TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read W. L. Cross’s “Development of the English Novel” for general characterization of the Gothic romance, and for contemporary reaction against this type of fiction read Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” chaps. i, xx ff.
Brown and his work are so remote from the present that they challenge inevitable comparisons with other authors who preceded, accompanied, or followed him in literary history. For example:
Read “Arthur Mervyn,” Bk. I, for a comparison in handling similar material with Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year” and the entries in Pepys’s Diary on the plague of 1666.
Read “Arthur Mervyn” for a comparison of subject matter, plot, and purpose with Godwin’s “Caleb Williams.”
Read “Edgar Huntly” for a comparison as a detective story with any modern story, as, for example, one of Conan Doyle’s.
Read the great suspense passages in “Wieland” for a comparison with similar passages in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
CHAPTER IX
IRVING AND THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL
The turn to Washington Irving and his chief associates in New York—James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant—is a turn from colonial to national America and from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. This is not to say that what they wrote was utterly and dramatically different from what had been written in the colonial period; yet there are many points of clear distinction to be marked. With them, for one thing, New York City first assumed the literary leadership of the country. It was not a permanent conquest, but it was notable as marking the fact that the new country had a dominating city. As a rule the intellectual and artistic life of a country centers about its capital. Athens, Rome, Paris, London, are places through which the voices of Greece, Italy, France, and England have uttered their messages. These cities have held their preëminence, moreover, because, in addition to being the seats of government, they have been the great commercial centers and usually the great ports of their countries. In the United States, then, the final adoption of Washington in the District of Columbia as the national capital was a compromise step; this could not result in bringing to it the additional distinction which natural conditions gave to New York. Washington has never been more than the city where the national business of government is carried on; locating the center for art and literature has been beyond the control of legislative action. For the first third of the nineteenth century New York was the favored city. Here Irving was born, and here Cooper and Bryant came as young men, rather than to the Philadelphia of Franklin and his contemporaries.
For these men of New York, America was an accomplished fact—a nation slowly and awkwardly taking its place among the nations of the world. To be sure, the place that Americans wanted to take, following the advice of George Washington, was one of withdrawal from the turmoil of the Old World and of safety from “entangling alliances” which could ever again bring it into the warfare from which it was so glad to be escaping. The Atlantic was immensely broader in those days than now, for its real breadth is to be measured not in miles but in the number of days that it takes to cross it. When Irving went abroad for the first time in 1803 he was fifty-nine days in passage. To-day one can go round the world in considerably less time, and the average fast Atlantic steamship passage is one tenth of that, while the aëroplane flight has divided the time by ten again. So the early Americans rejoiced in their “magnificent isolation” and wanted to grow up as dignified, respected, but very distant neighbors of the Old World.
It was an unhappy fact, however, that America—or the United States—was not notable for its dignity in the early years of the nineteenth century; for the finest dignity, like charity, “is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly,” whereas the new nation was very self-conscious; quickly irritated at foreign criticism, and uncomfortably aware of its own crudities in manner and defects in character. As far as foreign criticism was concerned, there were ample reasons for annoyance in America. Even as early as 1775 John Trumbull[4] had felt that it was hopeless to expect fair treatment at the hands of English reviewers, warning his friends Dwight and Barlow,
Such men to charm could Homer’s muse avail,
Who read to cavil, and who write to rail;
When ardent genius pours the bold sublime,
Carp at the style, or nibble at the rhyme;
and the mother country, after the Revolution and the War of 1812, was less inclined than before to deal in compliment. Man after man came over,
Like Fearon, Ashe, and others we could mention;
Who paid us friendly visits to abuse
Our country, and find food for the reviews.[5]
Moreover, all the time that England was criticizing her runaway child, she was maddeningly complacent as to her own virtues. Americans could not strike back with any effect, because they could not make the English feel their blows. So they fretted and fumed for half a century, their discomfort finding its clearest expression in Lowell’s lines[6]:
She is some punkins, thet I wun’t deny
(For ain’t she some related to you ’n’ I?)
But there’s a few small intrists here below
Outside the counter o’ John Bull an’ Co,
An’ though they can’t conceit how’t should be so,
I guess the Lord druv down Creation’s spiles
’thout no gret helpin’ from the British Isles,
An’ could contrive to keep things pooty stiff
Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff;
I ha’n’t no patience with sech swellin’ fellers ez
Think God can’t forge ’thout them to blow the bellerses.
