The Project Gutenberg EBook of Washington Irving, by Charles Dudley Warner
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Title: Washington Irving
Author: Charles Dudley Warner
Release Date: June 4, 2005 [EBook #15984]
Language: English
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[Illustration]
American Men of Letters.
WASHINGTON IRVING.
BY
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
FIFTH THOUSAND.
BOSTON:
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
11 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET, NEW YORK.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1884.
Copyright, 1881,
BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
_All rights reserved_.
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge:_
Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
PRELIMINARY 1
CHAPTER II.
BOYHOOD 21
CHAPTER III.
MANHOOD: FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE 31
CHAPTER IV.
SOCIETY AND "SALMAGUNDI" 43
CHAPTER V.
THE KNICKERBOCKER PERIOD 58
CHAPTER VI.
LIFE IN EUROPE: LITERARY ACTIVITY 94
CHAPTER VII.
IN SPAIN 141
CHAPTER VIII.
RETURN TO AMERICA: SUNNYSIDE: THE MISSION TO
MADRID 158
CHAPTER IX.
THE CHARACTERISTIC WORKS 190
CHAPTER X.
LAST YEARS: THE CHARACTER OF HIS LITERATURE 282
WASHINGTON IRVING.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
It is over twenty years since the death of Washington Irving removed
that personal presence which is always a powerful, and sometimes the
sole, stimulus to the sale of an author's books, and which strongly
affects the contemporary judgment of their merits. It is nearly a
century since his birth, which was almost coeval with that of the
Republic, for it took place the year the British troops evacuated the
city of New York, and only a few months before General Washington
marched in at the head of the Continental army and took possession of
the metropolis. For fifty years Irving charmed and instructed the
American people, and was the author who held, on the whole, the first
place in their affections. As he was the first to lift American
literature into the popular respect of Europe, so for a long time he was
the chief representative of the American name in the world of letters.
During this period probably no citizen of the Republic, except the
Father of his Country, had so wide a reputation as his namesake,
Washington Irving.
It is time to inquire what basis this great reputation had in enduring
qualities, what portion of it was due to local and favoring
circumstances, and to make an impartial study of the author's literary
rank and achievement.
The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and
fluctuating of all. The popularity of an author seems to depend quite as
much upon fashion or whim, as upon a change in taste or in literary
form. Not only is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity is
perpetually revising its opinion. We are accustomed to say that the
final rank of an author is settled by the slow consensus of mankind in
disregard of the critics; but the rank is after all determined by the
few best minds of any given age, and the popular judgment has very
little to do with it. Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly
valueless criterion of merit. The settling of high rank even in the
popular mind does not necessarily give currency; the so-called best
authors are not those most widely read at any given time. Some who
attain the position of classics are subject to variations in popular and
even in scholarly favor or neglect. It happens to the princes of
literature to encounter periods of varying duration when their names are
revered and their books are not read. The growth, not to say the
fluctuation, of Shakespeare's popularity is one of the curiosities of
literary history. Worshiped by his contemporaries, apostrophized by
Milton only fourteen years after his death as the "dear son of memory,
great heir to fame,"--
"So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"--
he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes
of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some
that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper
entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to
the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach
of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered from all its
neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars--I do
not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text--been proportioned to
his preëminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among
foreign peoples.
There are already signs that we are not to accept as the final judgment
upon the English contemporaries of Irving the currency their writings
have now. In the case of Walter Scott, although there is already visible
a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by
this generation as he was by the last. This faint reaction is no doubt a
sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical
speculation. An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another,
and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its
direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy.
The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel, or
Schopenhauer. The humanitarian novel, the fictions of passion, of
realism, of doubt, the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of
unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting
attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age
that is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural
and the material, the ideal and the real. It would be natural if in such
a time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should
be not so much heeded as the more strident voices. Yet when the passing
fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion of another, that which
is most acceptable to the thought and feeling of the present may be
without an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be
read as Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be
read. It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction
worthy to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who
have faithfully painted the manners of their own time.
Irving has shared the neglect of the writers of his generation. It
would be strange, even in America, if this were not so. The development
of American literature (using the term in its broadest sense) in the
past forty years is greater than could have been expected in a nation
which had its ground to clear, its wealth to win, and its new
governmental experiment to adjust; if we confine our view to the last
twenty years, the national production is vast in amount and encouraging
in quality. It suffices to say of it here, in a general way, that the
most vigorous activity has been in the departments of history, of
applied science, and the discussion of social and economic problems.
Although pure literature has made considerable gains, the main
achievement has been in other directions. The audience of the literary
artist has been less than that of the reporter of affairs and
discoveries and the special correspondent. The age is too busy, too
harassed, to have time for literature; and enjoyment of writings like
those of Irving depends upon leisure of mind. The mass of readers have
cared less for form than for novelty and news and the satisfying of a
recently awakened curiosity. This was inevitable in an era of
journalism, one marked by the marvelous results attained in the fields
of religion, science, and art, by the adoption of the comparative
method. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the vigor and
intellectual activity of the age than a living English writer, who has
traversed and illuminated almost every province of modern thought,
controversy, and scholarship; but who supposes that Mr. Gladstone has
added anything to permanent literature? He has been an immense force in
his own time, and his influence the next generation will still feel and
acknowledge, while it reads not the writings of Mr. Gladstone but may be
those of the author of "Henry Esmond" and the biographer of "Rab and his
Friends." De Quincey divides literature into two sorts, the literature
of power and the literature of knowledge. The latter is of necessity for
to-day only, and must be revised to-morrow. The definition has scarcely
De Quincey's usual verbal felicity, but we can apprehend the distinction
he intended to make.
It is to be noted also, and not with regard to Irving only, that the
attention of young and old readers has been so occupied and distracted
by the flood of new books, written with the single purpose of satisfying
the wants of the day, produced and distributed with marvelous cheapness
and facility that the standard works of approved literature remain for
the most part unread upon the shelves. Thirty years ago Irving was much
read in America by young people and his clear style helped to form a
good taste and correct literary habits. It is not so now. The
manufacturers of books, periodicals, and newspapers for the young keep
the rising generation fully occupied, with a result to its taste and
mental fibre which, to say the least of it, must be regarded with some
apprehension. The "plant," in the way of money and writing industry
invested in the production of juvenile literature, is so large and is so
permanent an interest, that it requires more discriminating
consideration than can be given to it in a passing paragraph.
Besides this, and with respect to Irving in particular, there has been
in America a criticism--sometimes called the destructive, sometimes the
Donnybrook Fair--that found "earnestness" the only thing in the world
amusing, that brought to literary art the test of utility, and
disparaged what is called the "Knickerbocker School" (assuming Irving to
be the head of it) as wanting in purpose and virility, a merely romantic
development of the post-Revolutionary period. And it has been to some
extent the fashion to damn with faint admiration the pioneer if not the
creator of American literature as the "genial" Irving.
Before I pass to an outline of the career of this representative
American author, it is necessary to refer for a moment to certain
periods, more or less marked, in our literature. I do not include in it
the works of writers either born in England or completely English in
training, method, and tradition, showing nothing distinctively American
in their writings except the incidental subject. The first authors whom
we may regard as characteristic of the new country--leaving out the
productions of speculative theology--devoted their genius to politics.
It is in the political writings immediately preceding and following the
Revolution--such as those of Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin,
Jefferson--that the new birth of a nation of original force and ideas is
declared. It has been said, and I think the statement can be maintained,
that for any parallel to those treatises on the nature of government, in
respect to originality and vigor, we must go back to classic times. But
literature, that is, literature which is an end in itself and not a
means to something else, did not exist in America before Irving. Some
foreshadowings (the autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not
published till 1817) of its coming may be traced, but there can be no
question that his writings were the first that bore the national
literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and
opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the
entrance of America upon the literary field. For some time he was our
only man of letters who had a reputation beyond seas.
Irving was not, however, the first American who made literature a
profession and attempted to live on its fruits. This distinction belongs
to Charles Brockden Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, January 17,
1771, and, before the appearance in a newspaper of Irving's juvenile
essays in 1802, had published several romances, which were hailed as
original and striking productions by his contemporaries, and even
attracted attention in England. As late as 1820 a prominent British
review gives Mr. Brown the first rank in our literature as an original
writer and characteristically American. The reader of to-day who has the
curiosity to inquire into the correctness of this opinion will, if he is
familiar with the romances of the eighteenth century, find little
originality in Brown's stories, and nothing distinctively American. The
figures who are moved in them seem to be transported from the pages of
foreign fiction to the New World, not as it was, but as it existed in
the minds of European sentimentalists.
Mr. Brown received a fair education in a classical school in his native
city, and studied law, which he abandoned on the threshold of practice,
as Irving did, and for the same reason. He had the genuine literary
impulse, which he obeyed against all the arguments and entreaties of his
friends. Unfortunately, with a delicate physical constitution he had a
mind of romantic sensibility, and in the comparative inaction imposed by
his frail health he indulged in visionary speculation, and in solitary
wanderings which developed the habit of sentimental musing. It was
natural that such reveries should produce morbid romances. The tone of
them is that of the unwholesome fiction of his time, in which the
"seducer" is a prominent and recognized character in social life, and
female virtue is the frail sport of opportunity. Brown's own life was
fastidiously correct, but it is a curious commentary upon his estimate
of the natural power of resistance to vice in his time, that he regarded
his feeble health as good fortune, since it protected him from the
temptations of youth and virility.
While he was reading law he constantly exercised his pen in the
composition of essays, some of which were published under the title of
the "Rhapsodist;" but it was not until 1797 that his career as an author
began, by the publication of "Alcuin: a Dialogue on the Rights of
Women." This and the romances which followed it show the powerful
influence upon him of the school of fiction of William Godwin, and the
movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader.
The period of social and political ferment during which "Alcuin" was put
forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height
in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48. In "Alcuin" are
anticipated most of the subsequent discussions on the right of women to
property and to self-control, and the desirability of revising the
marriage relation. The injustice of any more enduring union than that
founded upon the inclination of the hour is as ingeniously urged in
"Alcuin" as it has been in our own day.
Mr. Brown's reputation rests upon six romances: "Wieland," "Ormond,"
"Arthur Mervyn," "Edgar Huntly," "Clara Howard," and "Jane Talbot." The
first five were published in the interval between the spring of 1798 and
the summer of 1801, in which he completed his thirtieth year. "Jane
Talbot" appeared somewhat later. In scenery and character, these
romances are entirely unreal. There is in them an affectation of
psychological purpose which is not very well sustained, and a somewhat
clumsy introduction of supernatural machinery. Yet they have a power of
engaging the attention in the rapid succession of startling and uncanny
incidents and in adventures in which the horrible is sometimes
dangerously near the ludicrous. Brown had not a particle of humor. Of
literary art there is little, of invention considerable; and while the
style is to a certain extent unformed and immature, it is neither feeble
nor obscure, and admirably serves the author's purpose of creating what
the children call a "crawly" impression. There is undeniable power in
many of his scenes, notably in the descriptions of the yellow fever in
Philadelphia, found in the romance of "Arthur Mervyn." There is,
however, over all of them a false and pallid light; his characters are
seen in a spectral atmosphere. If a romance is to be judged not by
literary rules, but by its power of making an impression upon the mind,
such power as a ghastly story has, told by the chimney-corner on a
tempestuous night, then Mr. Brown's romances cannot be dismissed without
a certain recognition. But they never represented anything
distinctively American, and their influence upon American literature is
scarcely discernible.
