By PROF. WALLACE BRUCE.
The record of Washington Irving rests like a ray of sunlight upon the
pages of our early history. Born in 1783, at the close of the great
struggle for independence, his life of seventy-six years circles
a period of growth and material progress, the pages of which this
centennial generation has just been turning. And perhaps it is not
unfitting to consider at this time the life and services of our
sweetest writer, the best representative of our earliest culture. On
the other hand, I am well aware that the great mass of mankind are
absorbed in business, and like the Athenian of old continually asking
for something new; that the initials of our nation were long ago
condensed into a plain monogram of dollars, and this our nineteenth
century represented and symbolized by a large interrogation point. We
question the stars, the rocks and our Darwinian ancestors; and we are
thoroughly occupied in looking after our own personal interest and
the prosperity of the republic; yet I may hope that this lecture will
call up some pleasure in the hearts of those who read and re-read the
writings of Washington Irving, and will help to renew your acquaintance
with the incidents of his life, and perhaps awaken the attention of
some who are asking what to read—the one question which more than any
other decides their individual happiness and the education of the
rising generation. It is my purpose this afternoon to consider his
writings, his associations and his life; and I take up his works in the
order in which they were written, as in this way we trace the natural
development of the writer and the man.
“Knickerbocker,” his earliest work, written at the age of twenty-six,
bears the same relation to his later work as “Pickwick,” the first
heir of Dickens’ invention, to his novels that followed; and there
is another point of similarity in the fact that “Knickerbocker” and
“Pickwick” both outgrew the original design of the authors. Neither
Dickens nor Irving had any idea of the character of the work he
was proposing. The philosophical and benevolent Pickwick, you will
remember, was barely rescued from being the head of a holiday hunting
club; and the idea of “Knickerbocker,” at least at first, was simply to
parody a small hand-book which had recently appeared under the title of
“A Picture of New York.” Following this plan, a humorous description
of the early governors of New York was intended merely as a preface to
the customs and institutions of the city; but, like Buckle’s “History
of Civilization,” the introduction became the body of the book, and all
idea of a parody was early and happily abandoned. The “Rise and Fall of
the Dutch Nation along the Hudson,” presented a subject of unity, and
gave Irving an opportunity to depict the representative of a race whose
customs were fast passing away. The serio-comic nature of the work is
intensified by notices in the New York _Post_ calling attention to
the mysterious disappearance of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Never was any
volume more happily introduced. Before we turn a single page we have an
idea of the veritable writer. The description of Knickerbocker makes
him rise before us; we become interested in the mystery that surrounds
him. In fact, the charm of the book is in the simple reality or assumed
personality of Diedrich Knickerbocker. The portrait of Don Quixote
starting out to redress the wrongs of the world is not more clearly
drawn than that of the historian of New Amsterdam, with his silver shoe
buckles and cocked hat and quaint costume. But there is this difference
in the mind of the reader: in the great satire of Cervantes there is
an element of sadness. We see a crazed old man wandering out in quest
of adventure, exciting our pity, almost excusing the paradox of Lord
Byron: the saddest of all tales, and more sad still because it makes
us laugh. Here there is only a mild sort of insanity about the old
gentleman, with his books and papers and various employments, which
touches our humor, without exciting our sympathy. By the way, the books
of humor which we have here associated with each other belong to the
same form, are second cousins of one another, and ought to stand upon
the same shelf of our libraries.
Some of the Holland families are reported to have taken the work in
high dudgeon, as a rash innovation of the domain of history; and I
believe one of the gentler sex, who perhaps had no lover to fight
a duel or no brother to take her part, proposed herself with her
own hands to horsewhip the offensive writer for his bold attempt at
spelling and printing for the first time some of the old family names.