A further reason for uneasiness in the face of foreign comment was that honest Americans were aware that their country suffered from the crudities of youth. It is unpleasant enough for “Seventeen” to be nagged by an unsympathetic maiden aunt, but it is intolerable if she has some ground for her naggings. In small matters as well as great “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” In a period of such rapid expansion as prevailed in the young manhood of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant it was unavoidable that most of the population were drawn into business undertakings that were usually eager and hurried and that were often slipshod or even shady. The American colleges and their graduates were not as distinguished as they had been in the earlier colonial days, and the new influence of European culture from the Old World universities was yet to come. In the cities, and notably in New York, the vulgar possessors of mushroom fortunes multiplied rapidly, bringing up vapid daughters like Halleck’s “Fanny,”[7] who in all the modern languages was
Exceedingly well-versed; and had devoted
To their attainment, far more time than has,
By the best teachers, lately been allotted;
For she had taken lessons, twice a week,
For a full month in each; and she could speak
French and Italian, equally as well
As Chinese, Portuguese, or German; and,
What is still more surprising, she could spell
Most of our longest English words off-hand;
Was quite familiar in Low Dutch and Spanish,
And thought of studying modern Greek and Danish;
and whose father, a man of newly affected silence that spoke “unutterable things,” was established in a mortgaged house filled with servants and “whatever is necessary for a ‘genteel liver’” and buttressed with a coach and half a dozen unpaid-for horses. At the same time the countryside was developing a native but not altogether admirable Yankee type. At their best, Halleck[8] wrote,
The people of today
Appear good, honest, quiet men enough
And hospitable too—for ready pay;
With manners like their roads, a little rough,
And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough.
And at their worst Whittier[9] looked back a half century, to 1818, and recalled them as
Shrill, querulous women, sour and sullen men,
Untidy, loveless, old before their time,
With scarce a human interest save their own
Monotonous round of small economies,
Or the poor scandal of the neighborhood;
. . . . . . . .
Church-goers, fearful of the unseen Powers,
But grumbling over pulpit tax and pew-rent,
Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls
And winter pork, with the least possible outlay
Of salt and sanctity; in daily life
Showing as little actual comprehension
Of Christian charity and love and duty
As if the Sermon on the Mount had been
Outdated like a last year’s almanac.
A natural consequence of such criticism from without, and such raw and defective culture within the country, was that American writers of any moment bided their time as patiently as they could, recognizing that for the moment America must be a nation of workers who were
rearing the pedestal, broad-based and grand,
Whereon the fair shapes of the Artist shall stand,
And creating, through labors undaunted and long,
The theme for all Sculpture and Painting and Song.[10]
Finally, it is worth noting that the first three eminent writers in nineteenth-century America were themselves not university products. Bryant withdrew from Williams College at the end of the first year, and Cooper from Yale toward the end of the second. The real education of these two and of Irving, who did not even enter college, was in the world of action rather than in the world of books, and their associates were for the most part men of affairs.
WASHINGTON IRVING
Many of the facts about the boyhood and youth of Washington Irving (1783–1859) are typical of his place and his period as well as true of himself. The first is that he was born (in New York City) of British-American parents, his father a Scotch Presbyterian from the Orkney Islands and his mother an Englishwoman. His father’s rigid religious views dominated in the upbringing of himself and his six brothers and sisters. Two nearly inevitable results followed: one, that as a boy he grew to believe that almost everything that was enjoyable was wicked, and the other, that as he came toward manhood he was particularly fond of the pleasures of life. A boy of his capacities in Boston at this time would have been more than likely to go to Harvard College, which was a dominating influence in eastern Massachusetts, but King’s College (Columbia) occupied no such position in New York. Irving’s higher education began in a law office, and then, when his health seemed to be failing, was continued by travel abroad. The long journey, or series of journeys, that he took from 1804 to 1806 were of the greatest importance. They were important to Irving because he was peculiarly fitted to get the greatest good from such informal education. He was an attractive young fellow, so that it was easy for him to make and to hold friends; and he was blessed with his father’s moral balance, so that he did not fall into bad habits. He was so far inclined to laziness that it is doubtful if he would have achieved much if he had gone to college, but he was wide-awake and receptive, so that he absorbed information wherever he went. Furthermore, he had a mind as well as a memory, and he came back to America stocked not merely with a great lot of miscellaneous facts but with a real knowledge of human nature and of human life.
From the day of his return to New York in 1806 to the day of his death, in 1859, Washington Irving had an international point of view and developed steadily into an international character. His first piece of writing was that of a very young man, but a young man of promise. Like the other Americans of his day he had read a good deal of English literature written in the eighteenth century; and among the essayists of that century who had attracted his attention one was Oliver Goldsmith. New York supplied him with his subjects and Goldsmith with his method of attack, for he wrote, in company with one of his brothers and a mutual friend, a series of amusing criticisms on the ways of his townsmen, modeling his Salmagundi Papers after Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. This was at once independent and imitative. The youthful authors blithely announced in their introductory number that they proposed to “instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age.” In the twenty-two papers that came out at irregular intervals between January, 1807, and January, 1808, they criticized everything that struck their attention, and they had their eyes wide open. The American love of display, the inclination to indulge in fruitless discussion which made the country a “logocracy” rather than a democracy, the lack of both judgment and order which marked their political elections, and their social and literary fashions make just a beginning of the list of subjects held up to genial ridicule. Yet, though the criticism was fair and to the point, it was an old-fashioned kind of comment, the kind that England had been feeding on for the better part of a century, ever since Addison and Steele had made it popular in the Tatler and the Spectator. Moreover, it was done in an old-fashioned way, for in making Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, the Tripolitan, the foreign commentator on American life as he saw it with a stranger’s eyes, they were using a device that was old even before it was employed by the Englishman from whom they borrowed it. The Salmagundis are interesting, however, as early representatives of a longish succession of satires on the life of New York, all pleasant and rather pleasantly superficial. Three years later Irving, this time alone, followed up this initial success with his “Knickerbocker’s History of New York,” not as serious a piece of work as its title at first suggests, for it was a burlesque of a heavy and pretentious history on the same subject which had appeared just before. Like the Salmagundis it was vivacious and impertinent, the very clever work of a very young man.