Subsequently Mr. Brown became interested in political subjects, and
wrote upon them with vigor and sagacity. He was the editor of two
short-lived literary periodicals which were nevertheless useful in their
day: "The Monthly Magazine and American Review," begun in New York in
the spring of 1798, and ending in the autumn of 1800; and "The Literary
Magazine and American Register," which was established in Philadelphia
in 1803. It was for this periodical that Mr. Brown, who visited Irving
in that year, sought in vain to enlist the service of the latter, who,
then a youth of nineteen, had a little reputation as the author of some
humorous essays in the "Morning Chronicle" newspaper.
Charles Brockden Brown died, the victim of a lingering consumption, in
1810, at the age of thirty-nine. In pausing for a moment upon his
incomplete and promising career, we should not forget to recall the
strong impression he made upon his contemporaries as a man of genius,
the testimony to the charm of his conversation and the goodness of his
heart, nor the pioneer service he rendered to letters before the
provincial fetters were at all loosened.
The advent of Cooper, Bryant, and Halleck, was some twenty years after
the recognition of Irving, but thereafter the stars thicken in our
literary sky, and when in 1832 Irving returned from his long sojourn in
Europe, he found an immense advance in fiction, poetry, and historical
composition. American literature was not only born,--it was able to go
alone. We are not likely to overestimate the stimulus to this movement
given by Irving's example, and by his success abroad. His leadership is
recognized in the respectful attitude towards him of all his
contemporaries in America. And the cordiality with which he gave help
whenever it was asked, and his eagerness to acknowledge merit in others,
secured him the affection of all the literary class, which is popularly
supposed to have a rare appreciation of the defects of fellow craftsmen.
The period from 1830 to 1860 was that of our greatest purely literary
achievement, and, indeed, most of the greater names of to-day were
familiar before 1850. Conspicuous exceptions are Motley and Parkman and
a few belles-lettres writers, whose novels and stories mark a distinct
literary transition since the War of the Rebellion. In the period from
1845 to 1860, there was a singular development of sentimentalism; it had
been growing before, it did not altogether disappear at the time named,
and it was so conspicuous that this may properly be called the
sentimental era in our literature. The causes of it, and its relation to
our changing national character, are worthy the study of the historian.
In politics, the discussion of constitutional questions, of tariffs and
finance, had given way to moral agitations. Every political movement was
determined by its relation to slavery. Eccentricities of all sorts were
developed. It was the era of "transcendentalism" in New England, of
"come-outers" there and elsewhere, of communistic experiments, of reform
notions about marriage, about woman's dress, about diet; through the
open door of abolitionism women appeared upon its platform, demanding a
various emancipation; the agitation for total abstinence from
intoxicating drinks got under full headway, urged on moral rather than
on the statistical and scientific grounds of to-day; reformed drunkards
went about from town to town depicting to applauding audiences the
horrors of delirium tremens,--one of these peripatetics led about with
him a goat, perhaps as a scapegoat and sin-offering; tobacco was as
odious as rum; and I remember that George Thompson, the eloquent apostle
of emancipation, during his tour in this country, when on one occasion
he was the cynosure of a protracted antislavery meeting at Peterboro,
the home of Gerrit Smith, deeply offended some of his co-workers, and
lost the admiration of many of his admirers, the maiden devotees of
green tea, by his use of snuff. To "lift up the voice" and wear longhair
were signs of devotion to a purpose.
In that seething time, the lighter literature took a sentimental tone,
and either spread itself in manufactured fine writing, or lapsed into a
reminiscent and melting mood. In a pretty affectation, we were asked to
meditate upon the old garret, the deserted hearth, the old letters, the
old well-sweep, the dead baby, the little shoes; we were put into a mood
in which we were defenseless against the lukewarm flood of the Tupperean
Philosophy. Even the newspapers caught the bathetic tone. Every "local"
editor breathed his woe over the incidents of the police court, the
falling leaf, the tragedies of the boarding-house, in the most
lachrymose periods he could command, and let us never lack fine writing,
whatever might be the dearth of news. I need not say how suddenly and
completely this affectation was laughed out of sight by the coming of
the "humorous" writer, whose existence is justified by the excellent
service he performed in clearing the tearful atmosphere. His keen and
mocking method, which is quite distinct from the humor of Goldsmith and
Irving, and differs, in degree at least, from the comic almanac
exaggeration and coarseness which preceded it, puts its foot on every
bud of sentiment, holds few things sacred, and refuses to regard
anything in life seriously. But it has no mercy for any sham.
I refer to this sentimental era--remembering that its literary
manifestation was only a surface disease, and recognizing fully the
value of the great moral movement in purifying the national
life--because many regard its literary weakness as a legitimate
outgrowth of the Knickerbocker School, and hold Irving in a manner
responsible for it. But I find nothing in the manly sentiment and true
tenderness of Irving to warrant the sentimental gush of his followers,
who missed his corrective humor as completely as they failed to catch
his literary art. Whatever note of localism there was in the
Knickerbocker School, however _dilettante_ and unfruitful it was, it was
not the legitimate heir of the broad and eclectic genius of Irving. The
nature of that genius we shall see in his life.
CHAPTER II.
BOYHOOD.
Washington Irving was born in the city of New York, April 3, 1783. He
was the eighth son of William and Sarah Irving, and the youngest of
eleven children, three of whom died in infancy. His parents, though of
good origin, began life in humble circumstances. His father was born on
the island of Shapinska. His family, one of the most respectable in
Scotland, traced its descent from William De Irwyn, the secretary and
armor-bearer of Robert Bruce; but at the time of the birth of William
Irving its fortunes had gradually decayed, and the lad sought his
livelihood, according to the habit of the adventurous Orkney Islanders,
on the sea.
It was during the French War, and while he was serving as a petty
officer in an armed packet plying between Falmouth and New York, that he
met Sarah Sanders, a beautiful girl, the only daughter of John and Anna
Sanders, who had the distinction of being the granddaughter of an
English curate. The youthful pair were married in 1761, and two years
after embarked for New York, where they landed July 18, 1763. Upon
settling in New York William Irving quit the sea and took to trade, in
which he was successful until his business was broken up by the
Revolutionary War. In this contest he was a staunch Whig, and suffered
for his opinions at the hands of the British occupants of the city, and
both he and his wife did much to alleviate the misery of the American
prisoners. In this charitable ministry his wife, who possessed a rarely
generous and sympathetic nature, was especially zealous, supplying the
prisoners with food from her own table, visiting those who were ill, and
furnishing them with clothing and other necessaries.
Washington was born in a house on William Street, about half-way between
Fulton and John; the following year the family moved across the way into
one of the quaint structures of the time, its gable end with attic
window towards the street, the fashion of which, and very likely the
bricks, came from Holland. In this homestead the lad grew up, and it was
not pulled down till 1849, ten years before his death. The patriot army
occupied the city. "Washington's work is ended," said the mother, "and
the child shall be named after him." When the first President was again
in New York, the first seat of the new government, a Scotch maid-servant
of the family, catching the popular enthusiasm, one day followed the
hero into a shop and presented the lad to him. "Please, your honor,"
said Lizzie, all aglow, "here's a bairn was named after you." And the
grave Virginian placed his hand on the boy's head and gave him his
blessing. The touch could not have been more efficacious, though it
might have lingered longer, if he had known he was propitiating his
future biographer.
New York at the time of our author's birth was a rural city of about
twenty-three thousand inhabitants, clustered about the Battery. It did
not extend northward to the site of the present City Hall Park; and
beyond, then and for several years afterwards, were only country
residences, orchards, and corn-fields. The city was half burned down
during the war, and had emerged from it in a dilapidated condition.
There was still a marked separation between the Dutch and the English
residents, though the Irvings seem to have been on terms of intimacy
with the best of both nationalities. The habits of living were
primitive; the manners were agreeably free; conviviality at the table
was the fashion, and strong expletives had not gone out of use in
conversation. Society was the reverse of intellectual: the aristocracy
were the merchants and traders; what literary culture found expression
was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished with
Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the
relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their
gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true
progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established
in 1732, and a theatre had existed since 1750. Although the town had a
rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling lanes
and roads, and the water-pumps in the middle of the streets, it had the
aspirations of a city, and already much of the metropolitan air.
These were the surroundings in which the boy's literary talent was to
develop. His father was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a sedate,
God-fearing man, with the strict severity of the Scotch Covenanter,
serious in his intercourse with his family, without sympathy in the
amusements of his children; he was not without tenderness in his nature,
but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,--a man of high
character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates. He endeavored
to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no
room in their lives for triviality. One of the two weekly half-holidays
was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three
church services on Sunday was the reading of "Pilgrim's Progress." This
cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for
the more lovingly demonstrative and impulsive character of the mother,
whose gentle nature and fine intellect won the tender veneration of her
children. Of the father they stood in awe; his conscientious piety
failed to waken any religious sensibility in them, and they revolted
from a teaching which seemed to regard everything that was pleasant as
wicked. The mother, brought up an Episcopalian, conformed to the
religious forms and worship of her husband but she was never in sympathy
with his rigid views. The children were repelled from the creed of their
father, and subsequently all of them except one became attached to the
Episcopal Church. Washington, in order to make sure of his escape, and
feel safe while he was still constrained to attend his father's church,
went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age, and received the rite
of confirmation. The boy was full of vivacity, drollery, and innocent
mischief. His sportiveness and disinclination to religious seriousness
gave his mother some anxiety, and she would look at him, says his
biographer, with a half mournful admiration, and exclaim, "O Washington!
if you were only good!" He had a love of music, which became later in
life a passion, and great fondness for the theatre. The stolen delight
of the theatre he first tasted in company with a boy who was somewhat
his senior, but destined to be his literary comrade,--James K. Paulding,
whose sister was the wife of Irving's brother William. Whenever he could
afford this indulgence, he stole away early to the theatre in John
Street, remained until it was time to return to the family prayers at
nine, after which he would retire to his room, slip through his window
and down the roof to a back alley, and return to enjoy the after-piece.
Young Irving's school education was desultory, pursued under several
more or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen.
The teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity; he
studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the
classics. The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no
doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him.
He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating
about, in "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad;" at ten he was inspired by a
translation of "Orlando Furioso;" he devoured books of voyages and
travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities
were exercised in the composition of childish plays. The fact seems to
be that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he
used to wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships
departing on long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth.
His brothers Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is
probable that Washington would have had the same advantage if he had not
shown a disinclination to methodical study. At the age of sixteen he
entered a law office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired
either a taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat
in the law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress in
his self-culture; but he liked rambling and society quite as well as
books. In 1798 we find him passing a summer holiday in Westchester
County, and exploring with his gun the Sleepy Hollow region which he was
afterwards to make an enchanted realm; and in 1800 he made his first
voyage up the Hudson, the beauties of which he was the first to
celebrate, on a visit to a married sister who lived in the Mohawk
Valley. In 1802 he became a law clerk in the office of Josiah Ogden
Hoffman, and began that enduring intimacy with the refined and charming
Hoffman family which was so deeply to influence all his life. His health
had always been delicate, and his friends were now alarmed by symptoms
of pulmonary weakness. This physical disability no doubt had much to do
with his disinclination to severe study. For the next two or three years
much time was consumed in excursions up the Hudson and the Mohawk, and
in adventurous journeys as far as the wilds of Ogdensburg and to
Montreal, to the great improvement of his physical condition, and in the
enjoyment of the gay society of Albany, Schenectady, Ballston, and
Saratoga Springs. These explorations and visits gave him material for
future use, and exercised his pen in agreeable correspondence; but his
tendency at this time, and for several years afterwards, was to the idle
life of a man of society. Whether the literary impulse which was born in
him would have ever insisted upon any but an occasional and fitful
expression, except for the necessities of his subsequent condition, is
doubtful.
