One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs Elysées when he
said: “There is a new coon—a literary coon—come to town. He is a
Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson.” Then he told me of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was
living in a kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we
known this we could have ended the poor fellow’s struggle with his
pride and ambition then and there; have put him in the way of sure work
and plenty of it; perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened,
his days, unless it be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he
may easily be conceived to have been from reading his wayward biography
and voluminous correspondence.
To a young Kentuckian, one of “my boys,” was given the opportunity to
see the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had
taken himself for the final adventure and where he died, having
attained some measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope,
happy in the consciousness of the achievement.
I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-day
fictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing.
Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreign
recognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America
were still burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the
English, and was accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style
from Addison and Goldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he
went to Spain and in the same deft way he pictured the then unknown
byways of the land of dreams; and coming home again he peopled the
region of the Hudson with the beings of legend and fancy which are dear
to us.
He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of
our literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, “Who reads an
American book?” As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple
and vivid writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably
always be read; but as an originator literary history will hardly place
him very high. There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the
Argonauts as works of creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington
Irving alike in wealth of color and humor, in pathos and dramatic
action.
Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But
they have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not
the rather attenuated story of Irving, which—as far as the twenty years
of sleep went—was borrowed from an old German legend.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with
Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark
Twain did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider
reach than Irving’s. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the
suspicion either of insincerity or of artificiality. Irving’s humor was
the humor of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is
old English. Mark Twain’s is his own—American through and through to
the bone. I am not unmindful of Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of
Lowell and of Poe, but speak of Irving as the pioneer American man of
letters, and of Mark Twain and Bret Harte as American literature’s most
conspicuous and original modern examples.