From to-day’s standpoint these things seem ludicrous and uncalled
for in reference to a work abounding in kindly humor everywhere,
accepted as the finest blending of the classic and the comic in all
literature; and were it not that these early enemies soon became his
warmest friends, I should pass it over in silence. The transition
was so sudden and severe that it is one of the pleasantest in his
history. In later years Irving thus refers to “Knickerbocker”: “When
I find, after the lapse of forty years this haphazard production of
my youth cherished among the descendants of the Dutch worthies; when
I find its very name become a household word, and used to give the
home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptance; when I
see rising around me Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance
companies, omnibuses, steamboats, bread, ice, wagons; and when I find
New Yorkers of Dutch descent priding themselves upon being genuine
Knickerbocker stock, I please myself with the persuasion that I have
struck the right chord, that my dealings with the good old Dutch times
and customs derived from them are right in harmony with the beliefs
and humors of our townsmen, that I have opened up a vein of pleasing
associations equally characteristic and peculiar to my native place,
and which its inhabitants will not willingly suffer to pass away; and
that although other histories of New York may appear of higher claim to
learned acceptance, and may take their appropriate and dignified rank
in the family library, Knickerbocker’s history will still be received
with good-humored intelligence.” It was, indeed, wide from the sober
aim of history; but no volume ever gave such rose-tinted colors to the
early annals of any country, and New York instead of being covered with
ridicule, is to-day the only city of this Union whose early history
is associated with the golden age of poetry, with antiquity extending
back into the regions of doubt and fable; and it is safe to say that
the streams of Scotland are no more indebted to the genius of Robert
Burns and Walter Scott than the Hudson and the Catskills to the pen of
Washington Irving. [Applause.]
[At this point the lecturer gave some illustrations of Irving’s style;
his rendering of them being, as usual, all that could be desired.]
In this his first volume we would naturally look for his
characteristics as a writer, and we find a rich fund of humor and
invention; but here and there are gentle touches and the promise of
other qualities, to which Walter Scott refers in a letter to one of his
friends. He says: “I have never read anything so closely resembling the
style of Dean Swift, as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I think,
too, there are some passages which indicate that the author possesses
powers of a different kind, and he has some touches which remind me of
Sterne.”
The prophecy of Scott waited ten years for its fulfillment, but it
came at last in the most charming collection of essays in our language,
the “Sketch-Book,” which I divide into essays of character and
sentiment, English pictures and American legends. The “Broken Heart”
is perhaps the greatest favorite of his character sketches, and at the
same time a transcript of his early experience. In the short space of
six pages he portrays the qualities of woman’s nature, and illustrates
it with the touching story of Curran’s daughter, whose heart was buried
in the coffin of Robert Emmet. This essay was suggested by a friend
who had met the heroine at a masquerade. The name and the time of its
writing were closely associated with Moore’s familiar poem:
“She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
She sings the wild songs of her dear native plains,
Every note which he loved awaking;
Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the minstrel is breaking.”
In the whole range of English literature I know of no pen except
Irving’s which could have written an essay like this in plain and
simple prose. We find the same tender sentiment in Burns’ “Highland
Mary,” and Poe’s “Annabel Lee;” but poetry is the natural language of
passion and sorrow. Irving has often been likened to Addison, but in
this particular they have nothing in common. Edward Everett has well
said: One chord in the human heart, the pathetic, for whose weird
music Addison had no ear, Irving touched with the hand of a master.
He learned that in the school of early disappointment; and in the
following passages we seem to hear its sad but sweet vibration, still
responding through years of sorrow to the memory of her whose hopes
were entwined with his: “There are some strokes of calamity, which
scathe and scorch the soul, which penetrate to the vital seat of
happiness, and blast it never to put forth bud and blossom; and let
those tell her agony who have had the portals of the tomb suddenly
closed between them and the being they most loved on earth, who have
sat at its threshold as one shut out in the cold and lonely world,
whence all that was most lovely and loving had departed.”
It is said that when Lord Byron was dying at Missolonghi, he required
an attendant to read to him the “Broken Heart,” and while the attendant
was reading one of the most tender portions the poet’s eyes moistened,
and he said: “Irving never wrote that story without weeping, and I can
not hear it without tears.” He added: “I have not wept much in this
world, for trouble never brings tears to my eyes; but I always had
tears for the ‘Broken Heart.’”
Kindred to this, I select “The Wife” as a true picture of woman’s
power in adversity. As the story goes, his friend Leslie had married a
beautiful and accomplished girl, and having an ample fortune, it was
his ambition that her life should be a fairy tale. Having embarked in
speculation, his riches took to themselves wings and flew away, leaving
him in bankruptcy. For a time he kept his situation to himself, but
every look revealed his story; and at last he told all to his wife. We
see her rising from a state of childish dependence, and becoming the
support and comfort of her husband in his misfortune. Following them
from a mansion to a cottage, we feel that the last state of that man is
better than the first; in the knowledge and possession of such a heart
he had truer riches than diamonds can symbolize. [Applause.] To the
credit of our better nature, the words of Irving are true: “There is in
every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant
in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and blazes
in the dark hour of adversity. No man knows what the wife of his bosom
is, what a ministering angel she is, until he has gone with her through
the fiery trials of this world.” Outside the dramas of Shakspere and
the pages of Walter Scott, I know of no such pictures of graceful
womanhood as we find in these sketches.