Now for ten years Washington Irving produced nothing as a writer. He was engaged in business with his brothers, and proved himself the most level-headed member of a pretty unbusinesslike combination. In 1815, in connection with one of their many ambitious and unsuccessful schemes, he went abroad, probably without the least suspicion that he would be absent from his own country for seventeen years and that he would return to it as a celebrated writer widely read in two continents. The first step toward his wider reputation came in 1819 with the publication in London of “The Sketch Book,” the best known of all his works. This was followed in 1822 by “Bracebridge Hall” and in 1824 by “Tales of a Traveller,” both similar in tone and contents to “The Sketch Book.” With a reputation as a graceful writer of sketches and stories now thoroughly established, he turned to a more substantial and ambitious form of work in the composition of “The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” living and writing in Madrid for the two years before its publication in 1828; and this book he followed quickly, as in the case of “The Sketch Book,” with two other productions of the same kind—“The Conquest of Granada” in 1829 and “The Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus” in 1831. For three years before his return to America, Irving served as Secretary of Legation to the court of St. James, London, and then came back to enjoy at home a popularity which had been almost wholly earned abroad. Out of his career thus far four main facts deserve attention. First, that his literary work began with two pieces of social satire, written in a boyish, jovial manner which he largely abandoned in later years; second, that his fame was established on works of “The Sketch Book” type, made up of short units, gracefully written, and full of quiet humor and tender sentiment (now and again he continued in this sort of composition up to the end of his life); third, that in his maturer years he resorted to the writing of formal history, and that he followed the first three studies, done in Spain, with “Oliver Goldsmith” in 1849, “Mahomet and his Successors” in 1850, and “The Life of Washington,” completed in 1859, the year of his death. To these literary facts should be added a fourth which is both literary and political and of no small significance in history—the fact of Irving’s appointment to a post in the foreign diplomatic service. This was to be followed in his own life by his four years as Minister to Spain in 1842–1846, under President Harrison, and in the next fifty years by a distinguished list of other appointments to the consular and diplomatic staffs. No single group has done more to bring honor to the United States in the courts of Europe during the nineteenth century than writers like Irving, Hawthorne, Motley, Howells, Bayard Taylor, Lowell, Hay, and their successors down to Thomas Nelson Page and Brand Whitlock.
To return to “The Sketch Book.” By 1818, three years after Irving had gone abroad for the second time, the business in which he had been engaged with his brothers had utterly failed, and he was forced to regard writing not merely as an attractive way of diverting himself but as a possible source of income. The new articles which he then wrote, together with many which had been accumulating in the leisure of his years in England, were soon ready for publication, but they found no English publisher ready to risk putting them out. Even the powerful influence of Sir Walter Scott, Irving’s cordial friend, could not prevail at first with John Murray, “the prince of publishers.” In 1819 Sidney Smith’s contemptuous and famous query, “Who reads an American book?” was fairly representative of the English-reading public. Murray was interested in Irving’s manuscript, but did not see any prospect of selling enough books to justify the risk of publication. Irving had wanted the indorsement of Murray’s imprint to offset the severity of the kind of English criticism deplored years earlier by John Trumbull (see p. 111). As soon, however, as the sketches were printed in New York in a set of seven modest installments, the attention of English readers was attracted to them, and Irving heard rumors that a “pirated” English edition was to appear. There was no international copyright in those days, and no adequate one until as late as 1899; so that a book printed on one side of the Atlantic was fair game for anyone who chose to steal it on the other. If an author wanted his works to appear correctly and to get his full money return for them, it was necessary for him to go through all the details of publishing independently in both countries. After a great deal of difficulty, therefore, Irving contrived to get out an English edition through an inefficient publisher, but the success of it was so marked that Murray soon saw the light and from then on was eager to get the English rights for everything that Irving wrote and to pay him in advance five, ten, and, in one case, as much as fifteen thousand dollars.
With the appearance of “The Sketch Book” England arrived at a new answer for Sidney Smith’s question. Irving was sought as a celebrity by the many, in addition to being loved as a charming gentleman by his older friends. Few tributes are more telling than that contained in a letter written many years later by Charles Dickens in which he refers to the delight he took in Irving’s pages when he was “a small and not over particularly well taken care of boy.” Even the austere Edinburgh Review indorsed the American as a writer of “great purity and beauty of diction.” From the most feared critic in the English-speaking world to the neglected boy whose father was in debtors’ prison Irving received enough applause quite to turn the head of a less modest man.
“The Sketch Book” includes over thirty papers of four or five different kinds. About fifteen are definite observations on English life and habits as seen in country towns and on country estates. Of the remainder six are literary essays of various kinds; four are in the nature of personal traveling reminiscences; three are the famous short stories—“Rip Van Winkle,” "Sleepy Hollow,“ and the ”The Spectre Bridegroom"; and five so far defy classification as to fall under the convenient category of “miscellaneous.”