Irving's first literary publication was a series of letters, signed
Jonathan Oldstyle, contributed in 1802 to the "Morning Chronicle," a
newspaper then recently established by his brother Peter. The attention
that these audacious satires of the theatre, the actors, and their
audience attracted is evidence of the literary poverty of the period.
The letters are open imitations of the "Spectator" and the "Tatler," and
although sharp upon local follies are of no consequence at present
except as foreshadowing the sensibility and quiet humor of the future
author, and his chivalrous devotion to woman. What is worthy of note is
that a boy of nineteen should turn aside from his caustic satire to
protest against the cruel and unmanly habit of jesting at ancient
maidens. It was enough for him that they are women, and possess the
strongest claim upon our admiration, tenderness, and protection.
CHAPTER III.
MANHOOD: FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE.
Irving's health, always delicate, continued so much impaired when he
came of age, in 1804, that his brothers determined to send him to
Europe. On the 19th of May he took passage for Bordeaux in a sailing
vessel, which reached the mouth of the Garonne on the 25th of June. His
consumptive appearance when he went on board caused the captain to say
to himself, "There's a chap who will go overboard before we get across;"
but his condition was much improved by the voyage.
He stayed six weeks at Bordeaux to improve himself in the language, and
then set out for the Mediterranean. In the diligence he had some merry
companions, and the party amused itself on the way. It was their habit
to stroll about the towns in which they stopped, and talk with whomever
they met. Among his companions was a young French officer and an
eccentric, garrulous doctor from America. At Tonneins, on the Garonne,
they entered a house where a number of girls were quilting. The girls
gave Irving a needle and set him to work. He could not understand their
patois, and they could not comprehend his bad French, and they got on
very merrily. At last the little doctor told them that the interesting
young man was an English prisoner whom the French officer had in
custody. Their merriment at once gave place to pity. "Ah! le pauvre
garçon!" said one to another; "he is merry, however, in all his
trouble." "And what will they do with him?" asked a young woman. "Oh,
nothing of consequence," replied the doctor; "perhaps shoot him, or cut
off his head." The good souls were much distressed; they brought him
wine, loaded his pockets with fruit, and bade him good-by with a hundred
benedictions. Over forty years after, Irving made a detour, on his way
from Madrid to Paris, to visit Tonneins, drawn thither solely by the
recollection of this incident, vaguely hoping perhaps to apologize to
the tender-hearted villagers for the imposition. His conscience, had
always pricked him for it; "It was a shame," he said, "to leave them
with such painful impressions." The quilting party had dispersed by that
time. "I believe I recognized the house," he says; "and I saw two or
three old women who might once have formed part of the merry group of
girls; but I doubt whether they recognized, in the stout elderly
gentleman, thus rattling in his carriage through their streets, the pale
young English prisoner of forty years since."
Bonaparte was emperor. The whole country was full of suspicion. The
police suspected the traveler, notwithstanding his passport, of being an
Englishman and a spy, and dogged him at every step. He arrived at
Avignon, full of enthusiasm at the thought of seeing the tomb of Laura.
"Judge of my surprise," he writes, "my disappointment, and my
indignation, when I was told that the church, tomb, and all were utterly
demolished in the time of the Revolution. Never did the Revolution, its
authors and its consequences, receive a more hearty and sincere
execration than at that moment. Throughout the whole of my journey I
had found reason to exclaim against it for depriving me of some valuable
curiosity or celebrated monument, but this was the severest
disappointment it had yet occasioned." This view of the Revolution is
very characteristic of Irving, and perhaps the first that would occur to
a man of letters. The journey was altogether disagreeable, even to a
traveler used to the rough jaunts in an American wilderness: the inns
were miserable; dirt, noise, and insolence reigned without control. But
it never was our author's habit to stroke the world the wrong way: "When
I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to
suit my dinner." And he adds: "There is nothing I dread more than to be
taken for one of the Smell-fungi of this world. I therefore endeavor to
be pleased with everything about me, and with the masters, mistresses,
and servants of the inns, particularly when I perceive they have 'all
the dispositions in the world' to serve me; as Sterne says, 'It is
enough for heaven and ought to be enough for me.'"
The traveler was detained at Marseilles, and five weeks at Nice, on one
frivolous pretext of the police or another, and did not reach Genoa
till the 20th of October. At Genoa there was a delightful society, and
Irving seems to have been more attracted by that than by the historical
curiosities. His health was restored, and his spirits recovered
elasticity in the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to
whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from
them. The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls
were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa
seem like home to him was his intimacy with a few charming families,
among whom he mentions those of Mrs. Bird, Madame Gabriac, and Lady
Shaftesbury. From the latter he experienced the most cordial and
unreserved friendship; she greatly interested herself in his future, and
furnished him with letters from herself and the nobility to persons of
the first distinction in Florence, Rome, and Naples.
Late in December Irving sailed for Sicily in a Genoese packet. Off the
island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little pickaroon,
with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, in
poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and stilettos
and pistols stuck in their waistbands. The pirates thoroughly ransacked
the vessel, opened all the trunks and portmanteaus, but found little
that they wanted except brandy and provisions. In releasing the vessel,
the ragamuffins seem to have had a touch of humor, for they gave the
captain a "receipt" for what they had taken, and an order on the British
consul at Messina to pay for the same. This old-time courtesy was hardly
appreciated at the moment.
Irving passed a couple of months in Sicily, exploring with some
thoroughness the ruins, and making several perilous inland trips, for
the country was infested by banditti. One journey from Syracuse through
the centre of the island revealed more wretchedness than Irving supposed
existed in the world. The half-starved peasants lived in wretched cabins
and often in caverns, amid filth and vermin. "God knows my mind never
suffered so much as on this journey," he writes, "when I saw such scenes
of want and misery continually before me, without the power of
effectually relieving them." His stay in the ports was made agreeable by
the officers of American ships cruising in those waters. Every ship was
a home, and every officer a friend. He had a boundless capacity for
good-fellowship. At Messina he chronicles the brilliant spectacle of
Lord Nelson's fleet passing through the straits in search of the French
fleet that had lately got out of Toulon. In less than a year, Nelson's
young admirer was one of the thousands that pressed to see the remains
of the great admiral as they lay in state at Greenwich, wrapped in the
flag that had floated at the mast-head of the Victory.
From Sicily he passed over to Naples in a fruit boat which dodged the
cruisers, and reached Rome the last of March. Here he remained several
weeks, absorbed by the multitudinous attractions. In Italy the worlds of
music and painting were for the first time opened to him. Here he made
the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and the influence of this
friendship came near changing the whole course of his life. To return
home to the dry study of the law was not a pleasing prospect; the
masterpieces of art, the serenity of the sky, the nameless charm which
hangs about an Italian landscape, and Allston's enthusiasm as an artist,
nearly decided him to remain in Rome and adopt the profession of a
painter. But after indulging in this dream, it occurred to him that it
was not so much a natural aptitude for the art as the lovely scenery and
Allston's companionship that had attracted him to it. He saw something
of Roman society; Torlonia the banker was especially assiduous in his
attentions. It turned out when Irving came to make his adieus that
Torlonia had all along supposed him a relative of General Washington.
This mistake is offset by another that occurred later, after Irving had
attained some celebrity in England. An English lady passing through an
Italian gallery with her daughter stopped before a bust of Washington.
The daughter said, "Mother, who was Washington?" "Why, my dear, don't
you know?" was the astonished reply. "He wrote the 'Sketch-Book.'" It
was at the house of Baron von Humboldt, the Prussian minister, that
Irving first met Madame de Staël, who was then enjoying the celebrity
of "Delphine." He was impressed with her strength of mind, and somewhat
astounded at the amazing flow of her conversation, and the question upon
question with which she plied him.
In May the wanderer was in Paris, and remained there four months,
studying French and frequenting the theatres with exemplary regularity.
Of his life in Paris there are only the meagrest reports, and he records
no observations upon political affairs. The town fascinated him more
than any other in Europe; he notes that the city is rapidly beautifying
under the emperor, that the people seem gay and happy, and _Vive la
bagatelle!_ is again the burden of their song. His excuse for remissness
in correspondence was, "I am a young man and in Paris."
By way of the Netherlands he reached London in October and remained in
England till January. The attraction in London seems to have been the
theatre, where he saw John Kemble, Cooke, and Mrs. Siddons. Kemble's
acting seemed to him too studied and over-labored; he had the
disadvantage of a voice lacking rich, base tones. Whatever he did was
judiciously conceived and perfectly executed; it satisfied the head, but
rarely touched the heart. Only in the part of Zanga was the young critic
completely overpowered by his acting,--Kemble seemed to have forgotten
himself. Cooke, who had less range than Kemble, completely satisfied
Irving as Iago. Of Mrs. Siddons, who was then old, he scarcely dares to
give his impressions lest he should be thought extravagant. "Her looks,"
he says, "her voice, her gestures, delighted me. She penetrated in a
moment to my heart. She froze and melted it by turns; a glance of her
eye, a start, an exclamation, thrilled through my whole frame. The more
I see her the more I admire her. I hardly breathe while she is on the
stage. She works up my feelings till I am like a mere child." Some years
later, after the publication of the "Sketch-Book," in a London assembly
Irving was presented to the tragedy queen, who had left the stage, but
had not laid aside its stately manner. She looked at him a moment, and
then in a deep-toned voice slowly enunciated, "You've made me weep."
The author was so disconcerted that he said not a word, and retreated in
confusion. After the publication of "Bracebridge Hall" he met her in
company again, and was persuaded to go through the ordeal of another
presentation. The stately woman fixed her eyes on him as before, and
slowly said, "You've made me weep again." This time the bashful author
acquitted himself with more honor.
This first sojourn abroad was not immediately fruitful in a literary
way, and need not further detain us. It was the irresolute pilgrimage of
a man who had not yet received his vocation. Everywhere he was received
in the best society, and the charm of his manner and his ingenuous
nature made him everywhere a favorite. He carried that indefinable
passport which society recognizes and which needs no _visé_. He saw the
people who were famous, the women whose recognition is a social
reputation; he made many valuable friends; he frequented the theatre, he
indulged his passion for the opera; he learned how to dine, and to
appreciate the delights of a brilliant salon; he was picking up
languages; he was observing nature and men, and especially women. That
he profited by his loitering experience is plain enough afterward, but
thus far there is little to prophesy that Irving would be anything more
in life than a charming _flâneur_.
CHAPTER IV.
SOCIETY AND "SALMAGUNDI."
