "will
not be replaced by Mr. Washington Irving and Mr. Lowell". But it is
equally true that, since Swift, _Blackwood_ cannot find in English
literature political satire more trenchant, humorous, forcible, and
effective than the _Biglow Papers_, and nothing in Swift more original.
It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip
Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious
"derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning
invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any
just sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny. The tender and
imaginative play of Rip Van Winkle are wholly beyond the reach of Swift.
Irving and other American writers are not the rivals of their British
associates in the literature of the English language--they are worthy
comrades. Wordsworth and Byron are not Shakespeare and Milton, but they
are nevertheless Wordsworth and Byron, and their place is secure. So the
brows of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Longfellow, and of Lowell, of
Emerson and Hawthorne do not crave the laurels of any other master. The
perturbed spirit of _Blackwood_ may rest in the confident assurance that
no generous and intelligent student of our literature admires Gibbon
less because he enjoys Macaulay, or depreciates Bacon because he
delights in Emerson, or denies the sting of Gulliver because he feels
the light touch of Knickerbocker. It is with good fame as with true
love:
"True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away."
In the year that Irving published the _Sketch Book_, Cooper published
his first novel, and two years before Bryant's _Thanatopsis_ had been
published. When, forty years afterwards, in the last year of his life,
the last volume of the _Life of Washington_ was issued, Irving and
Bryant and Cooper were no longer the solitary chiefs of our literature.
An illustrious company had received the torch unextinguished from
their hands--Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell,
Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Mrs. Stowe, had all taken their
places, yet all gladly and proudly acknowledged Irving as the patriarch.
It is our happy fortune that these names, of which we are all proud, are
not those of men of letters only, but of typical American citizens.
The old traditions of the literary life, the mad roystering, the
dissipation, Grub Street, the sponging-house, the bailiff, the garret,
and the jail, genius that fawns for place and flatters for hire, the
golden talent wrapped in a napkin, and often a dirty and ragged
napkin, have vanished in our American annals of letters. Pure, upright,
faithful, industrious, honorable, and honored, there is scarcely one
American author of eminence who may not be counted as a good and
useful citizen of the Republic of the Union, and a shining light of the
Republic of Letters.
Of Washington Irving, as of so many of this noble company, it is
especially true that the author was the man. The healthy fun and merry
satire of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the sweet humor and quick sympathy
and simple pathos of Geoffrey Crayon, were those of the modest master
of Sunnyside. Every literary man of Irving's time, whether old or
young, had nothing but affectionate praise of his artless urbanity and
exhaustless good-nature. These qualities are delightfully reflected in
Thackeray's stories of him in the _Roundabout Papers_ upon Irving and
Macaulay, "the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time".
"He came to one of my lectures in Washington," Thackeray says, "and the
retiring President, Mr. Fillmore, and his successor, Mr. Pierce, were
present. 'Two kings of Brentford smelling at one rose,' said Irving,
with his good-natured smile. In his little bower of a home at Sunnyside
he was always accessible. One English newspaper man came and introduced
himself, and partook of luncheon with the family, and, while the host
fell into a little doze, as was his habit, the wary Englishman took
a swift inventory of everything in the house, and served up the
description to the British public, including the nap of his entertainer.
At another time, Irving said, 'Two persons came to me, and one held me
in conversation while the other miscreant took my portrait.'" Thackeray
tells these little stories with admiring sympathy. His manly heart
always grew tender over his fellow-authors who had no acrid drop in
their humor, and Irving's was as sweet as dew.
It is late for a fresh compliment to be paid to him, but the London
_Spectator_ paid it in 1883, the year of his centenary, by saying,
"Since the time of Pope more than one hundred essayists have attempted
to excel or to equal the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_. One alone, in a
few of his best efforts, may be said to have rivalled them, and he is
Washington Irving." The _Spectator_ adds that one has surpassed them,
"the incomparable Elia".
Irving's temperament, however, was much more congenial with that of the
early essayists than Charles Lamb's, and his pictures of English country
life in _Bracebridge Hall_ have just the delicate, imaginative touch
of the sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley. But in treating distinctively
English topics, however airy and vivid his touch may be, Irving is
manifestly enthralled by his admiration for the literary masters of
the Anne time, and by the spirit of their writing. It is in the
Knickerbocker world that he is characteristically at home. Indeed, it is
his humorous and graphic fancy more than the sober veracity of history
which has given popular and perpetual form to the early life of New
York, and it is Irving who has enriched it with romantic tradition such
as suffuses the story of no other State.
