II

WASHINGTON IRVING

THE name of Washington Irving reminds us rather startlingly how short is the real history of American letters. Although he has been dead for a little more than forty years, many people still remember him personally; and when in 1842 he went as President Tyler's minister to Spain, he passed through an England where Queen Victoria had already been five years on the throne, and he presented his credentials to Queen Isabella II., who, although long exiled from her country, is still a not very old lady in Paris. Yet in one sense this Irving, who has not yet faded from living memory, may be called, more certainly than Brockden Brown, the first American. man of letters. At least, he was the first whose work has remained popular; and the first, too, who was born after the Revolution had made native Americans no longer British subjects but citizens of the United States. His parents, to be sure, were foreign, his father Scotch, his mother English; but he himself was born in New York in 1783. He was not very strong; his early habits were rather desultory and his education irregular; he studied law and was admitted to the bar, but never practised much; and at the age of twenty-one he was sent abroad for his health. There he remained two years.

His distinctly American character first becomes salient during this trip abroad, at that time an unusual experience. He was of simple origin; his family were in respectable trade. Born in England, he might have been as accomplished and agreeable as he ever became, but he could hardly have

been received on equal terms by the polite society of Europe. Going abroad, as an American citizen, however, he took from the beginning a social position there which he maintained to the end. He was cordially received by people of rank, and incidentally had little to do with those of the station which would have been his had his family never emigrated to this side of the Atlantic. He was among the first, in short, of that distinguished body of Americans, of whom later examples are such men as Ticknor, Everett, Sumner, Motley, and Lowell, who have proved during the nineteenth century the social dignity of American letters.

In 1806, Irving returned home; the next year, in company with one or two kinsmen, he began writing a series of essays called the "Salmagundi Papers." Only his subsequent eminence has preserved from blameless oblivion these conventional survivals of the eighteenth century. About this time occurred an episode which deeply influenced his whole life: he fell in love with a young girl whose death at seventeen almost broke his heart. When she died he was at her bedside; and throughout his later life he could not bear to hear her name mentioned. The tender melancholy which one recognises all through his writings was probably due to this bereavement; and the intense simplicity and faithfulness of his pure and ideal love is characteristic not only of the man but of his country.

In 1809 he published his first considerable book, the "Knickerbocker History of New York." Shortly thereafter he devoted himself to business; and in 1815 he went abroad in connection with his affairs. There, after a few years, commercial misfortune overtook him. In 1819 he brought out his "Sketch Book;" from that time forth he was a professional man of letters. He remained abroad until 1832, spending the years between 1826 and 1829 in Spain, and those between 1829 and 1832 as Secretary to the American Legation in London. Coming home, he resided for ten years

at Tarrytown on the Hudson, in that house "Sunnyside which has become associated with his name. From 1842 to 1846 he was Minister to Spain. He then finally returned home, crowning his literary work with his "Life of Washington," of which the last volume appeared in the year of his death, 1859.

Irving was the first American man of letters to attract wide attention abroad. The "Knickerbocker History" was favourably received by contemporary England; and the "Sketch Book" and "Bracebridge Hall," which followed it, were from the beginning what they have remained, as popular in England as they have been in his native country. The same, on the whole, is true of his writings about Spain; and, to somewhat slighter degree, of his "Life of Goldsmith" and his "Life of Washington." The four general classes of work here mentioned followed one another in fairly distinct succession through his half-century of literary life. We may perhaps get our clearest notion of him by considering them

in turn.

The "Knickerbocker History of New York" has properly lasted. The origin of this book resembles that of Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" some seventy years before, and of Dickens's "Pickwick Papers" some twenty-five years later. All three began as burlesques and ended as independent works of fiction, retaining of their origin little more trace than occasional extravagance. In 1807 one Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill had published "A Picture of New York," said to be ridiculous, even among works of its time, for ponderous pretentiousness. The book had such success, however, that Irving and his brother were moved to write a parody of it. Before long Irving's brother tired of the work, which was left to Irving himself. As he wrote on, his style and purpose underwent a change. Instead of burlesquing Mitchill, he found himself composing a comic history of old New York, and incidentally introducing a good deal of personal and polit

ical satire, now as forgotten as that which lies neglected in "Gulliver's Travels." His style, which began in deliberately ponderous imitation of Dr. Mitchill's, passed almost insensibly into one of considerable freedom, evidently modelled on that of eighteenth-century England. Most of the book, then, reads like some skilful bit of English writing during the generation which preceded the American Revolution. The substance of the book, however, is distinctly different from what was then usual in England.

Assuming throughout the character of Diedrich Knickerbocker, an eccentric old bachelor who typifies the decaying Dutch families of New York, Irving mingles with many actual facts of colonial history all manner of unbridled extravagance. The governors and certain other of his personages are historical; the wars with New Englanders are historical wars; and historical, too, is the profound distaste for Yankee character which Washington Irving needed no assumed personality to feel. But throughout the book there mingles with these historical facts the wildest sort of sportive nonsense. Wouter Van Twiller, to take a casual example, was an authentic Dutch governor of New Amsterdam; and here is the way in which Irving writes about him:

"In his council he presided with great state and solemnity. He sat in a huge chair of solid oak, hewn in the celebrated forest of the Hague, fabricated by an experienced timmerman of Amsterdam, and curiously carved about the arms and feet, into exact imitations of gigantic eagle's claws. Instead of a sceptre he swayed a long Turkish pipe, wrought with jasmin and amber, which had been presented to a stadtholder of Holland, at the conclusion of a treaty with one of the petty Barbary powers. In this stately chair would he sit, and this magnificent pipe would he smoke, shaking his right knee with constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours together upon a little print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black frame against the opposite wall of the council chamber. Nay, it has even been said that when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects — and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was evinced by certain

regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared were merely the noise of conflict, made by his contending doubts and opinions."

More than possibly the chair here mentioned was some real chair which Irving had seen and in which an old Dutch governor might have sat. Conceivably the Turkish pipe may have been at least legendarily true. The rest of the passage is utter extravagance; yet you will be at a little pains to say just where fact passes nonsense.

Though this kind of humour is not unprecedented, one thing about it is worth attention. When we were considering the work of Franklin, we found in his letter to a London newspaper concerning the state of the American colonies a grave mixture of fact and nonsense, remarkably like the American humour of our later days. In Irving's "Knickerbocker History" one finds something very similar. The fun of the thing lies in frequent and often imperceptible lapses from sense to nonsense and back again. Something of the same kind, expressed in a far less gracious manner than Irving's, underlies Mark Twain's comic work and that of our latest journalistic humourist, Mr. Dooley. This deliberate confusion of sense and nonsense, in short, proves generally characteristic of American humour; and although the formal amenity of Irving's style often makes him seem rather an imitator of the eighteenth-century English writers than a native American, one can feel that if the "Knickerbocker History" and Franklin's letter could be reduced to algebraic formula, these formulæ would pretty nearly coincide both with one another and with that of the "Innocents Abroad." The temper of the "Knickerbocker History," may, accordingly, be regarded as freshly American. The style, meanwhile, is rather like that of Goldsmith. When the "Knickerbocker History" was published, Goldsmith had been dead for thirty-five years. In Irving, then, we find a man who used the traditional style of eighteenth-century England for a purpose foreign at once to the century and the country of its origin.