As a document in literary history the sixth paper deserves far more notice than is usually conceded to it, for as a rule it is totally neglected. This is entitled “British Writers on America.” The tone of English literary criticism has already been referred to. Irving called attention to the fact that all English writings on America and the Americans were equally ill-natured. He pointed out that ordinarily English readers demanded strictest accuracy from author-travelers; that if a man who wrote a book on the regions of the Upper Nile or the unknown islands of the Yellow Sea was caught in error at a few minor points, he was held up to scorn as careless and unreliable, and another English traveler who could convict him of mistakes or misstatements could completely discredit him. But in marked contrast to this, no such scrupulousness was demanded of visitors to the United States. Books on the new nation in the Western World were written and read to satisfy unfriendly prejudice rather than to supply exact information and honest opinion. Against a continuation of such a practice Irving gave warning, not merely because it was uncharitable but because in time it would estrange the two peoples and lose for England a friend with whom she could not afford to be at loggerheads.
Is all this to be at end? Is this golden band of kindred sympathies, so rare between nations, to be broken forever? Perhaps it may be for the best. It may dispel an illusion which might have kept us in mental vassalage; which might have interfered occasionally with our true interests, and prevented the growth of proper national pride. But it is hard to give up the kindred tie! and there are feelings dearer than interest—closer to the heart than pride—that will make us cast back a look of regret as we wander farther and farther from the paternal roof, and lament the waywardness of the parent that would repel the affections of the child.
There were probably many other Americans capable of making the warning prophecy so notably fulfilled nearly a hundred years later, though few, perhaps, who would have put it in such temperate language; but Irving went further in following with a warning to his fellow-countrymen:
Shortsighted and injudicious, however, as the conduct of England may be in this system of aspersion, recrimination on our part would be equally ill-judged.... Let us guard particularly against such a temper, for it would double the evil instead of redressing the wrong. Nothing is so easy and inviting as the retort of abuse and sarcasm, but it is a paltry and unprofitable contest.... The members of a republic, above all other men, should be candid and dispassionate. They are, individually, portions of the sovereign mind and sovereign will, and should be enabled to come to all questions of national concern with calm and unbiased judgments.... Let it be the pride of our writers, therefore, discarding all feelings of irritation, and disdaining to retaliate the illiberality of British authors, to speak of the English nation without prejudice and with determined candor.
If there is any justification for calling an American essay “The American Declaration of Literary Independence” the title should be conferred on this neglected number in “The Sketch Book.” It was long before either English or American writers were wise enough to follow Irving’s counsels, but he himself was always as tactful as he was honest.
“The Sketch Book” as a whole, then, can best be understood as an American’s comments on English life and custom, made at a time when “the retort of abuse and sarcasm” would have been quite natural. In the opening paper, as well as in the sixth, there is a gentle reminder that the literary east wind had felt rather sharp and nipping in New York. Irving is describing himself after the fashion of the eighteenth-century essayists at the introduction of a series, and at the end indulges in this little nudge of irony:
A great man of Europe, thought I, must ... be as superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was confirmed by observing the comparative importance and swelling magnitude of many English travelers among us, who, I was assured, were very little people in their own country. I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.
His summarized impressions of the typical Englishman are contained in the thirtieth paper, on “John Bull.” This keen analysis will bear the closest reading and study, and the more one knows of English history the more interesting it becomes. In this respect it is like “Gulliver’s Travels,” for it is full of double meanings. To the inattentive or the immature it is simply a picture of a bluff, hearty, quick-tempered, over-conservative average English country gentleman, but to the intelligent and attentive reader this gentleman turns out to be the embodiment of the English government and the British Empire. The character of Parliament, the relation between Church and State, the condition of the national treasury, the attitude of the rulers toward reform legislation and toward the colonies, dependencies, and dominions are all treated with kindly humor by the visiting critic. The picture is by no means a flattering one, but it was Irving’s happy gift to be able to indulge in really biting satire and yet to do so in such a courteous and friendly way that his words carried little sting. Part of the concluding paragraph to this essay will illustrate his method of combining justice with mercy:
Though there may be something rather whimsical in all this, yet I confess I cannot look upon John’s situation without strong feelings of interest. With all his odd humors and obstinate prejudices, he is a sterling-hearted old blade. He may not be so wonderfully fine a fellow as he thinks himself, but he is at least twice as good as his neighbors represent him. His virtues are all his own; all plain, home-bred, and unaffected. His very faults smack of the raciness of his good qualities. His extravagance savors of his generosity; his quarrelsomeness of his courage; his credulity of his open faith; his vanity of his pride; and his bluntness of his sincerity. They are all the redundancies of a rich and liberal character.
In this spirit Irving wrote the other sketches of John Bull as he appears in “Rural Life,” “The Country Church,” “The Inn Kitchen,” and the group of five Christmas pictures.
