In the whole range of English literature I know of no pen except Irving’s which could have written an essay like this in plain and simple prose. We find the same tender sentiment in Burns’ “Highland Mary,” and Poe’s “Annabel Lee;” but poetry is the natural language of passion and sorrow. Irving has often been likened to Addison, but in this particular they have nothing in common. Edward Everett has well said: One chord in the human heart, the pathetic, for whose weird music Addison had no ear, Irving touched with the hand of a master. He learned that in the school of early disappointment; and in the following passages we seem to hear its sad but sweet vibration, still responding through years of sorrow to the memory of her whose hopes were entwined with his: “There are some strokes of calamity, which scathe and scorch the soul, which penetrate to the vital seat of happiness, and blast it never to put forth bud and blossom; and let those tell her agony who have had the portals of the tomb suddenly closed between them and the being they most loved on earth, who have sat at its threshold as one shut out in the cold and lonely world, whence all that was most lovely and loving had departed.”
It is said that when Lord Byron was dying at Missolonghi, he required an attendant to read to him the “Broken Heart,” and while the attendant was reading one of the most tender portions the poet’s eyes moistened, and he said: “Irving never wrote that story without weeping, and I can not hear it without tears.” He added: “I have not wept much in this world, for trouble never brings tears to my eyes; but I always had tears for the ‘Broken Heart.’”
Kindred to this, I select “The Wife” as a true picture of woman’s power in adversity. As the story goes, his friend Leslie had married a beautiful and accomplished girl, and having an ample fortune, it was his ambition that her life should be a fairy tale. Having embarked in speculation, his riches took to themselves wings and flew away, leaving him in bankruptcy. For a time he kept his situation to himself, but every look revealed his story; and at last he told all to his wife. We see her rising from a state of childish dependence, and becoming the support and comfort of her husband in his misfortune. Following them from a mansion to a cottage, we feel that the last state of that man is better than the first; in the knowledge and possession of such a heart he had truer riches than diamonds can symbolize. [Applause.] To the credit of our better nature, the words of Irving are true: “There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and blazes in the dark hour of adversity. No man knows what the wife of his bosom is, what a ministering angel she is, until he has gone with her through the fiery trials of this world.” Outside the dramas of Shakspere and the pages of Walter Scott, I know of no such pictures of graceful womanhood as we find in these sketches.
Another quality no less marked than his humor and pathos we see in his reverence and love for antiquity, which forms a marked feature in the English pictures. In his “Rural Life” and “Christmas Sketches” we see his love for the old English writers, and that Chaucer and Spenser were his favorite authors. “To my mind these early poets are something more than wells of English undefiled. They are rather like the lakes of the Adirondacks, separated from each other and from us by events which loom up like mountains in the world’s history; clear and cool in far off solitudes, reflecting in their bright mirrors the serenity of earth and the broad expanse of heaven, responding to the gentle glow of summer sunset, holding quiet communion with the evening stars and awakening rosy life at the first touch of morn. . . . The old English ballads have all the energy, the rhythm and sparkle of our mountain streams, but Chaucer and Spenser and Shakspere and Bunyan are the fountains from which flows a river, ay, the Hudson of our English language.” With this deep love for the masters of English literature, we are not surprised that Westminster Abbey, with its poets’ corner, should be the subject of one of his earliest essays; and the principal feature of this essay, that which makes it the enduring one of all that have been written upon this venerable pile, is its truth and sincerity. It is, indeed, pleasant, in these days of irreverence; when flippant writing is received for wit and mis-spelled slang accepted for originality; when popular literature is running into low levels of life and luxury and the vices and follies of mankind; when modern poets take their cue from the heathen Chinee and find rhyme and rhythm in subdued oaths and significant dashes; when even home ballads are infected with the speech, if not the morality of Jim Bludsoe; in these days of scoffing at all things temporal and spiritual; when it seems as if belief had gone out of man: we turn with satisfaction to these essays, in which we see the nobility of a loyal heart, and feel that truth and goodness and beauty, the offspring of God, are not subject to the changes which upset the invention of man. [Applause.] I make no quotation from this familiar essay; it possesses too much unity to detach a paragraph or a sentence. I can only say I read it over and over again with the same interest to-day as years ago in the deep shade of that melancholy aisle at the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots.
There is one other place in England where I took my pocket edition of the “Sketch-Book”—to Stratford-on-Avon, for, more than any other man, Irving is associated with the world’s greatest poet. Writers without number, and many of them well known to fame, have given their impressions of Stratford-on-Avon, but Irving’s description supersedes them all. In this companionship of Shakspere and Irving we see the enduring qualities of the human heart. In the deep sympathy of Irving for the olden time, we feel that he has added another charm to Stratford, and that we as a nation have a better claim to the great poet.
In Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which I take as illustrations of his “American Legends,” we see that he is one of the few writers who recognize the fact that comedy is quite as natural as tragedy. At the time this essay was written we understand that Irving had never visited the Catskill Mountains; but there is this feature about all his essays or stories: wherever he locates them, they seem at once to take root and flourish. This story is too well known, through the genius of Jefferson on the stage, and Rogers in the studio, to need delineation. The old Dutch village, with its philosophers and sages, the sorely-tried Gretchen, the shiftless, good-natured Van Winkle, the adventure on the mountains, the return—it all passes before our minds like a series of pictures; and we come to the closing scene, which the play-writer and dramatist would have done well to follow, for there is more dramatic unity in the story which Irving left us than in the drama.
I must pass over to-night “Bracebridge Hall,” the “History of Columbus,” the “History of Washington,” the “Alhambra,” and many more, which, as we think of them, rise up before us like a new vision of the “Arabian Nights” in our literature; and in order to read them and get the full beauty of Irving’s works, we must read them in connection with his “Life and Letters,” published by his nephew, Peor Irving, in which we see the whole history of the man pass before us, from the time when the boy of twenty went through the northern wilderness of New York, until the time when, a man of seventy, he again stood on the banks of the St. Lawrence, and in a letter to his niece called up the changes of fifty years.
[After referring to the changes Irving had lived to see take place, the speaker made the following allusion to Chautauqua:]
Think of Mr. Miller when he ten years ago laid out the site of the first humble cottage in this grove; and if he had slept from that time until now, he would be more than Rip Van Winkle, could he look in to-night upon this Auditorium. [Applause.]
