Washington Irving

by Henry Walcott Boynton

Pretty soon Irving himself was leaving America. In February, 1842, he was startled from the home quiet of Sunnyside by a summons which he could not disregard. Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, had secured his appointment as Minister to Spain. The Senate confirmed it almost by acclamation, and letters came from various quarters urging him to accept it. He could not doubt that the wish was general. But it was very hard for him to leave home and America again. For some time after accepting the post he was plunged into a dejection which seemed laughable to himself. "The crowning honor of his life," he admitted, had come to him, and he could only groan under it.

"'It is hard, very hard,' he half murmured to himself, half to me; yet he added whimsically enough, being struck with the seeming absurdity of such a view, 'I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb'" (P. M. Irving).

In April he sailed from New York, and made a leisurely journey by way of England and France, not reaching Madrid till the end of July. Europe had lost its old charm. Many places reminded him painfully of the favorite brother Peter who had shared his first impressions of them, and whose loss was one of the keenest griefs of his life. "My visit to Europe has by no means the charm of former visits," he wrote from Paris; "scenes and objects have no longer the effect of novelty with me. I am no longer curious to see great sights or great people, and have been so long accustomed to a life of quiet, that I find the turmoil of the world becomes irksome to me. Then I have a house of my own, a little domestic world, created in a manner by my own hand, which I have left behind, and which is continually haunting my thoughts, and coming in contrast with the noisy, tumultuous, heartless world in which I am called to mingle. However, I am somewhat of a philosopher, and can accommodate myself to changes, so I shall endeavor to resign myself to the splendor of courts and the conversation of courtiers, comforting myself with the thought that the time will come when I shall once more return to sweet little Sunnyside, and be able to sit on a stone fence, and talk about politics and rural affairs with Neighbor Forkel and Uncle Brom."

At Madrid he very soon found himself too much occupied for the literary work he had counted on. He had accepted the place under the impression that his duties would not greatly interfere with the writing of the "Life of Washington," on which he was then fairly launched. But from the beginning he found the situation in Spain unexpectedly absorbing. It was the usual Spanish situation, to be sure: a designing pretender, a child monarch, a court honeycombed with intrigue, and a people ready for anything spectacular. When Irving was presented to the young queen, she was closely guarded. "On ascending the grand staircase, we found the portal at the head of it, opening into the royal suite of apartments, still bearing the marks of the midnight attack upon the palace in October last, when an attempt was made to get possession of the persons of the little queen and her sister, to carry them off.... The marble casements of the doors had been shattered in several places, and the double doors themselves pierced all over with bullet-holes, from the musketry that played upon them from the staircase during that eventful night. What must have been the feelings of those poor children, on listening from their apartment to the horrid tumult, the outcries of a furious multitude, and the reports of fire-arms, echoing and reverberating through the vaulted halls and spacious courts of the immense edifice, and dubious whether their own lives were not the object of the assault!" Such an appeal to Irving's sympathy and chivalry was enough to deprive the situation of its quality of opéra-bouffe.

Presently an insurrection takes place in Barcelona. The regent hurries off to quell it, and Irving's letters are full of the pomp and circumstance of war. The regent is successful, and returns apparently firmer than ever in power. But a few months later the trouble breaks out again, more seriously; Madrid is placed in a state of siege, and martial law declared. The life of the queen is thought to be in danger, and the diplomatic corps, headed by Irving, offers its services for her protection. Finally the regent is driven out of power, and blows are once again succeeded by intrigue. Such, briefly, was the character of the little drama in which the quiet American author was to take a significant part, during his whole ministry. This Spanish experience is fully recorded in his family letters. He was always a voluminous letter-writer; during this period he is fairly encyclopedic. A single letter to his sister fills thirteen closely printed pages of his nephew's biography. His official dispatches, too, were very full and thorough. Webster valued them particularly, and remarked that he "always laid aside every other correspondence to read a diplomatic dispatch from Mr. Irving." He had time, too, for many charming chatty letters to the nieces at Sunnyside. Here is a Thackerayish passage from one of them: "You seem to pity the poor little queen, shut up with her sister like two princesses in a fairy tale, in a great, grand, dreary palace, and wonder whether she would not like to change her situation for a nice little cottage on the Hudson? Perhaps she would, Kate, if she knew anything of the gayeties of cottage life; if she had ever been with us at a picnic, or driven out in the shandry-dan with the two roans, and James, in his slipshod hat, for a coachman, or yotted in the Dream, or sang in the Tarrytown choir, or shopped at Tommy Dean's; but, poor thing! she would not know how to set about enjoying herself. She would not think of appearing at church without a whole train of the Miss ——s and the Miss ——s, and the Miss ——s, as maids of honor, nor drive through Sleepy Hollow except in a coach and six, with a cloud of dust, and a troop of horsemen in glittering armor. So I think, Kate, we must be content with pitying her, and leaving her in ignorance of the comparative desolateness of her situation."

