Literary and Social Essays

by George William Curtis

It was in vain to try to thwart the young Irving's genius. Yet the boy who a little later was to light with rosy cheer the air which, as Wendell Phillips said, was still black with sermons; who was to give to our literature its first distinctly humorous strain, and innocently to amuse the world, was somehow or other, as he said, "taught to feel that everything pleasant was wicked".

If that were so, what a sinner Washington Irving was! If to make life easier by making it pleasanter, if to outwit trouble by gay banter, if with satire that smiles but never stings to correct foibles and to quicken good impulses; if to deepen and strengthen human sympathy, is not to be a human benefactor, what makes one? When Dr. Johnson said of Garrick that his death eclipsed the gayety of nations, he did not mean merely that the player would no longer make men laugh, but that he could no longer make them better. "If, however," said Irving—and Willis selected the words for the motto of his second volume of verse published in 1827—"I can by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sadness; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good-humor with his fellow-beings and himself, surely, surely I shall not then have written entirely in vain."

That cannot be said to have been the spirit of any American author before Irving. Our colonial literature was mainly political and theological. You have only to return to the early New England days in the stories of Hawthorne, the magician who restores with a shuddering spell that old, sombre life, to understand the character of its reading. The books that were not treatises upon special topics all seemed to say with one of the grim bards of Calvinism:

"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead."

Literature, in its proper sense, there was none. There was no imaginative creation, no play of fancy and humor, no subtle charm of the ideal life, no grace and delight of expression, which are essential to literature. The perpetual twilight and chill of the New England Puritan world were an arctic winter in which no flower of poesy bloomed and no bird sang. One of the French players who came to this country with Rachel says, in his journal, with a startled air, as if he had remarked in Americans a universal touch of lunacy, that he was invited to take a pleasure-drive to Greenwood Cemetery. Evidently he was not familiar with Froissart's epigram nor with the annals of the Puritan fathers, or he would have known that their favorite pleasure-ground was the graveyard. Judge Sewell's Journal, the best picture of daily New England life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a portrait framed in black and hung with thick crape. It is a register of funerals—a book which seems to require a suit of sables for its proper reading.

The early Christians dwelt so often and so long in the catacombs that when they emerged, accustomed to associate life with the tomb, they doubtless regarded the whole world as a cemetery. The American Puritans inherited the disposition from their early confessors, and so powerful was the tendency that it laid its sombre spirit upon the earliest enduring poem in our literature, and the fresh and smiling nature of the new world was first depicted by our literary art as a tomb:

"The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty; and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man."

"Thanatopsis" is the swan-song of Puritanism. Indeed, when New England Puritanism could sing, as for the first time it did in the verse of Bryant, the great change was accomplished. Out of strength had come forth sweetness. I am not decrying the Puritans. They were the stern builders of the modern world, the unconscious heralds of wider liberty, and a kindlier future for mankind. But

"God works in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform,"

and never more mysteriously than when he chose as the pioneers of religious liberty in the New World those who hung Quakers, and as the founders of civil equality those who permitted only members of their own Church to vote.