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.