Another quality no less marked than his humor and pathos we see in his
reverence and love for antiquity, which forms a marked feature in the
English pictures. In his “Rural Life” and “Christmas Sketches” we see
his love for the old English writers, and that Chaucer and Spenser were
his favorite authors. “To my mind these early poets are something more
than wells of English undefiled. They are rather like the lakes of the
Adirondacks, separated from each other and from us by events which loom
up like mountains in the world’s history; clear and cool in far off
solitudes, reflecting in their bright mirrors the serenity of earth and
the broad expanse of heaven, responding to the gentle glow of summer
sunset, holding quiet communion with the evening stars and awakening
rosy life at the first touch of morn.... The old English ballads have
all the energy, the rhythm and sparkle of our mountain streams, but
Chaucer and Spenser and Shakspere and Bunyan are the fountains from
which flows a river, ay, the Hudson of our English language.” With
this deep love for the masters of English literature, we are not
surprised that Westminster Abbey, with its poets’ corner, should be the
subject of one of his earliest essays; and the principal feature of
this essay, that which makes it the enduring one of all that have been
written upon this venerable pile, is its truth and sincerity. It is,
indeed, pleasant, in these days of irreverence; when flippant writing
is received for wit and mis-spelled slang accepted for originality;
when popular literature is running into low levels of life and luxury
and the vices and follies of mankind; when modern poets take their cue
from the heathen Chinee and find rhyme and rhythm in subdued oaths
and significant dashes; when even home ballads are infected with the
speech, if not the morality of Jim Bludsoe; in these days of scoffing
at all things temporal and spiritual; when it seems as if belief had
gone out of man: we turn with satisfaction to these essays, in which
we see the nobility of a loyal heart, and feel that truth and goodness
and beauty, the offspring of God, are not subject to the changes which
upset the invention of man. [Applause.] I make no quotation from this
familiar essay; it possesses too much unity to detach a paragraph or a
sentence. I can only say I read it over and over again with the same
interest to-day as years ago in the deep shade of that melancholy aisle
at the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots.
There is one other place in England where I took my pocket edition
of the “Sketch-Book”—to Stratford-on-Avon, for, more than any other
man, Irving is associated with the world’s greatest poet. Writers
without number, and many of them well known to fame, have given their
impressions of Stratford-on-Avon, but Irving’s description supersedes
them all. In this companionship of Shakspere and Irving we see the
enduring qualities of the human heart. In the deep sympathy of Irving
for the olden time, we feel that he has added another charm to
Stratford, and that we as a nation have a better claim to the great
poet.
In Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which I
take as illustrations of his “American Legends,” we see that he is
one of the few writers who recognize the fact that comedy is quite as
natural as tragedy. At the time this essay was written we understand
that Irving had never visited the Catskill Mountains; but there is this
feature about all his essays or stories: wherever he locates them, they
seem at once to take root and flourish. This story is too well known,
through the genius of Jefferson on the stage, and Rogers in the studio,
to need delineation. The old Dutch village, with its philosophers and
sages, the sorely-tried Gretchen, the shiftless, good-natured Van
Winkle, the adventure on the mountains, the return—it all passes before
our minds like a series of pictures; and we come to the closing scene,
which the play-writer and dramatist would have done well to follow, for
there is more dramatic unity in the story which Irving left us than in
the drama.
I must pass over to-night “Bracebridge Hall,” the “History of
Columbus,” the “History of Washington,” the “Alhambra,” and many more,
which, as we think of them, rise up before us like a new vision of the
“Arabian Nights” in our literature; and in order to read them and get
the full beauty of Irving’s works, we must read them in connection with
his “Life and Letters,” published by his nephew, Peor Irving, in which
we see the whole history of the man pass before us, from the time when
the boy of twenty went through the northern wilderness of New York,
until the time when, a man of seventy, he again stood on the banks of
the St. Lawrence, and in a letter to his niece called up the changes of
fifty years.
[After referring to the changes Irving had lived to see take place, the
speaker made the following allusion to Chautauqua:]
Think of Mr. Miller when he ten years ago laid out the site of the
first humble cottage in this grove; and if he had slept from that time
until now, he would be more than Rip Van Winkle, could he look in
to-night upon this Auditorium. [Applause.]