On Irving's return to America in February, 1806, with reëstablished
health, life did not at first take on a more serious purpose. He was
admitted to the bar, but he still halted.[1] Society more than ever
attracted him and devoured his time. He willingly accepted the office of
"champion at the tea-parties;" he was one of a knot of young fellows of
literary tastes and convivial habits, who delighted to be known as "The
Nine Worthies," or "Lads of Kilkenny." In his letters of this period I
detect a kind of callowness and affectation which is not discernible in
his foreign letters and journal.
[Footnote 1: Irving once illustrated his legal acquirements at
this time by the relation of the following anecdote to his
nephew: Josiah Ogden Hoffman and Martin Wilkins, an effective
and witty advocate, had been appointed to examine students for
admission. One student acquitted himself very lamely, and at
the supper which it was the custom for the candidates to give
to the examiners, when they passed upon their several merits,
Hoffman paused in coming to this one, and turning to Wilkins
said, as if in hesitation, though all the while intending to
admit him, "Martin, I think he knows a _little_ law." "Make it
stronger, Jo," was the reply; "_d----d_ little."]
These social worthies had jolly suppers at the humble taverns of the
city, and wilder revelries in an old country house on the Passaic, which
is celebrated in the "Salmagundi" papers as Cockloft Hall. We are
reminded of the change of manners by a letter of Mr. Paulding, one of
his comrades, written twenty years after, who recalls to mind the keeper
of a porter house, "who whilom wore a long coat, in the pockets whereof
he jingled two bushels of sixpenny pieces, and whose daughter played the
piano to the accompaniment of broiled oysters." There was some
affectation of roystering in all this; but it was a time of social
good-fellowship, and easy freedom of manners in both sexes. At the
dinners there was much sentimental and bacchanalian singing; it was
scarcely good manners not to get a little tipsy; and to be laid under
the table by the compulsory bumper was not to the discredit of a guest.
Irving used to like to repeat an anecdote of one of his early friends,
Henry Ogden, who had been at one of these festive meetings. He told
Irving the next day that in going home he had fallen through a grating
which had been carelessly left open, into a vault beneath. The solitude,
he said, was rather dismal at first, but several other of the guests
fell in, in the course of the evening, and they had on the whole a
pleasant night of it.
These young gentlemen liked to be thought "sad dogs." That they were
less abandoned than they pretended to be the sequel of their lives
shows: among Irving's associates at this time who attained honorable
consideration were John and Gouverneur Kemble, Henry Brevoort, Henry
Ogden, James K. Paulding, and Peter Irving. The saving influence for all
of them was the refined households they frequented and the association
of women who were high-spirited without prudery, and who united purity
and simplicity with wit, vivacity, and charm of manner. There is some
pleasant correspondence between Irving and Miss Mary Fairlie, a belle of
the time, who married the tragedian, Thomas A. Cooper; the "fascinating
Fairlie," as Irving calls her, and the Sophie Sparkle of the
"Salmagundi." Irving's susceptibility to the charms and graces of
women--a susceptibility which continued always fresh--was tempered and
ennobled by the most chivalrous admiration for the sex as a whole. He
placed them on an almost romantic pinnacle, and his actions always
conformed to his romantic ideal, although in his writings he sometimes
adopts the conventional satire which was more common fifty years ago
than now. In a letter to Miss Fairlie, written from Richmond, where he
was attending the trial of Aaron Burr, he expresses his exalted opinion
of the sex. It was said in accounting for the open sympathy of the
ladies with the prisoner that Burr had always been a favorite with them;
"but I am not inclined," he writes, "to account for it in so illiberal a
manner; it results from that merciful, that heavenly disposition,
implanted in the female bosom, which ever inclines in favor of the
accused and the unfortunate. You will smile at the high strain in which
I have indulged; believe me, it is because I feel it; and I love your
sex ten times better than ever."[1]
[Footnote 1: An amusing story in connection with this Richmond
visit illustrates the romantic phase of Irving's character.
Cooper, who was playing at the theatre, needed small-clothes
for one of his parts; Irving lent him a pair,--knee-breeches
being still worn,--and the actor carried them off to Baltimore.
From that city he wrote that he had found in the pocket an
emblem of love, a mysterious locket of hair in the shape of a
heart. The history of it is curious: when Irving sojourned at
Genoa he was much taken with the beauty of a young Italian
lady, the wife of a Frenchman. He had never spoken with her,
but one evening before his departing he picked up from the
floor her handkerchief which she had dropped, and with more
gallantry than honesty carried it off to Sicily. His pocket was
picked of the precious relic while he was attending a religious
function in Catania, and he wrote to his friend Storm, the
consul at Genoa, deploring his loss. The consul communicated
the sad misfortune to the lovely Bianca, for that was the
lady's name, who thereupon sent him a lock of her hair, with
the request that he would come to see her on his return. He
never saw her again, but the lock of hair was inclosed in a
locket and worn about his neck, in memory of a radiant vision
that had crossed his path and vanished.]
Personally, Irving must have awakened a reciprocal admiration. A drawing
by Vanderlyn, made in Paris in 1805, and a portrait by Jarvis in 1809,
present him to us in the fresh bloom of manly beauty. The face has an
air of distinction and gentle breeding; the refined lines, the poetic
chin, the sensitive mouth, the shapely nose, the large dreamy eyes, the
intellectual forehead, and the clustering brown locks are our ideal of
the author of the "Sketch-Book" and the pilgrim in Spain. His
biographer, Mr. Pierre M. Irving, has given no description of his
appearance; but a relative, who saw much of our author in his latter
years, writes to me: "He had dark gray eyes; a handsome straight nose,
which might perhaps be called large; a broad, high, full forehead, and a
small mouth. I should call him of medium height, about five feet eight
and a half to nine inches, and inclined to be a trifle stout. There was
no peculiarity about his voice; but it was pleasant and had a good
intonation. His smile was exceedingly genial, lighting up his whole face
and rendering it very attractive; while, if he were about to say
anything humorous, it would beam forth from his eyes even before the
words were spoken. As a young man his face was exceedingly handsome, and
his head was well covered with dark hair; but from my earliest
recollection of him he wore neither whiskers nor moustache, but a dark
brown wig, which, although it made him look younger, concealed a
beautifully shaped head." We can understand why he was a favorite in the
society of Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and Albany, as well as
of New York, and why he liked to linger here and there, sipping the
social sweets, like a man born to leisure and seemingly idle observation
of life.
It was in the midst of these social successes, and just after his
admission to the bar, that Irving gave the first decided evidence of the
choice of a career. This was his association with his eldest brother,
William, and Paulding in the production of "Salmagundi," a semi-monthly
periodical, in small duodecimo sheets, which ran with tolerable
regularity through twenty numbers, and stopped in full tide of success,
with the whimsical indifference to the public which had characterized
its every issue. Its declared purpose was "simply to instruct the young,
reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age." In manner and
purpose it was an imitation of the "Spectator" and the "Citizen of the
World," and it must share the fate of all imitations; but its wit was
not borrowed, and its humor was to some extent original; and so
perfectly was it adapted to local conditions that it may be profitably
read to-day as a not untrue reflection of the manners and spirit of the
time and city. Its amusing audacity and complacent superiority, the
mystery hanging about its writers, its affectation of indifference to
praise or profit, its fearless criticism, lively wit, and irresponsible
humor, piqued, puzzled, and delighted the town. From the first it was an
immense success; it had a circulation in other cities, and many
imitations of it sprung up. Notwithstanding many affectations and
puerilities it is still readable to Americans. Of course, if it were
offered now to the complex and sophisticated society of New York, it
would fail to attract anything like the attention it received in the
days of simplicity and literary dearth; but the same wit, insight, and
literary art, informed with the modern spirit and turned upon the
follies and "whim-whams" of the metropolis, would doubtless have a great
measure of success. In Irving's contributions to it may be traced the
germs of nearly everything that he did afterwards; in it he tried the
various stops of his genius; he discovered his own power; his career was
determined; thereafter it was only a question of energy or necessity.
In the summer of 1808 there were printed at Ballston-Spa--then the
resort of fashion and the arena of flirtation--seven numbers of a
duodecimo bagatelle in prose and verse, entitled "The Literary Picture
Gallery and Admonitory Epistles to the Visitors of Ballston-Spa, by
Simeon Senex, Esquire." This piece of summer nonsense is not referred to
by any writer who has concerned himself about Irving's life, but there
is reason to believe that he was a contributor to it if not the
editor.[1]
[Footnote 1: For these stray reminders of the old-time gayety
of Ballston-Spa, I am indebted to J. Carson Brevoort, Esq.,
whose father was Irving's most intimate friend, and who told
him that Irving had a hand in them.]
In these yellow pages is a melancholy reflection of the gayety and
gallantry of the Sans Souci hotel seventy years ago. In this "Picture
Gallery," under the thin disguise of initials, are the portraits of
well-known belles of New York whose charms of person and graces of mind
would make the present reader regret his tardy advent into this world,
did not the "Admonitory Epistles," addressed to the same sex, remind him
that the manners of seventy years ago left much to be desired. In
respect of the habit of swearing, "Simeon" advises "Myra" that if ladies
were to confine themselves to a single round oath, it would be quite
sufficient; and he objects, when he is at the public table, to the
conduct of his neighbor who carelessly took up "Simeon's" fork and used
it as a tooth-pick. All this, no doubt, passed for wit in the beginning
of the century. Punning, broad satire, exaggerated compliment, verse
which has love for its theme and the "sweet bird of Venus" for its
object, an affectation of gallantry and of _ennui_, with anecdotes of
distinguished visitors, out of which the screaming fun has quite
evaporated, make up the staple of these faded mementos of ancient
watering-place. Yet how much superior is our comedy of to-day? The
beauty and the charms of the women of two generations ago exist only in
tradition; perhaps we should give to the wit of that time equal
admiration if none of it had been preserved.
Irving, notwithstanding the success of "Salmagundi," did not immediately
devote himself to literature, nor seem to regard his achievements in it
as anything more than aids to social distinction. He was then, as
always, greatly influenced by his surroundings. These were unfavorable
to literary pursuits. Politics was the attractive field for preferment
and distinction; and it is more than probable that, even after the
success of the Knickerbocker history, he would have drifted through
life, half lawyer and half placeman, if the associations and stimulus of
an old civilization, in his second European residence, had not fired his
ambition. Like most young lawyers with little law and less clients, he
began to dabble in local politics. The experiment was not much to his
taste, and the association and work demanded, at that time, of a ward
politician soon disgusted him. "We have toiled through the purgatory of
an election," he writes to the fair Republican, Miss Fairlie, who
rejoiced in the defeat he and the Federals had sustained:--
"What makes me the more outrageous is, that I got fairly drawn into
the vortex, and before the third day was expired, I was as deep in
mud and politics as ever a moderate gentleman would wish to be; and
I drank beer with the multitude; and I talked hand-bill fashion
with the demagogues; and I shook hands with the mob, whom my heart
abhorreth. 'Tis true, for the first two days I maintained my
coolness and indifference. The first day I merely hunted for whim,
character, and absurdity, according to my usual custom; the second
day being rainy, I sat in the bar-room at the Seventh Ward, and
read a volume of 'Galatea,' which I found on a shelf; but before I
had got through a hundred pages, I had three or four good Feds
sprawling round me on the floor, and another with his eyes half
shut, leaning on my shoulder in the most affectionate manner, and
spelling a page of the book as if it had been an electioneering
hand-bill. But the third day--ah! then came the tug of war. My
patriotism then blazed forth, and I determined to save my country!