To judge from these eight scenes of English country life, Irving, a visitor from a new and unsettled land, was chiefly fascinated by the evidences of old age and tradition on every side. For this reason, if for no other, he delighted in the customs of the country squires who had not been swept out of their ancient order by the tide of modern trade. Even the English scenery was in his mind “associated with ideas of order, of quiet, of sober, well-established principles, of hoary usage and reverend custom. Everything seems to be the growth of ages of regular and peaceful existence.” As Irving observed it, it was still theof song and story, an England, therefore, beautifully typified in the celebration of the Christmas festivities. There is a touch of autobiography in his comment on the good cheer that prevailed at Bracebridge Hall,—a home that Squire Bracebridge tried to make his children feel was the happiest place in the world,—it was so utterly different from the suppressed family circle over which his Presbyterian father had ruled. As a guest he enjoyed all the picturesque and quaint merrymaking at the Hall, and re-conjured up pictures like those which Addison had previously drawn at Sir Roger de Coverley’s. Yet all the while he was aware that the old English gentleman was a costly luxury for England to maintain, that Squire Bracebridge was after all nothing but John Bull, and that John Bull was inclining to lag behind his age. As a student of Goldsmith, Irving had read the thought of it seems to have come back to him while writing for a moment the usurpation of the land by the wealthy disquieted him, but then he consoled himself with the comforting thought that abuses of this sort were “but casual outbreaks in the general system.” Irving was writing as an observer who found much to admire in the external beauty of the old order of things, but at the bottom of his American mind it is quite apparent that there was a silent approval of gradual reform in “the good old ways.” Squire Bracebridge was delightful to Irving, but on the whole he was a delightful old fogy.
Irving’s papers on London—“The Boar’s Head Tavern,” “Westminster Abbey,” and “Little Britain”—are full of a similar reverence for old age in the life of the community. In the same mood in which he laughed at the pranks of the Christmas Lord of Misrule, he made his way to Eastcheap, “that ancient region of wit and wassail, where the very names of the streets relished of good cheer, as Pudding Lane bears testimony even at the present day”; and he took much more evident satisfaction in his recollection of Shakespearean revelries than in his hours in Westminster, the “mingled picture of glory and decay.” Once again in “Little Britain” Irving was in more congenial surroundings, for he preferred to smile at the echoes of dead laughter than to shudder at the reminders of vanished greatness.
Little Britain may truly be called the heart’s core of the city; the strong-hold of true John Bullism. It is a fragment of London as it was in its better days, with its antiquated folks and fashions. Here flourish in great preservation many of the holiday games and customs of yore. The inhabitants most religiously eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, hot-cross-buns on Good Friday, and roast goose at Michaelmas; they send love-letters on Valentine’s Day, burn the Pope on the fifth of November, and kiss all the girls under the mistletoe at Christmas. Roast beef and plum-pudding are also held in superstitious veneration, and port and sherry maintain their grounds as the only true English wines.
In more than casual respect for such traditions Irving goes on to introduce the rival oracles of Little Britain, to escort us to Wagstaff’s and the Roaring Lads, to act as personal conductor to Bartholomew Fairs and a Lord Mayor’s Day, and finally to lament the baleful influence of the socially ambitious Misses Lamb and the decline of the choice old games All-Fours, Pope Joan, and Tom-come-tickle-me. It is no wonder that the youthful Dickens loved these papers, for the same England appealed to both Irving and Dickens throughout their lives. It was a rough, boisterous, jolly England, with a good deal of vulgarity which they were ready to forgive and a good many vices which they chose to overlook in favor of its chief virtues—a blunt honesty, a hearty laugh, and a full stomach.
There is another side of old England that was dear to those two—that John Bull could “easily be moved to a sudden tear” (see p. 109, first topic). In the old days of even a hundred years ago men of Saxon stock were much more ready to express themselves than they are to-day, for the accepted manners of the present are comparatively reserved and impassive. If a man was amused he laughed loud and long; if he was angered he came up with “a word and a blow”; and if his deeper feelings were touched he was not ashamed of a tear. In fact he seemed almost to feel a certain pride in his “sensibility,” as if his power to weep proved that his nature was not destitute of finer feeling and made up for his quickness to wrath and his fondness for a broad joke. In perhaps unconscious recognition of this habit of mind the literature of a century ago contained a great many frank appeals to the reader’s feeling for pathos, appeals which the modern reader would be likely to condemn as unworthily sentimental.
In the history of literature a distinction is made between “sentiment”—the ability to respond to the finer emotions, such as love, sorrow, reverence, patriotism, worship—and “sentimentalism”—the unrestricted expression of these emotions by eloquence, tears, and feminine sighs, blushes, and swoonings. For this sentimentalism, which was a literary fashion of his period, Irving found an outlet in sketches like “The Wife,” “The Broken Heart,” “The Widow and her Son,” and “The Pride of the Village.” The first is on “the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune,” a sketch in which the husband is the sentimentalist. He has lost his money and is afraid to shock his wife with the revelation, but his “altered looks and stifled sighs” half betray him. In “an agony of tears” he tells a friend, and by him is persuaded to be honest with her. Her latent heroism comes out in the face of his announcement; and on her welcome to him at his first homecoming to the modest cottage he is rendered speechless, and tears once more gush into his eyes. The second is a direct attempt to shame “those who have outlived the susceptibility of early feeling, or have been brought up ... to laugh at all love stories.” The third, on “The Widow and her Son,” is more convincing to the reader of to-day, for it is on the tragic picture of a fond parent’s bereavement. The fourth is the best example of all. The pride of the village is introduced as “blushing and smiling in all the beautiful confusion of girlish diffidence and delight.” She falls in love with a gallant young soldier, who begs her to accompany him when he is ordered to the front. Shocked at his perfidy she clasps her hands in agony, then succumbs to “faintings and hysterics,” and then goes into a decline. After some time her lover returns to her and rushes into the house. “She was too faint to rise—she attempted to extend her trembling hand—her lips moved as if she spoke, but no word was articulated—she looked down upon him with a smile of unutterable tenderness—and closed her eyes forever!” If these sketches seem unreal and even amusing to the student, it is partly because they are actually overdrawn and partly because the present generation has repressed, if it has not “outlived, the susceptibility of early feeling.”
