The Easy Chair recently spoke of the statue of Longfellow which has been
erected in the city of Portland, where he was born, and "Charter Oak,"
writing from Connecticut, asks why there is as yet no statue of
Washington Irving in Central Park, the beautiful sylvan resort of his
native city of New York. It is a question which the Easy Chair has
already asked, and which must constantly suggest itself in the spacious
public grounds which are becoming the most comprehensive of Walhallas.
The London _Times_ calls Westminster Abbey "our Walhalla," meaning that
of England only. But the pleasure-ground of New York is truly a
Pantheon. It is dedicated to all the gods except its own. With unwonted
metropolitan modesty the city honors especially those who are not
children of New York.
Webster is there, but not John Jay; Shakespeare and Scott and Burns and
Dante and Halleck even, but not Irving. It is grotesque that a space set
apart in New York for recreation, and decorated with marbles and bronzes
commemorating illustrious men, and among them authors and statesmen,
should still lack a fitting memorial of the greatest statesman and the
greatest author who were born in the city. Webster's famous panegyric of
Jay, that when the ermine of the Chief-Justiceship fell upon his
shoulders it touched nothing that was not as pure as itself, suggests
that a statue of John Jay might be of peculiar service as an object of
admonitory meditation in the bowery seclusion of a city that more
recently contemplated a statue to Tweed. In Couture's picture of the
"Decadence of the Romans," behind the luxurious and voluptuous groups of
intoxicated revellers in the foreground stand in sad severity the
statues of the elder Romans surveying the scene. In the lofty aspect of
Jay, filling with calm dignity the seclusion of some winding walk, would
there be felt amazement and reproof? Is it to escape the sculptured
rebuke of contrast with the civic heroes of to-day that it is not seen,
and that the eye of the student who reflects that the city of New York
has contributed few very great names to our history seeks in vain the
statue of John Jay in Central Park?
Irving has every claim to this especial distinction. It is his kindly
genius which made the annals of New Amsterdam the first work of our
creative literature, and which invested the great river of New York with
imperishable romance. Undoubtedly he wrote those annals in characters of
rollicking fun, and even over the heroism of the doughty Peter
Stuyvesant he has cast a humorous halo. But not all our authors combined
are so identified with New York as Irving. His earlier squib of
"Salmagundi" treats "the town" with an arch memory of the Spectator
loitering in London, and his spell was such that in a later day Dennett,
in the _Nation_, happily nicknamed the work of the talent which he had
quickened the Knickerbocker literature.
The same genius in a tenderer mood colored the shores of the Hudson with
the softest hues of legend. The banks at Tarrytown stretching backward
to Sleepy Hollow, the broad water of the Tappan Zee, the airy heights of
the summer Katskill, were mere landscape, pleasing scenery only, until
Irving suffused them with the rosy light of story, and gave them the
human association which is the crowning charm of landscape. In many a
scene a hundred mountain ranges survey the lower land far reaching to
the ocean. The scene is grand, but nameless, bare of tradition, and
forgotten. But where
"The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea,"
the eye and the heart are enchanted with the story of Greece and its
heroic human associations.
In the first century of our literature, which is ending, very few of our
authors have laid this legendary spell upon American scenes as Irving
did upon the Hudson. They have not much endeared the country to the
popular imagination, like Burns and Scott in Scotland, where every hill
and stream and bird and flower is reflected individually and fondly in
tale and song. The Easy Chair once met at Niagara a young Scotchman who
had come straight from his native land, and at every turn and glimpse
upon Goat Island and along the banks of the river he fairly bubbled and
murmured with the music of Burns and the other poets about Scottish
streams and scenes, of which he was reminded at every step. So in his
"Poems of Places" Longfellow reveals the charm which literature imparts
to scenery--a charm which he illustrates in his "Nuremberg" and "Belfry
at Bruges," and in his "Lost Youth," with its beautiful pictures of
Portland, a poem which probably gives to a larger number of persons a
more distinct and pleasing interest in that delightful city than
anything else connected with it.
Irving is the magician who has cast this glamour upon New York, the
roaring mart of trade, the humming hive of industry. He shows us in
these crowded and hurried streets the leisurely forms of old Dutch
burghers, their comely wives and buxom daughters, and their tranquil
existence. Upon this very spot, which thus becomes a palimpsest, one
life over-writing another, he awakens a romantic interest which gives it
an endless fascination. He is thus a universal benefactor.
His Rip Van Winkle, indolent but kindly vagabond that he is, asserts the
charm of a loitering life in the woods and fields, against all the
tremendous energy and lucrative devotion to dollars, the overpowering
crowd and crushing competition, of the whirring emporium. It is not
necessary to defend poor Rip, or justify him as a moral exemplar. Pax,
good Zeal-in-the-land Busy! But how soothing, as we mop our brows in the
ardent struggle, and waste our lives in the furious accumulation of the
means of living, to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or
pleasing the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset! Other figures
allure us, but still he holds his place. The new writers create their
worlds. The new standards, another literary spirit, a fresh impulse,
appear all around us. But still Rip Van Winkle lounges idly by, an
unwasted figure of the imagination, the first distinct creation of our
literature, the constant, unconscious satirist of our life.
The edicts of Fortune are caprices. Halleck, who sang of Marco Bozzaris,
has his statue in the Park. Bryant still awaits his, and Irving, first
of all, is without his memorial. The Germans have justly honored
Humboldt in our Walhalla, the Scotch have commemorated Burns, the
Italians have given to it Mazzini. The Puritan Pilgrim, ancestor of
distinctive America, New England in bronze, is properly there. But
where, asked the thoughtful child, reading the epitaphs in the
graveyard, where be the bad people buried? Those whom the statues recall
are all well and wisely honored in this most cosmopolitan of countries
and of cities. But where, amid Germans and Italians and Scotchmen and
great New-Englanders--where be the New-Yorkers?