Oh, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy
nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! 'I have
sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker
in his own language during my life,'--faugh! I shall not be able to
bear the smell of small beer and tobacco for a month to come....
Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business,
and if patriotism is such a dirty virtue,--prythee, no more of it."
He unsuccessfully solicited some civil appointment at Albany, a very
modest solicitation, which was never renewed, and which did not last
long, for he was no sooner there than he was "disgusted by the servility
and duplicity and rascality witnessed among the swarm of scrub
politicians." There was a promising young artist at that time in Albany,
and Irving wishes he were a man of wealth, to give him a helping hand; a
few acts of munificence of this kind by rich nabobs, he breaks out,
"would be more pleasing in the sight of Heaven, and more to the glory
and advantage of their country, than building a dozen shingle church
steeples, or buying a thousand venal votes at an election." This was in
the "good old times!"
Although a Federalist, and, as he described himself, "an admirer of
General Hamilton, and a partisan with him in politics," he accepted a
retainer from Burr's friends in 1807, and attended his trial in
Richmond, but more in the capacity of an observer of the scene than a
lawyer. He did not share the prevalent opinion of Burr's treason, and
regarded him as a man so fallen as to be shorn of the power to injure
the country, one for whom he could feel nothing but compassion. That
compassion, however, he received only from the ladies of the city, and
the traits of female goodness manifested then sunk deep into Irving's
heart. Without pretending, he says, to decide on Burr's innocence or
guilt, "his situation is such as should appeal eloquently to the
feelings of every generous bosom. Sorry am I to say the reverse has been
the fact: fallen, proscribed, pre-judged, the cup of bitterness has been
administered to him with an unsparing hand. It has almost been
considered as culpable to evince toward him the least sympathy or
support; and many a hollow-hearted caitiff have I seen, who basked in
the sunshine of his bounty while in power, who now skulked from his
side, and even mingled among the most clamorous of his enemies.... I bid
him farewell with a heavy heart, and he expressed with peculiar warmth
and feeling his sense of the interest I had taken in his fate. I never
felt in a more melancholy mood than when I rode from his solitary
prison." This is a good illustration of Irving's tender-heartedness; but
considering Burr's whole character, it is altogether a womanish case of
misplaced sympathy with the cool slayer of Alexander Hamilton.
CHAPTER V.
THE KNICKERBOCKER PERIOD.
Not long after the discontinuance of "Salmagundi," Irving in connection
with his brother Peter projected the work that was to make him famous.
At first nothing more was intended than a satire upon the "Picture of
New York," by Dr. Samuel Mitchell, just then published. It was begun as
a mere burlesque upon pedantry and erudition, and was well advanced,
when Peter was called by his business to Europe, and its completion was
fortunately left to Washington. In his mind the idea expanded into a
different conception. He condensed the mass of affected learning, which
was their joint work, into five introductory chapters,--subsequently he
said it would have been improved if it had been reduced to one, and it
seems to me it would have been better if that one had been thrown
away,--and finished "A History of New York," by Diedrich Knickerbocker,
substantially as we now have it. This was in 1809, when Irving was
twenty-six years old.
But before this humorous creation was completed, the author endured the
terrible bereavement which was to color all his life. He had formed a
deep and tender passion for Matilda Hoffman, the second daughter of
Jeremiah Ogden Hoffman, in whose family he had long been on a footing of
the most perfect intimacy, and his ardent love was fully reciprocated.
He was restlessly casting about for some assured means of livelihood
which would enable him to marry, and perhaps his distrust of a literary
career was connected with this desire, when after a short illness Miss
Hoffman died, in the eighteenth year of her age. Without being a
dazzling beauty, she was lovely in person and mind, with most engaging
manners, a refined sensibility, and a delicate and playful humor. The
loss was a crushing blow to Irving, from the effects of which he never
recovered, although time softened the bitterness of his grief into a
tender and sacred memory. He could never bear to hear her name spoken
even by his most intimate friends, or any allusion to her. Thirty years
after her death, it happened one evening at the house of Mr. Hoffman,
her father, that a granddaughter was playing for Mr. Irving, and in
taking her music from the drawer, a faded piece of embroidery was
brought forth. "Washington," said Mr. Hoffman, picking it up, "this is a
piece of poor Matilda's workmanship." The effect was electric. He had
been talking in the sprightliest mood before, but he sunk at once into
utter silence, and in a few moments got up and left the house.
After his death, in a private repository of which he always kept the
key, was found a lovely miniature, a braid of fair hair, and a slip of
paper, on which was written in his own hand, "Matilda Hoffman;" and with
these treasures were several pages of a memorandum in ink long since
faded. He kept through life her Bible and Prayer Book; they were placed
nightly under his pillow in the first days of anguish that followed her
loss, and ever after they were the inseparable companions of all his
wanderings. In this memorandum--which was written many years
afterwards--we read the simple story of his love:--
"We saw each other every day, and I became excessively attached to
her. Her shyness wore off by degrees. The more I saw of her the
more I had reason to admire her. Her mind seemed to unfold leaf by
leaf, and every time to discover new sweetness. Nobody knew her so
well as I, for she was generally timid and silent; but I in a
manner studied her excellence. Never did I meet with more intuitive
rectitude of mind, more native delicacy, more exquisite propriety
in word, thought, and action, than in this young creature. I am not
exaggerating; what I say was acknowledged by all who knew her. Her
brilliant little sister used to say that people began by admiring
her, but ended by loving Matilda. For my part, I idolized her. I
felt at times rebuked by her superior delicacy and purity, and as
if I was a coarse, unworthy being in comparison."
At this time Irving was much perplexed about his career. He had "a fatal
propensity to belles-lettres;" his repugnance to the law was such that
his mind would not take hold of the study; he anticipated nothing from
legal pursuits or political employment; he was secretly writing the
humorous history, but was altogether in a low-spirited and disheartened
state. I quote again from the memorandum:--
"In the mean time I saw Matilda every day, and that helped to
distract me. In the midst of this struggle and anxiety she was
taken ill with a cold. Nothing was thought of it at first; but she
grew rapidly worse, and fell into a consumption. I cannot tell you
what I suffered. The ills that I have undergone in this life have
been dealt out to me drop by drop, and I have tasted all their
bitterness. I saw her fade rapidly away; beautiful, and more
beautiful, and more angelical to the last. I was often by her
bedside; and in her wandering state of mind she would talk to me
with a sweet, natural, and affecting eloquence, that was
overpowering. I saw more of the beauty of her mind in that
delirious state than I had ever known before. Her malady was rapid
in its career, and hurried her off in two months. Her dying
struggles were painful and protracted. For three days and nights I
did not leave the house, and scarcely slept. I was by her when she
died; all the family were assembled round her, some praying, others
weeping, for she was adored by them all. I was the last one she
looked upon. I have told you as briefly as I could what, if I were
to tell with all the incidents and feelings that accompanied it,
would fill volumes. She was but about seventeen years old when she
died.
"I cannot tell you what a horrid state of mind I was in for a long
time. I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me. I
abandoned all thoughts of the law. I went into the country, but
could not bear solitude, yet could not endure society. There was a
dismal horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be
alone. I had often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of
my brother, as if the having a human being by me would relieve me
from the frightful gloom of my own thoughts.
"Months elapsed before my mind would resume any tone; but the
despondency I had suffered for a long time in the course of this
attachment, and the anguish that attended its catastrophe, seemed
to give a turn to my whole character, and throw some clouds into my
disposition, which have ever since hung about it. When I became
more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of occupation, to
the finishing of my work. I brought it to a close, as well as I
could, and published it; but the time and circumstances in which it
was produced rendered me always unable to look upon it with
satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me celebrity,
as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in
America. I was noticed, caressed, and, for a time, elevated by the
popularity I had gained. I found myself uncomfortable in my
feelings in New York, and traveled about a little. Wherever I went
I was overwhelmed with attentions; I was full of youth and
animation, far different from the being I now am, and I was quite
flushed with this early taste of public favor. Still, however, the
career of gayety and notoriety soon palled on me. I seemed to drift
about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart
wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form
other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would
continually recur to what it had lost; and whenever there was a
pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into
dismal dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this
hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image
was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."
This memorandum, it subsequently appeared, was a letter, or a transcript
of it, addressed to a married lady, Mrs. Foster, in which the story of
his early love was related, in reply to her question why he had never
married. It was in the year 1823, the year after the publication of
"Bracebridge Hall," while he sojourned in Dresden, that he became
intimate with an English family residing there, named Foster, and
conceived for the daughter, Miss Emily Foster, a warm friendship and
perhaps a deep attachment. The letter itself, which for the first time
broke the guarded seclusion of Irving's heart, is evidence of the tender
confidence that existed between him and this family. That this intimacy
would have resulted in marriage, or an offer of marriage, if the lady's
affections had not been preoccupied, the Fosters seem to have believed.
In an unauthorized addition to the "Life and Letters," inserted in the
English edition without the knowledge of the American editor, with some
such headings as, "History of his First Love brought to us, and
returned," and "Irving's Second Attachment," the Fosters tell the
interesting story of Irving's life in Dresden, and give many of his
letters, and an account of his intimacy with the family. From this
account I quote:--
"Soon after this, Mr. Irving, who had again for long felt 'the
tenderest interest warm his bosom, and finally enthrall his whole
soul,' made one vigorous and valiant effort to free himself from a
hopeless and consuming attachment. My mother counseled him, I
believe, for the best, and he left Dresden on an expedition of
several weeks into a country he had long wished to see, though, in
the main, it disappointed him; and he started with young Colbourne
(son of General Colbourne) as his companion. Some of his letters on
this journey are before the public; and in the agitation and
eagerness he there described, on receiving and opening letters from
us, and the tenderness in his replies,--the longing to be once more
in the little Pavilion, to which we had moved in the beginning of
the summer,--the letters (though carefully guarded by the delicacy
of her who intrusted them to the editor, and alone retained among
many more calculated to lay bare his true feelings), even
fragmentary as they are, point out the truth.
"Here is the key to the journey to Silesia, the return to Dresden,
and, finally, to the journey from Dresden to Rotterdam in our
company, first planned so as to part at Cassel, where Mr. Irving
had intended to leave us and go down the Rhine, but subsequently
could not find in his heart to part. Hence, after a night of pale
and speechless melancholy, the gay, animated, happy countenance
with which he sprang to our coachbox to take his old seat on it,
and accompany us to Rotterdam. There even could he not part, but
joined us in the steamboat; and, after bearing us company as far as
a boat could follow us, at last tore himself away, to bury himself
in Paris, and try to work....
"It was fortunate, perhaps, that this affection was returned by the
_warmest friendship_ only, since it was destined that the
accomplishment of his wishes was impossible, for many obstacles
which lay in his way; and it is with pleasure I can truly say that
in time he schooled himself to view, also with friendship only, one
who for some time past has been the wife of another."
Upon the delicacy of this revelation the biographer does not comment,
but he says that the idea that Irving thought of marriage at that time
is utterly disproved by the following passage from the very manuscript
which he submitted to Mrs. Foster:--
"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not
long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I
became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the
world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was
too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by
matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon
my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.
I feel as if I already had a family to think and provide for."