Two other types of work remain to be mentioned. The first is the literary essay, in which the chief interest arises from Irving’s sympathetic appreciation of his English masters. From these essays—there are five of distinct importance—it appears that he was especially well-read in the writings of a much earlier period and that he took pleasure in dwelling on passages which were characterized, as his own work came to be, by “great purity and beauty of diction.” The other group is the most famous in “The Sketch Book,” the three stories of which “Rip Van Winkle” is the best known. This is extremely interesting for several reasons. The first is that it is a good story, which will long be read for its own sake, and as such it needs no comment, for it is familiar to everyone. But it is also a milestone in literary history. One reason for this is that it carries into practice a principle that American authors had long been talking and writing about—the principle of using native material. It is located in the Catskill Mountains and in the years before and after the Revolutionary War. It introduces real colonial and early American people. Although it is a far-fetched romance in its theme, it makes use of homely, realistic details. Jonathan Doolittle’s hotel was just the sort of shabby boarding house that marred the countryside during the slipshod years after the Revolution and that survived into Irving’s youth. “A large rickety wooden building ... with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats.” The sign was strangely changed from pre-Revolution days. “The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON.” The fact that the folk story about Hendrick Hudson and his crew had some basis in a German superstition does not affect the fact that Irving completely localized it and gave it its enduring fame as an American tale.
Another reason why this story stands out in literary history is that it is one of the first really successful examples of the modern short story, and that in this sense it represents America’s chief contribution to the types of literature. We are likely to take for granted that all the popular forms of literature have existed since the beginning of time. Yet prose stories of any kind were comparatively modern a hundred years ago, and most of them were long narratives in two or three and sometimes as many as six or seven volumes. What short stories existed were merely condensed novels, not limited to any brief period and not developed with any definite detail. “Rip Van Winkle” was strikingly different from its vague and shapeless forerunners. After the introduction it was limited to two short passages of time—the few hours just before and the few hours just after Rip went to sleep on the mountain. And the whole story was composed to lead up to the main point,—the chief point of this history and of all history,—the relentless way in which life moves on, regardless of the individual who falls asleep and is left behind. All the details in the story help to develop this idea. Rip, the ne’er-do-well, was the sort of man to serve as the central character, for he was more anxious to escape life than to take his part in it. His eager, querulous, sharp-tongued wife reminded him of the burden of living only to make him avoid it the more; her loss was the only one which he did not regret on his return. His dog and gun, which he missed first and missed most keenly, were the pride of the old-fashioned trapper out of place in the up-to-date American village. The years bridging the Revolution were the most natural and effective ones to mark the kind of change that is always taking place; and Rip’s experience in finding that loyalty to a discarded monarchy was treason to a new republic was simply an emphatic illustration of what will usually happen to a man who lives in the past instead of in the present. It is not at all necessary to assume that Irving chose the old folk-legend in order to expound this theme, or even that he was conscious of the completeness with which he was doing it. The fact remains that it was remarkable in its day for its clear compactness, and that it meets one of the tests of enduring fiction in telling a good story well and of building that story out of elements that convey some truth about life.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is comparable to “Rip Van Winkle” only in its use of native American character, scenes, and tradition. It is hardly a short story at all, but rather a prolonged sketch full of “local atmosphere” and partly strung on a narrative thread. Ichabod Crane and his townsmen, except for Brom Bones and his gang, are like Rip in one respect, for they are representative citizens in a town where “population, manners and customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.” Ichabod was an interesting survival, too, because his combination of learning and superstition had come to him from a distinguished source, for he “was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s history of New England witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed. He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary, and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there con over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes.” Ichabod, moreover, is a comic type in American life in the early nineteenth century, who seems to have been equally disliked by all the New Yorkers—the Puritan descendant strayed from home. Cooper’s David Gamut is one of the same crop. The story of the Headless Horseman, like that of the Spectre Bridegroom, is, of course, only a make-believe ghost story, neither important nor well told. The real interest in the sketch lies in its picture of simple country life. The whole scene at Baltus Van Tassel’s house is as clear and vivid as the contrasting scenes at Bracebridge Hall or as Whittier’s picture of another family scene in “Snow-Bound.” The third well-known story in “The Sketch Book,” “The Spectre Bridegroom,” is, like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” more of a sketch than a story, and does not pretend to be laid on American soil.