The bay, the river, the city, the Kaatskill Mountains, as Choate said
of Faneuil Hall and Webster, breathe and burn of him. He has charmed the
Hudson with a peculiar spell. The quaint life of its old Dutch villages,
the droll legend of Sleepy Hollow, the pathetic fate of Rip Van Winkle,
the drowsy wisdom of Communipaw, the marvellous municipality of New
Amsterdam, and the Nose of Anthony guarding the Highlands, with the
myriad sly and graphic allusions and descriptions strewn all through his
books, have made the river Irving's river, and the state Irving's state,
and the city Irving's city, so that the first instinctive question of
every lover of Irving from beyond the state, as he enters Central Park
and beholds its memorial statues, is, "Where is the statue of Irving?"
Unhappily, echo, and not the park guide-book, answers. There is, indeed,
a bust, and, in a general sense, "Si monumentum" may serve for a reply.
From that point of view, indeed, Westminster Abbey, as the monument of
English heroes in letters and arms, in the Church and the State, would
be superfluous. But the abbey is a shrine of pilgrimage because of the
very fact that it is the burial-place of famous Englishmen. The Central
Park, in New York, is already a Walhalla of famous men, and the statue
that would first suggest itself as peculiarly fitting for the Park is
of the New-Yorker who first made New York distinctively famous in
literature--the New-Yorker whose kindly genius first made American
literature respected by the world.
Reversing the question, "Where be the bad people buried?" the wondering
pilgrim in the Park asks, "Where be Irving and Bryant and Cooper?" They
were not Americans only, but, by birth or choice, New-Yorkers, and the
three distinctive figures of our early literature. It was very touching
to see the venerable Bryant, in the soft May sunshine, when the statue
of Halleck was unveiled, standing with bare head and speaking of his old
friend and comrade. But who that listened could not see, through tender
mists of years, the grave and reverend form of the speaker himself,
transformed to marble or bronze, sitting serene forever beneath the
shadowing trees, side by side with the poet of Faust and the worshipper
of Highland Mary?
But Bryant would have been the first to name Washington Irving as
the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure,
reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should
decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should
open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of
the head and almost the twinkling eye, that brisk and jaunty air, that
springing step, that modest and gentle and benign presence, all these
could be suggested by the artist, and in their happy combination the
pleased loiterer would perceive old Diedrich Knickerbocker and the
summer dreamer of the Hudson legends, the charming biographer of
Columbus and of Goldsmith, the cheerful gossip of Wolfert's Roost, and
the mellow and courteous Geoffrey Crayon, who first taught incredulous
Europe that beyond the sea there were men also, and that at last all the
world must read an American book.
Irving was seventy-six years old when he died, late in 1859. Born in the
year in which the Revolution ended, he died on the eve of the civil war.
His life exactly covered the period during which the American republic
was an experiment. It ended just as the invincible power of free
institutions was to be finally demonstrated. His life had been one of
singular happiness, both of temperament and circumstance. His nature
was too simple and gentle to breed rivalries or to tolerate animosities.
Through the sharpest struggles of our politics he passed without
bitterness of feeling and with universal respect, and his eyes happily
closed before seeing a civil war which, although the most righteous of
all wars, would have broken his heart. The country was proud of him: the
older authors knew in him not a rival, but a friend, the younger loved
him as a father. Such love, I think, is better than fame. On the day of
his burial in the ground overlooking the Hudson and the valley of Sleepy
Hollow, unable to reach Tarrytown in time for the funeral, I came down
the shore of the river which he loved and immortalized. As the train
hastened and wound along, I saw the Catskills draped in autumnal
mist, not concealing, but irradiating them with lingering and pathetic
splendor. Far away towards the south the river-bank on which his home
lay was Sunnyside still, for the sky was cloudless and soft with serene
sunshine. I could not but remember his last words to me, more than a
year before, when his book was finished and his health was failing: "I
am getting ready to go; I am shutting up my doors and windows", and
I could not but feel that they were all open now, and bright with the
light of eternal morning.