Upon the question of attachment and depression, Mr. Pierre Irving
says:--
"While the editor does not question Mr. Irving's great enjoyment of
his intercourse with the Fosters, or his deep regret at parting
from them, he is too familiar with his occasional fits of
depression to have drawn from their recurrence on his return to
Paris any such inference as that to which the lady alludes. Indeed,
his 'memorandum book' and letters show him to have had, at this
time, sources of anxiety of quite a different nature. The allusion
to his having 'to put once more to sea' evidently refers to his
anxiety on returning to his literary pursuits, after a season of
entire idleness."
It is not for us to question the judgment of the biographer, with his
full knowledge of the circumstances and his long intimacy with his
uncle; yet it is evident that Irving was seriously impressed at Dresden,
and that he was very much unsettled until he drove away the impression
by hard work with his pen; and it would be nothing new in human nature
and experience if he had for a time yielded to the attractions of
loveliness and a most congenial companionship, and had returned again to
an exclusive devotion to the image of the early loved and lost.
That Irving intended never to marry is an inference I cannot draw either
from his fondness for the society of women, from his interest in the
matrimonial projects of his friends and the gossip which has feminine
attractions for its food, or from his letters to those who had his
confidence. In a letter written from Birmingham, England, March 15,
1816, to his dear friend Henry Brevoort, who was permitted more than
perhaps any other person to see his secret heart, he alludes, with
gratification, to the report of the engagement of James Paulding, and
then says:--
"It is what we must all come to at last. I see you are hankering
after it, and I confess I have done so for a long time past. We
are, however, past that period [Irving was thirty-two] when a man
marries suddenly and inconsiderately. We may be longer making a
choice, and consulting the convenience and concurrence of easy
circumstances, but we shall both come to it sooner or later. I
therefore recommend you to marry without delay. You have sufficient
means, connected with your knowledge and habits of business, to
support a genteel establishment, and I am certain that as soon as
you are married you will experience a change in your ideas. All
those vagabond, roving propensities will cease. They are the
offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix the
feelings. You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts about
at the mercy of every vagrant breeze or trifling eddy. Get a wife,
and she'll anchor you. But don't marry a fool because she has a
pretty face, and don't seek after a great belle. Get such a girl as
Mary ----, or get her if you can; though I am afraid she has still
an unlucky kindness for poor ----, which will stand in the way of
her fortunes. I wish to God they were rich, and married, and
happy!"
The business reverses which befell the Irving brothers, and which drove
Washington to the toil of the pen, and cast upon him heavy family
responsibilities, defeated his plans of domestic happiness in marriage.
It was in this same year, 1816, when the fortunes of the firm were daily
becoming more dismal, that he wrote to Brevoort, upon the report that
the latter was likely to remain a bachelor: "We are all selfish beings.
Fortune by her tardy favors and capricious freaks seems to discourage
all my matrimonial resolves, and if I am doomed to live an old bachelor,
I am anxious to have good company. I cannot bear that all my old
companions should launch away into the married state, and leave me alone
to tread this desolate and sterile shore." And, in view of a possible
life of scant fortune, he exclaims: "Thank Heaven, I was brought up in
simple and inexpensive habits, and I have satisfied myself that, if need
be, I can resume them without repining or inconvenience. Though I am
willing, therefore, that Fortune should shower her blessings upon me,
and think I can enjoy them as well as most men, yet I shall not make
myself unhappy if she chooses to be scanty, and shall take the position
allotted me with a cheerful and contented mind."
When Irving passed the winter of 1823 in the charming society of the
Fosters at Dresden, the success of the "Sketch-Book" and "Bracebridge
Hall" had given him assurance of his ability to live comfortably by the
use of his pen.
To resume. The preliminary announcement of the History was a humorous
and skillful piece of advertising. Notices appeared in the newspapers of
the disappearance from his lodging of "a small, elderly gentleman,
dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of
Knickerbocker." Paragraphs from week to week, purporting to be the
result of inquiry, elicited the facts that such an old gentleman had
been seen traveling north in the Albany stage; that his name was
Diedrich Knickerbocker; that he went away owing his landlord; and that
he left behind a very curious kind of a written book, which would be
sold to pay his bills if he did not return. So skillfully was this
managed that one of the city officials was on the point of offering a
reward for the discovery of the missing Diedrich. This little man in
knee-breeches and cocked hat was the germ of the whole "Knickerbocker
legend," a fantastic creation, which in a manner took the place of
history, and stamped upon the commercial metropolis of the New World the
indelible Knickerbocker name and character; and even now in the city it
is an undefined patent of nobility to trace descent from "an old
Knickerbocker family."
The volume, which was first printed in Philadelphia, was put forth as a
grave history of the manners and government under the Dutch rulers, and
so far was the covert humor carried that it was dedicated to the New
York Historical Society. Its success was far beyond Irving's
expectation. It met with almost universal acclaim. It is true that some
of the old Dutch inhabitants who sat down to its perusal, expecting to
read a veritable account of the exploits of their ancestors, were
puzzled by the indirection of its commendation; and several excellent
old ladies of New York and Albany were in blazing indignation at the
ridicule put upon the old Dutch people, and minded to ostracize the
irreverent author from all social recognition. As late as 1818, in an
address before the Historical Society, Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, Irving's
friend, showed the deep irritation the book had caused, by severe
strictures on it as a "coarse caricature." But the author's winning ways
soon dissipated the social cloud, and even the Dutch critics were
erelong disarmed by the absence of all malice in the gigantic humor of
the composition. One of the first foreigners to recognize the power and
humor of the book was Walter Scott. "I have never," he wrote, "read
anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of
Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in
reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests, and our
sides have been absolutely sore with laughing. I think, too, there are
passages which indicate that the author possesses power of a different
kind, and has some touches which remind me of Sterne."
The book is indeed an original creation, and one of the few masterpieces
of humor. In spontaneity, freshness, breadth of conception, and joyous
vigor, it belongs to the spring-time of literature. It has entered into
the popular mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said
to have created a social realm which, with all its whimsical conceit,
has almost historical solidity. The Knickerbocker pantheon is almost as
real as that of Olympus. The introductory chapters are of that
elephantine facetiousness which pleased our great-grandfathers, but
which is exceedingly tedious to modern taste; and the humor of the book
occasionally has a breadth that is indelicate to our apprehension,
though it perhaps did not shock our great-grandmothers. But,
notwithstanding these blemishes, I think the work has more enduring
qualities than even the generation which it first delighted gave it
credit for. The world, however, it must be owned, has scarcely yet the
courage of its humor, and dullness still thinks it necessary to
apologize for anything amusing. There is little doubt that Irving
himself supposed that his serious work was of more consequence to the
world.
It seems strange that after this success Irving should have hesitated to
adopt literature as his profession. But for two years, and with leisure,
he did nothing. He had again some hope of political employment in a
small way; and at length he entered into a mercantile partnership with
his brothers, which was to involve little work for him, and a share of
the profits that should assure his support, and leave him free to follow
his fitful literary inclinations. Yet he seems to have been mainly
intent upon society and the amusements of the passing hour, and, without
the spur of necessity to his literary capacity, he yielded to the
temptations of indolence, and settled into the unpromising position of a
"man about town." Occasionally, the business of his firm and that of
other importing merchants being imperiled by some threatened action of
Congress, Irving was sent to Washington to look after their interests.
The leisurely progress he always made to the capital through the
seductive society of Philadelphia and Baltimore did not promise much
business dispatch. At the seat of government he was certain to be
involved in a whirl of gayety. His letters from Washington are more
occupied with the odd characters he met than with the measures of
legislation. These visits greatly extended his acquaintance with the
leading men of the country; his political leanings did not prevent an
intimacy with the President's family, and Mrs. Madison and he were sworn
friends.
It was of the evening of his first arrival in Washington that he writes:
"I emerged from dirt and darkness into the blazing splendor of Mrs.
Madison's drawing-room. Here I was most graciously received; found a
crowded collection of great and little men, of ugly old women and
beautiful young ones, and in ten minutes was hand and glove with half
the people in the assemblage. Mrs. Madison is a fine, portly, buxom
dame, who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody. Her sisters,
Mrs. Cutts and Mrs. Washington, are like two merry wives of Windsor; but
as to Jemmy Madison,--oh, poor Jemmy!--he is but a withered little
apple-john."
Odd characters congregated then in Washington as now. One honest fellow,
who, by faithful fagging at the heels of Congress, had obtained a
profitable post under government, shook Irving heartily by the hand, and
professed himself always happy to see anybody that came from New York;
"somehow or another, it was _natteral_ to him," being the place where he
was _first_ born. Another fellow-townsman was "endeavoring to obtain a
deposit in the Mechanics' Bank, in case the United States Bank does not
obtain a charter. He is as deep as usual; shakes his head and winks
through his spectacles at everybody he meets. He swore to me the other
day that he had not told anybody what his opinion was,--whether the bank
ought to have a charter or not. Nobody in Washington knew what his
opinion was--not one--nobody; he defied any one to say what it
was--'anybody--damn the one! No, sir, nobody knows;' and if he had added
nobody cares, I believe honest ---- would have been exactly in the
right. Then there's his brother George: 'Damn that fellow,--knows eight
or nine languages; yes, sir, nine languages,--Arabic, Spanish, Greek,
Ital--And there's his wife, now,--she and Mrs. Madison are always
together. Mrs. Madison has taken a great fancy to her little daughter.
Only think, sir, that child is only six years old, and talks the Italian
like a book, by ----; little devil learnt it from an Italian
servant,--damned clever fellow; lived with my brother George ten years.
George says he would not part with him for all Tripoli,'" etc.
It was always difficult for Irving, in those days, to escape from the
genial blandishments of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Writing to Brevoort
from Philadelphia, March 16, 1811, he says: "The people of Baltimore are
exceedingly social and hospitable to strangers, and I saw that if I once
let myself get into the stream I should not be able to get out under a
fortnight at least; so, being resolved to push home as expeditiously as
was honorably possible, I resisted the world, the flesh, and the devil
at Baltimore; and after three days' and nights' stout carousal, and a
fourth's sickness, sorrow, and repentance, I hurried off from that
sensual city."
Jarvis, the artist, was at that time the eccentric and elegant lion of
society in Baltimore. "Jack Randolph" had recently sat to him for his
portrait. "By the bye [the letter continues] that little 'hydra and
chimera dire,' Jarvis, is in prodigious circulation at Baltimore. The
gentlemen have all voted him a rare wag and most brilliant wit; and the
ladies pronounce him one of the queerest, ugliest, most agreeable little
creatures in the world. The consequence is there is not a ball,
tea-party, concert, supper, or other private regale but that Jarvis is
the most conspicuous personage; and as to a dinner, they can no more do
without him than they could without Friar John at the roystering revels
of the renowned Pantagruel." Irving gives one of his _bon mots_ which
was industriously repeated at all the dinner tables, a profane sally,
which seemed to tickle the Baltimoreans exceedingly. Being very much
importuned to go to church, he resolutely refused, observing that it was
the same thing whether he went or stayed at home. "If I don't go," said
he, "the minister says I'll be d----d, and I'll be d----d if I do go."
This same letter contains a pretty picture, and the expression of
Irving's habitual kindly regard for his fellow-men:--
"I was out visiting with Ann yesterday, and met that little
assemblage of smiles and fascinations, Mary Jackson. She was
bounding with youth, health, and innocence, and good humor. She had
a pretty straw hat, tied under her chin with a pink ribbon, and
looked like some little woodland nymph, just turned out by spring
and fine weather. God bless her light heart, and grant it may never
know care or sorrow! It's enough to cure spleen and melancholy only
to look at her.
