And make their bed with thee.”
The appearance of “Thanatopsis” and “Lines to a Waterfowl” in the early numbers of the “North American Review,” while leaving no doubt that a new national literature was close at hand, proved also that it was not to be the product of a single source; for Bryant, though greatly tempted to join the Emersons, Channing, Dana, Allston, and Tudor in Boston, turned finally to New York, where influences of a different kind surrounded him. The Unitarian school could not but take a sober cast, and even its humor was sure to be tinged with sadness, sarcasm, or irony, or some serious purpose or passion; but New York contained no atmosphere in which such a society could thrive. Busy with the charge of practical work,—the development of industries continually exceeding their power of control,—the people of New York wanted amusement, and shunned what in Boston was considered as intellectual. Their tastes were gratified by the appearance of a writer whose first book created a school of literature as distinctly marked as the Unitarian school of Boston, and more decidedly original. “The History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker,” appeared in 1809, and stood alone. Other books of the time seemed to recognize some literary parentage. Channing and Buckminster were links in a chain of theologians and preachers. “Thanatopsis” evidently drew inspiration from Wordsworth. Diedrich Knickerbocker owed nothing to any living original.
The “History of New York” was worth more than passing notice. In the development of a national character, as well as of the literature that reflected it, humor was a trait of the utmost interest; and Washington Irving was immediately recognized as a humorist whose name, if he fulfilled the promise of his first attempt, would have a chance of passing into the society of Rabelais, Cervantes, Butler, and Sterne. Few literary tasks were more difficult than to burlesque without vulgarizing, and to satirize without malignity; yet Irving in his first effort succeeded in doing both. The old families, and serious students of colonial history, never quite forgave Irving for throwing an atmosphere of ridicule over the subject of their interest; but Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History was so much more entertaining than ordinary histories, that even historians could be excused for regretting that it should not be true.
Yet the book reflected the political passions which marked the period of the Embargo. Besides the burlesque, the “History” contained satire; and perhaps its most marked trait was the good-nature which, at a time when bitterness was universal in politics, saved Irving’s political satire from malignity. Irving meant that no one should mistake the character of the universal genius, Governor Wilhelmus Kieft, surnamed the Testy, who as a youth had made many curious investigations into the nature and operations of windmills, and who came well-nigh being smothered in a slough of unintelligible learning,—“a fearful peril, from the effects of which he never perfectly recovered.”
“No sooner had this bustling little man been blown by a whiff of fortune into the seat of government, than he called together his council and delivered a very animated speech on the affairs of the government; ... and here he soon worked himself into a fearful rage against the Yankees, whom he compared to the Gauls who desolated Rome, and to the Goths and Vandals who overran the fairest plains of Europe.... Having thus artfully wrought up his tale of terror to a climax, he assumed a self-satisfied look, and declared with a nod of knowing import that he had taken measures to put a final stop to these encroachments,—that he had been obliged to have recourse to a dreadful engine of warfare, lately invented, awful in its effects but authorized by direful necessity; in a word, he was resolved to conquer the Yankees—by Proclamation.”
Washington Irving’s political relations were those commonly known as Burrite, through his brother Peter, who edited in Burr’s interest the “Morning Chronicle.” Antipathy to Jefferson was a natural result, and Irving’s satire on the President was the more interesting because the subject offered temptations for ill-tempered sarcasm such as spoiled Federalist humor. The Knickerbocker sketch of Jefferson was worth comparing with Federalist modes of expressing the same ideas:—
“The great defect of Wilhelmus Kieft’s policy was that though no man could be more ready to stand forth in an hour of emergency, yet he was so intent upon guarding the national pocket that he suffered the enemy to break its head.... All this was a remote consequence of his education at the Hague; where, having acquired a smattering of knowledge, he was ever a great conner of indexes, continually dipping into books without ever studying to the bottom of any subject, so that he had the scum of all kinds of authors fermenting in his pericranium. In some of these titlepage researches he unluckily stumbled over a grand political cabalistic word, which with his customary facility he immediately incorporated into his great scheme of government, to the irretrievable injury and delusion of the honest province of Nieuw Nederlands, and the eternal misleading of all experimental rulers.”
Little was wanting to make such a sketch bitter; but Irving seemed to have the power of deadening venom by a mere trick of hand. Readers of the “History,” after a few years had passed, rarely remembered the satire, or supposed that the story contained it. The humor and the style remained to characterize a school.
The originality of the Knickerbocker humor was the more remarkable because it was allowed to stand alone. Irving published nothing else of consequence until 1819, and then, abandoning his early style, inclined to imitate Addison and Steele, although his work was hardly the less original. Irving preceded Walter Scott, whose “Waverley” appeared in 1814, and “Guy Mannering” in 1815; and if either author could be said to influence the other, the influence of Diedrich Knickerbocker on Scott was more evident than that of “Waverley” on Irving.
In the face of the spontaneous burst of genius which at that moment gave to English literature and art a character distinct even in its own experience, Americans might have been excused for making no figure at all. Other periods produced one poet at a time, and measured originality by single poems; or satisfied their ambition by prose or painting of occasional merit. The nineteenth century began in England with genius as plenty as it was usually rare. To Beattie, Cowper, and Burns, succeeded Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Crabbe, Campbell, Charles Lamb, Moore, Shelley, and Keats. The splendor of this combination threw American and even French talent into the shade, and defied hope of rivalry; but the American mind, as far as it went, showed both freshness and originality. The divergence of American from English standards seemed insignificant to critics who required, as they commonly did, a national literature founded on some new conception,—such as the Shawanee or Aztecs could be supposed to suggest; but to those who expected only a slow variation from European types, the difference was well marked. Channing and Irving were American in literature, as Calhoun and Webster were American in politics. They were the product of influences as peculiar to the country as those which produced Fulton and his steamboat.