It is a common experience of schoolboys and schoolgirls to feel on reading Irving for the first time that his way of writing is stiff and unnatural. Compared with the fashion of to-day the wording and sentence structure of “The Sketch Book” deserve such a verdict. But to render it against the writing of a hundred years ago, without comparing the book in question with others of its own generation, is to ignore the very point of “Rip Van Winkle”—that fashions change. Assuming, then, that styles do change, and that Irving was no more formal than other authors of his day, it is still worth while to see what some of the main points of contrast are between 1819 and 1919. Here are two passages that will serve as a basis for comparison. The first is from “Philip of Pokanoket,” one of the two “Sketch Book” essays written in America.
It is to be regretted that those early writers, who treated of the discovery and settlement of America, have not given us more particular and candid accounts of the remarkable characters that flourished in savage life. The scanty anecdotes which have reached us are full of peculiarity and interest; they furnish us with nearer glimpses of human nature, and show what man is in a comparatively primitive state, and what he owes to civilization. There is something of the charm of discovery in lighting upon these wild and unexplored tracts of human nature; in witnessing, as it were, the native growth of moral sentiment, and perceiving those generous and romantic qualities which have been artificially cultivated by society, vegetating in spontaneous hardihood and rude magnificence.
The second is from G. S. Lee’s “Crowds,” Bk. I, chap, viii:
The future in America cannot be pictured. The only place it can be seen is in people’s faces. Go out into the street, in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Seattle; look eagerly as you go into the faces of the men who pass, and you feel hundreds of years—the next hundred years—like a breath swept past. America, with all its forty-story buildings, its little play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the unseen country. It can only as yet be seen in people’s eyes. Some days, flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn, like sunshine around me.
These passages have almost exactly the same number of words,—the former one hundred and fifteen and the latter one hundred and seventeen,—but a glance at the printed page shows that Irving’s words take up one fifth more space than Lee’s do. The reason is that Irving uses twenty-six words of more than two syllables, and Lee, aside from place-names, only two. Although both passages are written in analysis of American conditions, Irving, who is discussing the past, employs abstract or general words—to use the nouns alone, words like discovery, anecdotes, peculiarity, civilisation, sentiment, qualities, magnificence; Lee, who is looking to the future, uses definite and picturesque terms like faces, street, buildings, eyes, panorama, towers, footfalls,—uses these words even though he admits the idea he is dealing with cannot be pictured. Again, Irving cast his one hundred and fifteen words into three sentences averaging nearly forty words in length, and Lee put his into six, averaging a fraction less than twenty. Finally, all Irving’s sentences are “loose,” or so built that the reader may rest or even stop with a completed sense before he comes to the end; but four out of six in Lee’s passage are “periodic,” or so constructed that you must read to the end or be left hanging in mid-air.
It would, of course, be forcing the issue absurdly far to insist or even suggest that so broad a comparison would apply without exception to the writers of a hundred years ago and of to-day, but in general there is a fair deduction to be drawn. Irving belonged to a group who were still addressing an eighteenth-century audience, an audience made up of “gentle readers”—men who enjoyed the rhythmical flow of a courtly and elegant style, who felt that there was a virtue in purity and beauty of diction apart from any idea the diction was supposed to express; but the modern reader esteems literature as a means rather than an end. It must catch and hold his attention; it must be clear and forcible first, and elegant as a secondary matter; and its words and sentences must be chosen and put together as a challenge to a reader in the midst of a restless, driving, twentieth-century world. With these facts in mind one may say, if he will, that Washington Irving was stiff and formal, but he should say this as marking a difference and not a necessary inferiority in Irving.
Irving lived until 1859, but the richly fruitful part of his life was from 1819, the year in which the serial publication of “The Sketch Book” began, to 1832, the year of his return from abroad. In this period he published ten books and all the best known of his works but the lives of Goldsmith and Washington. When he came back after seventeen years’ absence he was known and admired in England, France, and Germany, and the most popular of American authors. Irving was one of the first to profit, American fashion, by a European reputation reflected and redoubled at home. At the dinner of welcome tendered him soon after his arrival he showed how absence had made the heart grow fonder:
I come from gloomier climes to one of brilliant sunshine and inspiring purity. I come from countries lowering with doubt and danger, where the rich man trembles and the poor man frowns—where all repine at the present and dread the future. I come from these to a country where all is life and animation; where I hear on every side the sound of exultation; where everyone speaks of the past with triumph, the present with delight, the future with growing and confident anticipation.
And here, he went on to say, he proposed to remain as long as he lived. These last twenty-seven years were filled with honors. He had already received the gold medal from the Royal Society of Literature and the degree of Doctor of Laws from Oxford University. Now he was to have the refusal of a whole succession of public offices and the leadership of a whole “school” of writers. Diedrich Knickerbocker had become a household word, which was applied to the Knickerbocker school of Irving’s followers and used in the christening of the Knickerbocker Magazine (1833–1865). Irving was in truth a connecting link between the century of his birth and the century of his achievements. He carried over the spirit and the manners of Addison and Goldsmith into the New World and into the age of steam. With him it was a natural mode of thought and way of expression, but with his imitators it was affected and superficial—so much so that the Knickerbocker school declined and the Knickerbocker Magazine went out of existence shortly after Irving’s death.