"Your familiar pictures of home made me extremely desirous again
to be there.... I shall once more return to sober life, satisfied
with having secured three months of sunshine in this valley of
shadows and darkness. In this space of time I have seen
considerable of the world, but I am sadly afraid I have not grown
wiser thereby, inasmuch as it has generally been asserted by the
sages of every age that wisdom consists in a knowledge of the
wickedness of mankind, and the wiser a man grows the more
discontented he becomes with those around him. Whereas, woe is me,
I return in infinitely better humor with the world than I ever was
before, and with a most melancholy good opinion and good will for
the great mass of my fellow-creatures!"
Free intercourse with men of all parties, he thought, tends to divest a
man's mind of party bigotry.
"One day [he writes] I am dining with a knot of honest, furious
Federalists, who are damning all their opponents as a set of
consummate scoundrels, panders of Bonaparte, etc. The next day I
dine, perhaps, with some of the very men I have heard thus
anathematized, and find them equally honest, warm, and indignant;
and if I take their word for it, I had been dining the day before
with some of the greatest knaves in the nation, men absolutely paid
and suborned by the British government."
His friends at this time attempted to get him appointed secretary of
legation to the French mission, under Joel Barlow, then minister, but he
made no effort to secure the place. Perhaps he was deterred by the
knowledge that the author of "The Columbiad" suspected him, though
unjustly, of some strictures on his great epic. He had in mind a book of
travel in his own country, in which he should sketch manners and
characters; but nothing came of it. The peril to trade involved in the
War of 1812 gave him some forebodings, and aroused him to exertion. He
accepted the editorship of a periodical called "Select Reviews,"
afterwards changed to the "Analectic Magazine," for which he wrote
sketches, some of which were afterwards put into the "Sketch-Book," and
several reviews and naval biographies. A brief biography of Thomas
Campbell was also written about this time, as introductory to an edition
of "Gertrude of Wyoming." But the slight editorial care required by the
magazine was irksome to a man who had an unconquerable repugnance to
all periodical labor.
In 1813 Francis Jeffrey made a visit to the United States. Henry
Brevoort, who was then in London, wrote an anxious letter to Irving to
impress him with the necessity of making much of Mr. Jeffrey. "It is
essential," he says, "that Jeffrey may imbibe a just estimate of the
United States and its inhabitants; he goes out strongly biased in our
favor, and the influence of his good opinion upon his return to this
country will go far to efface the calumnies and the absurdities that
have been laid to our charge by ignorant travelers. Persuade him to
visit Washington, and by all means to see the Falls of Niagara." The
impression seems to have prevailed that if Englishmen could be made to
take a just view of the Falls of Niagara the misunderstandings between
the two countries would be reduced. Peter Irving, who was then in
Edinburgh, was impressed with the brilliant talent of the editor of the
"Review," disguised as it was by affectation, but he said he "would not
give the Minstrel for a wilderness of Jeffreys."
The years from 1811 to 1815, when he went abroad for the second time,
were passed by Irving in a sort of humble waiting on Providence. His
letters to Brevoort during this period are full of the _ennui_ of
irresolute youth. He idled away weeks and months in indolent enjoyment
in the country; he indulged his passion for the theatre when opportunity
offered; and he began to be weary of a society which offered little
stimulus to his mind. His was the temperament of the artist, and America
at that time had little to evoke or to satisfy the artistic feeling.
There were few pictures and no galleries; there was no music, except the
amateur torture of strings which led the country dance, or the martial
inflammation of fife and drum, or the sentimental dawdling here and
there over the ancient harpsichord, with the songs of love, and the
broad or pathetic staves and choruses of the convivial table; and there
was no literary atmosphere.
After three months of indolent enjoyment in the winter and spring of
1811, Irving is complaining to Brevoort in June of the enervation of his
social life: "I do want most deplorably to apply my mind to something
that will arouse and animate it; for at present it is very indolent and
relaxed, and I find it very difficult to shake off the lethargy that
enthralls it. This makes me restless and dissatisfied with myself, and I
am convinced I shall not feel comfortable and contented until my mind is
fully employed. Pleasure is but a transient stimulus, and leaves the
mind more enfeebled than before. Give me rugged toils, fierce
disputation, wrangling controversy, harassing research,--give me
anything that calls forth the energies of the mind; but for Heaven's
sake shield me from those calms, those tranquil slumberings, those
enervating triflings, those siren blandishments, that I have for some
time indulged in, which lull the mind into complete inaction, which
benumb its powers, and cost it such painful and humiliating struggles to
regain its activity and independence!"
Irving at this time of life seemed always waiting by the pool for some
angel to come and trouble the waters. To his correspondent, who was in
the wilds of Michilimackinac, he continues to lament his morbid
inability. The business in which his thriving brothers were engaged was
the importation and sale of hardware and cutlery, and that spring his
services were required at the "store." "By all the martyrs of Grub
Street [he exclaims], I'd sooner live in a garret, and starve into the
bargain, than follow so sordid, dusty, and soul-killing a way of life,
though certain it would make me as rich as old Croesus, or John Jacob
Astor himself!" The sparkle of society was no more agreeable to him than
the rattle of cutlery. "I have scarcely [he writes] seen anything of the
----s since your departure; business and an amazing want of inclination
have kept me from their threshold. Jim, that sly poacher, however,
prowls about there, and vitrifies his heart by the furnace of their
charms. I accompanied him there on Sunday evening last, and found the
Lads and Miss Knox with them. S---- was in great spirits, and played the
sparkler with such great success as to silence the whole of us excepting
Jim, who was the _agreeable rattle_ of the evening. God defend me from
such vivacity as hers, in future,--such smart speeches without meaning,
such bubble and squeak nonsense! I'd as lieve stand by a frying-pan for
an hour and listen to the cooking of apple fritters. After two hours'
dead silence and suffering on my part I made out to drag him off, and
did not stop running until I was a mile from the house." Irving gives
his correspondent graphic pictures of the social warfare in which he was
engaged, the "host of rascally little tea-parties" in which he was
entangled; and some of his portraits of the "divinities," the
"blossoms," and the beauties of that day would make the subjects of them
flutter with surprise in the church-yards where they lie. The writer was
sated with the "tedious commonplace of fashionable society," and
languishing to return to his books and his pen.
In March, 1812, in the shadow of the war and the depression of business,
Irving was getting out a new edition of the "Knickerbocker," which
Inskeep was to publish, agreeing to pay $1,200 at six months for an
edition of fifteen hundred. The modern publisher had not then arisen and
acquired a proprietary right in the brains of the country, and the
author made his bargains like an independent being who owned himself.
Irving's letters of this period are full of the gossip of the town and
the matrimonial fate of his acquaintances. The fascinating Mary Fairlie
is at length married to Cooper, the tragedian, with the opposition of
her parents, after a dismal courtship and a cloudy prospect of
happiness. "Goodhue is engaged to Miss Clarkson, the sister to the
pretty one. The engagement suddenly took place as they walked from
church on Christmas Day, and report says the action was shorter than any
of our naval victories, for the lady struck on the first broadside." The
war colored all social life and conversation. "This war [the letter is
to Brevoort, who is in Europe] has completely changed the face of things
here. You would scarcely recognize our old peaceful city. Nothing is
talked of but armies, navies, battles, etc." The same phenomenon was
witnessed then that was observed in the war for the Union: "Men who had
loitered about, the hangers-on and encumbrances of society, have all at
once risen to importance, and been the only useful men of the day." The
exploits of our young navy kept up the spirits of the country. There was
great rejoicing when the captured frigate Macedonian was brought into
New York, and was visited by the curious as she lay wind-bound above
Hell Gate. "A superb dinner was given to the naval heroes, at which all
the great eaters and drinkers of the city were present. It was the
noblest entertainment of the kind I ever witnessed. On New Year's Eve a
grand ball was likewise given, where there was a vast display of great
and little people. The Livingstons were there in all their glory. Little
Rule Britannia made a gallant appearance at the head of a train of
beauties, among whom were the divine H----, who looked very inviting,
and the little Taylor, who looked still more so. Britannia was
gorgeously dressed in a queer kind of hat of stiff purple and silver
stuff, that had marvelously the appearance of copper, and made us
suppose that she had procured the real Mambrino helmet. Her dress was
trimmed with what we simply mistook for scalps, and supposed it was in
honor of the nation; but we blushed at our ignorance on discovering that
it was a gorgeous trimming of marten tips. Would that some eminent
furrier had been there to wonder and admire!"
With a little business and a good deal of loitering, waiting upon the
whim of his pen, Irving passed the weary months of the war. As late as
August, 1814, he is still giving Brevoort, who has returned, and is at
Rockaway Beach, the light gossip of the town. It was reported that
Brevoort and Dennis had kept a journal of their foreign travel, "which
is so exquisitely humorous that Mrs. Cooper, on only looking at the
first word, fell into a fit of laughing that lasted half an hour."
Irving is glad that he cannot find Brevoort's flute, which the latter
requested should be sent to him: "I do not think it would be an innocent
amusement for you, as no one has a right to entertain himself at the
expense of others." In such dallying and badinage the months went on,
affairs every day becoming more serious. Appended to a letter of
September 9, 1814, is a list of twenty well-known mercantile houses that
had failed within the preceding three weeks. Irving himself, shortly
after this, enlisted in the war, and his letters thereafter breathe
patriotic indignation at the insulting proposals of the British and
their rumored attack on New York, and all his similes, even those having
love for their subject, are martial and bellicose. Item: "The gallant
Sam has fairly changed front, and, instead of laying siege to Douglas
castle, has charged sword in hand, and carried little Cooper's
entrenchments."
As a Federalist and an admirer of England, Irving had deplored the war,
but his sympathies were not doubtful after it began, and the burning of
the national Capitol by General Ross aroused him to an active
participation in the struggle. He was descending the Hudson in a
steamboat when the tidings first reached him. It was night, and the
passengers had gone into the cabin, when a man came on board with the
news, and in the darkness related the particulars: the burning of the
President's house and government offices, and the destruction of the
Capitol, with the library and public archives. In the momentary silence
that followed, somebody raised his voice, and in a tone of complacent
derision "wondered what _Jimmy_ Madison would say now." "Sir," cried
Mr. Irving, in a burst of indignation that overcame his habitual
shyness, "do you seize upon such a disaster only for a sneer? Let me
tell you, sir, it is not now a question about _Jimmy_ Madison or _Jimmy_
Armstrong. The pride and honor of the nation are wounded; the country is
insulted and disgraced by this barbarous success, and every loyal
citizen would feel the ignominy and be earnest to avenge it." There was
an outburst of applause, and the sneerer was silenced. "I could not see
the fellow," said Mr. Irving, in relating the anecdote, "but I let fly
at him in the dark."
The next day he offered his services to Governor Tompkins, and was made
the governor's aid and military secretary, with the right to be
addressed as Col. Washington Irving. He served only four months in this
capacity, when Governor Tompkins was called to the session of the
legislature at Albany. Irving intended to go to Washington and apply for
a commission in the regular army, but he was detained at Philadelphia by
the affairs of his magazine, until news came in February, 1815, of the
close of the war. In May of that year he embarked for England to visit
his brother, intending only a short sojourn. He remained abroad
seventeen years.
