“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.”