The leading figure in the Knickerbocker school was Fitz-Greene Halleck, who was born in Connecticut in 1790 but spent his active life in New York. When he came up to the city, at the age of twenty-one, he fell in with the literary people of the town and shared their eager interest in the current English output. According to his biographer they were absorbed in “The Lady of the Lake” and “Marmion,” in Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope,” Rogers’s “Pleasures of Memory,” Moore’s “Melodies,” Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs” and “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” and, a little later, in “Waverley,” “Guy Mannering,” and “The Antiquary”—works that in Halleck’s opinion produced “a wide-spread enthusiasm throughout Great Britain and this country which has probably never been equalled in the history of literature.”
Halleck (as already cited on page 113) was uncomfortably conscious of the prosaic commercial drive of American life and disposed to lament the wane of romance. His regret for the passage of “the good old days” he frequently expressed in the poems he wrote between the ages of twenty-five and thirty—“Alnwick Castle,” “Red-Jacket,” “A Sketch,” “A Poet’s Daughter”; and in “Wyoming” he sometimes grieved for the old and sometimes protested at the new. When in 1823 he wrote “Marco Bozzaris,” he lived up to his own thesis, taking an heroic episode of immediate interest—August 20, 1823—and putting it into a ballad for freedom that has probably been declaimed as often as “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.”
In the meanwhile he had become the intimate of the talented young Joseph Rodman Drake. Their friendship had sprung from a common love of romantic poetry, but the joint work which they undertook was a series of contemporary satires. These were printed in The National Advocate and the New York Evening Post between March and July, 1819. Thirty-five of them appeared over the signature of “Croaker,” from which they became known as the “Croaker Papers.” They were both pertinent and impertinent, aided by the mystery of their authorship and accumulating in interest through the uncertainty as to when the next would appear and whom it would assail. The more general in theme had the same underlying good sense which belonged to the earlier Salmagundis (see p. 116), and in their simple and often brutal directness they must have offered then, as they do now, a relief from the fashionable echoes of secondary English poets. Later in 1819 Halleck resumed the same strain in “Fanny”—the account in about a thousand lines of the rise and fall of Fanny and her father in New York finance and society.[11] Among many efforts of the sort Stedman’s “Diamond Wedding” and Butler’s “Nothing to Wear” have been the only later approach, and all have been true not merely of New York but of the same stage in most quick-growing American cities.
In 1820 Drake died at the age of twenty-five, leaving as his literary bequest the inspiration for Halleck’s memorial verses,
Green be the turf above thee
Friend of my better days!
as well as his share in the “Croaker Papers,” and “The Culprit Fay,” and certain shorter poems which give promise of things much greater than this overrated attempt. The “Fay,” according to a letter by Halleck, was a three-day production of 1816, written to demonstrate that the Hudson River scenery could be turned to literary account. Whether or no the anecdote is true, Drake wrote to this point in his “To a Friend,” and in “Niagara” and “Bronx.” Yet the fact is worth remark that nothing in “The Culprit Fay” is any more explicitly true of the Hudson region than of the Rhine country or the Norwegian fiords. The poem reads like a pure fantasy, hurriedly and carelessly written by an inexperienced hand. Nevertheless, when published it was extravagantly praised. Halleck said, “It is certainly the best thing of the kind in the English language, and is more strikingly original than I had supposed it was possible for a modern poem to be.”[12]
In Halleck’s exclamatory surprise at originality in any modern poem is to be found the vital difference between the two friends. Halleck seemed to believe that the final canons for art had been fixed, and could hardly conceive of originality in a nineteenth-century poet; but Drake tried new things and rebelled at the old. His best efforts, however qualified their success, were strainings at the leash of eighteenth-century convention.
Go! kneel a worshipper at nature’s shrine!
For you her fields are green, and fair her skies!
For you her rivers flow, her hills arise!
And will you scorn them all, to pour forth tame
And heartless lays of feigned or fancied sighs?
And will you cloud the muse? nor blush for shame
To cast away renown, and hide your head from fame?
As “The Culprit Fay” shows, Drake’s idea was to escape from the drawing-room into the open, but when in the open to weave, as it were, Gobelin tapestries for drawing-room use. He saw no gleam of essential poetry in democracy or the crowded town, yet in his vague craving for something better than Georgian iterations he showed that the revival of individualism was at work in him. The story is told that his intimacy with Halleck began in his accord with the latter’s wish that he could “lounge upon the rainbow, and read ‘Tom Campbell.’” In his aspirations he seems to have been nearer to the spirit of Keats and Shelley.
As fate would have it, the more independent of the two was taken off before his prime, and Halleck, the survivor, settled down into complacent Knickerbockerism. With his nicety of taste, his keen eye, his fund of humor, and his frankness, he was an established literary and social favorite. He was the kind of handsome and courtly gentleman of the old school, as Irving was also, who became a friend and associate of the leading financier of the day. There was nothing restless or disconcerting about him. He was a critic of manners, but not of the social order. He probably knew little of Emerson, and he certainly disapproved of Whitman. In 1848, when less than sixty years of age, he went back to his native town in Connecticut and lived there till after the Civil War, totally unaffected as a man of letters, except as the conflict seems to have silenced him. But he was not alone, for when he sank into eclipse all the Knickerbockers disappeared with him. Their vogue was over.