In 1842, Irving suffered another of those petty persecutions which he was not thick-skinned enough to endure without suffering, nor confident enough to ignore. The charges were of the most ordinary sort, and advanced by men of little weight: he had appropriated material without giving due credit for it, and he had puffed his own work. Their only claim upon our notice lies in the fact that Irving thought it worth while to confute them at length. He was perhaps especially sensitive to critical attacks at this time. His income from literary property had nearly ceased. Some of his books were out of print, and the rest were having comparatively little sale. A wave of indifference had overtaken his public. "Everything behind me seems to have turned to chaff and stubble," he wrote. "And if I desire any further profits from literature, it must be by the further exercise of my pen." It is characteristic of his modesty that he was disposed to accept this momentary neglect as final. He planned to revise all his works, in the hope of finding a renewed market for them later, but evidently expected little.

A letter to Brevoort from Bordeaux dated November, 1843, accounts for the first break in his Madrid residence: "I am now on my way back to my post, after between two and three months' absence. I set out in pursuit of health, and thought a little traveling and a change of air would 'make me my own man again'; but I was laid by the heels at Paris by a recurrence of my malady, and have just escaped out of the doctor's hands.... This indisposition has been a sad check upon all my plans. I had hoped, by zealous employment of all the leisure afforded me at Madrid, to accomplish one or two literary tasks which I have in hand.... A year, however, has now been lost to me, and a precious year, at my time of life. The 'Life of Washington,' and indeed all my literary tasks, have remained suspended; and my pen has remained idle, excepting now and then in writing a dispatch to Government, or scrawling a letter to my family. In the mean time the income which I used to derive from farming out my writings has died away, and my moneyed investments yield scarce any interest.... However, thank God, my health and with it my capacity for work are returning. I shall soon again have pen in hand, and hope to get two or three good years of literary labor out of myself."

After his return to Spain he was again laid by. He was disappointed, but not discouraged, for the self-pity of the invalid never deprived him of his strong man's humor. "When I drive out and notice the opening of spring, I feel sometimes almost moved to tears at the thought that in a little while I shall again have the use of my limbs, and be able to ramble about and enjoy these green fields and meadows. It seems almost too great a privilege. I am afraid when I once more sally forth and walk the streets, I shall feel like a boy with a new coat, who thinks everybody will turn around to look at him. 'Bless my soul, how that gentleman has the use of his legs!'" A few days after this was written, he got word that one of his friends had just undergone a successful surgical operation. "God bless these surgeons and dentists!" he exclaims. "May their good deeds be returned upon them a thousand fold! May they have the felicity, in the next world, to have successful operations performed upon them to all eternity!"

By this time he had come to take Spanish politics rather too seriously. The insincerity and profligacy of the Spanish character, the corruption of the court and state, fairly sicken him: "The last ten or twelve years of my life," he writes, "have shown me so much of the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow men, and look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination, and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be." His sense of responsibility for the young queen oppressed him, and he looked forward impatiently to the hour of his release.

A year later he had gained far better health and spirits. On his sixty-second birthday—"I caught myself bounding upstairs three steps at a time, to the astonishment of the porter, and checked myself, recollecting that it was not the pace befitting a minister and a man of my years." His mental life had, however, caught the sober tone of age. "I am now at that time of life when the mind has a stock of recollections on which to employ itself; and though these may sometimes be of a melancholy nature, yet it is a 'sweet-souled melancholy,' mellowed and softened by the operation of time, and has no bitterness in it.... When I was young, my imagination was always in the advance, picturing out the future, and building castles in the air; now memory comes in the place of imagination, and I look back over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling, which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all their asperity in the distance."