CHAPTER VI.
LIFE IN EUROPE: LITERARY ACTIVITY.
When Irving sailed from New York, it was with lively anticipations of
witnessing the stirring events to follow the return of Bonaparte from
Elba. When he reached Liverpool the curtain had fallen in Bonaparte's
theatre. The first spectacle that met the traveler's eye was the mail
coaches, darting through the streets, decked with laurel and bringing
the news of Waterloo. As usual, Irving's sympathies were with the
unfortunate. "I think," he says, writing of the exile of St. Helena,
"the cabinet has acted with littleness toward him. In spite of all his
misdeeds he is a noble fellow [_pace_ Madame de Rémusat], and I am
confident will eclipse, in the eyes of posterity, all the crowned
wiseacres that have crushed him by their overwhelming confederacy. If
anything could place the Prince Regent in a more ridiculous light, it is
Bonaparte suing for his magnanimous protection. Every compliment paid
to this bloated sensualist, this inflation of sack and sugar, turns to
the keenest sarcasm."
After staying a week with his brother Peter, who was recovering from an
indisposition, Irving went to Birmingham, the residence of his
brother-in-law, Henry Van Wart, who had married his youngest sister,
Sarah; and from thence to Sydenham, to visit Campbell. The poet was not
at home. To Mrs. Campbell Irving expressed his regret that her husband
did not attempt something on a grand scale.
"'It is unfortunate for Campbell,' said she, 'that he lives in the
same age with Scott and Byron.' I asked why. 'Oh,' said she, 'they
write so much and so rapidly. Mr. Campbell writes slowly, and it
takes him some time to get under way; and just as he has fairly
begun out comes one of their poems, that sets the world agog, and
quite daunts him, so that he throws by his pen in despair.' I
pointed out the essential difference in their kinds of poetry, and
the qualities which insured perpetuity to that of her husband. 'You
can't persuade Campbell of that,' said she. 'He is apt to
undervalue his own works, and to consider his own little lights
put out, whenever they come blazing out with their great torches.'
"I repeated the conversation to Scott some time afterward, and it
drew forth a characteristic comment. 'Pooh!' said he, good
humoredly; 'how can Campbell mistake the matter so much? Poetry
goes by quality, not by bulk. My poems are mere cairngorms, wrought
up, perhaps, with a cunning hand, and may pass well in the market
as long as cairngorms are the fashion; but they are mere Scotch
pebbles, after all. Now, Tom Campbell's are real diamonds, and
diamonds of the first water.'"
Returning to Birmingham, Irving made excursions to Kenilworth, Warwick,
and Stratford-on-Avon, and a tour through Wales with James Renwick, a
young American of great promise, who at the age of nineteen had for a
time filled the chair of natural philosophy in Columbia College. He was
a son of Mrs. Jane Renwick, a charming woman and a life-long friend of
Irving, the daughter of the Rev. Andrew Jeffrey, of Lochmaben, Scotland,
and famous in literature as "The Blue-Eyed Lassie" of Burns. From
another song, "When first I saw my Jeanie's Face," which does not
appear in the poet's collected works, the biographer quotes:--
"But, sair, I doubt some happier swain
Has gained my Jeanie's favor;
If sae, may every bliss be hers,
Tho' I can never have her.
"But gang she east, or gang she west,
'Twixt Nith and Tweed all over,
While men have eyes, or ears, or taste,
She'll always find a lover."
During Irving's protracted stay in England he did not by any means lose
his interest in his beloved New York and the little society that was
always dear to him. He relied upon his friend Brevoort to give him the
news of the town, and in return he wrote long letters,--longer and more
elaborate and formal than this generation has leisure to write or to
read; letters in which the writer laid himself out to be entertaining,
and detailed his emotions and state of mind as faithfully as his travels
and outward experiences.
No sooner was our war with England over than our navy began to make a
reputation for itself in the Mediterranean. In his letter of August,
1815, Irving dwells with pride on Decatur's triumph over the Algerine
pirates. He had just received a letter from that "worthy little tar,
Jack Nicholson," dated on board the Flambeau, off Algiers. In it
Nicholson says that "they fell in with and captured the admiral's ship,
and _killed him_." Upon which Irving remarks: "As this is all that
Jack's brevity will allow him to say on the subject, I should be at a
loss to know whether they killed the admiral _before_ or _after_ his
capture. The well-known humanity of our tars, however, induces me to the
former conclusion." Nicholson, who has the honor of being alluded to in
"The Croakers," was always a great favorite with Irving. His gallantry
on shore was equal to his bravery at sea, but unfortunately his
diffidence was greater than his gallantry; and while his susceptibility
to female charms made him an easy and a frequent victim, he could never
muster the courage to declare his passion. Upon one occasion, when he
was desperately enamored of a lady whom he wished to marry, he got
Irving to write for him a love-letter, containing an offer of his heart
and hand. The enthralled but bashful sailor carried the letter in his
pocket till it was worn out, without ever being able to summon pluck
enough to deliver it.
While Irving was in Wales the Wiggins family and Madame Bonaparte passed
through Birmingham, on their way to Cheltenham. Madame was still
determined to assert her rights as a Bonaparte. Irving cannot help
expressing sympathy for Wiggins: "The poor man has his hands full, with
such a bevy of beautiful women under his charge, and all doubtless bent
on pleasure and admiration." He hears, however, nothing further of her,
except the newspapers mention her being at Cheltenham. "There are so
many stars and comets thrown out of their orbits, and whirling about the
world at present, that a little star like Madame Bonaparte attracts but
slight attention, even though she draw after her so sparkling a tail as
the Wiggins family." In another letter he exclaims: "The world is surely
topsy-turvy, and its inhabitants shaken out of place: emperors and
kings, statesmen and philosophers, Bonaparte, Alexander, Johnson, and
the Wigginses, all strolling about the face of the earth."
The business of the Irving brothers soon absorbed all Washington's time
and attention. Peter was an invalid, and the whole weight of the
perplexing affairs of the failing firm fell upon the one who detested
business, and counted every hour lost that he gave to it. His letters
for two years are burdened with harassments in uncongenial details and
unsuccessful struggles. Liverpool, where he was compelled to pass most
of his time, had few attractions for him, and his low spirits did not
permit him to avail himself of such social advantages as were offered.
It seems that our enterprising countrymen flocked abroad, on the
conclusion of peace. "This place [writes Irving] swarms with Americans.
You never saw a more motley race of beings. Some seem as if just from
the woods, and yet stalk about the streets and public places with all
the easy nonchalance that they would about their own villages. Nothing
can surpass the dauntless independence of all form, ceremony, fashion,
or reputation of a downright, unsophisticated American. Since the war,
too, particularly, our lads seem to think they are 'the salt of the
earth' and the legitimate lords of creation. It would delight you to
see some of them playing Indian when surrounded by the wonders and
improvements of the Old World. It is impossible to match these fellows
by anything this side the water. Let an Englishman talk of the battle of
Waterloo, and they will immediately bring up New Orleans and Plattsburg.
A thoroughbred, thoroughly appointed soldier is nothing to a Kentucky
rifleman," etc., etc. In contrast to this sort of American was Charles
King, who was then abroad: "Charles is exactly what an American should
be abroad: frank, manly, and unaffected in his habits and manners,
liberal and independent in his opinions, generous and unprejudiced in
his sentiments towards other nations, but most loyally attached to his
own." There was a provincial narrowness at that date and long after in
America, which deprecated the open-minded patriotism of King and of
Irving as it did the clear-sighted loyalty of Fenimore Cooper.
The most anxious time of Irving's life was the winter of 1815-16. The
business worry increased. He was too jaded with the din of pounds,
shillings, and pence to permit his pen to invent facts or to adorn
realities. Nevertheless, he occasionally escapes from the tread-mill. In
December he is in London, and entranced with the acting of Miss O'Neil.
He thinks that Brevoort, if he saw her, would infallibly fall in love
with this "divine perfection of a woman." He writes: "She is, to my
eyes, the most soul-subduing actress I ever saw; I do not mean from her
personal charms, which are great, but from the truth, force, and pathos
of her acting. I have never been so completely melted, moved, and
overcome at a theatre as by her performances.... Kean, the prodigy, is
to me insufferable. He is vulgar, full of trick, and a complete
mannerist. This is merely my opinion. He is cried up as a second
Garrick, as a reformer of the stage, etc. It may be so. He may be right,
and all the other actors wrong. This is certain: he is either very good
or very bad. I think decidedly the latter; and I find no medium opinions
concerning him. I am delighted with Young, who acts with great judgment,
discrimination, and feeling. I think him much the best actor at present
on the English stage.... In certain characters, such as may be classed
with Macbeth, I do not think that Cooper has his equal in England. Young
is the only actor I have seen who can compare with him." Later, Irving
somewhat modified his opinion of Kean. He wrote to Brevoort: "Kean is a
strange compound of merits and defects. His excellence consists in
sudden and brilliant touches, in vivid exhibitions of passion and
emotion. I do not think him a discriminating actor, or critical either
at understanding or delineating character; but he produces effects which
no other actor does."
In the summer of 1816, on his way from Liverpool to visit his sister's
family at Birmingham, Irving tarried for a few days at a country place
near Shrewsbury on the border of Wales, and while there encountered a
character whose portrait is cleverly painted. It is interesting to
compare this first sketch with the elaboration of it in the essay on The
Angler in the "Sketch-Book."
"In one of our morning strolls [he writes, July 15th] along the
banks of the Aleen, a beautiful little pastoral stream that rises
among the Welsh mountains and throws itself into the Dee, we
encountered a veteran angler of old Isaac Walton's school. He was
an old Greenwich out-door pensioner, had lost one leg in the battle
of Camperdown, had been in America in his youth, and indeed had
been quite a rover, but for many years past had settled himself
down in his native village, not far distant, where he lived very
independently on his pension and some other small annual sums,
amounting in all to about £40. His great hobby, and indeed the
business of his life, was to angle. I found he had read Isaac
Walton very attentively; he seemed to have imbibed all his
simplicity of heart, contentment of mind, and fluency of tongue. We
kept company with him almost the whole day, wandering along the
beautiful banks of the river, admiring the ease and elegant
dexterity with which the old fellow managed his angle, throwing the
fly with unerring certainty at a great distance and among
overhanging bushes, and waving it gracefully in the air, to keep it
from entangling, as he stumped with his staff and wooden leg from
one bend of the river to another. He kept up a continual flow of
cheerful and entertaining talk, and what I particularly liked him
for was, that though we tried every way to entrap him into some
abuse of America and its inhabitants, there was no getting him to
utter an ill-natured word concerning us. His whole conversation and
deportment illustrated old Isaac's maxims as to the benign
influence of angling over the human heart.... I ought to mention
that he had two companions--one, a ragged, picturesque varlet, that
had all the air of a veteran poacher, and I warrant would find any
fish-pond in the neighborhood in the darkest night; the other was a
disciple of the old philosopher, studying the art under him, and
was son and heir apparent to the landlady of the village tavern."
A contrast to this pleasing picture is afforded by some character
sketches at the little watering-place of Buxton, which our kindly
observer visited the same year.
"At the hotel where we put up [he writes] we had a most singular
and whimsical assemblage of beings. I don't know whether you were
ever at an English watering-place, but if you have not been, you
have missed the best opportunity of studying English oddities, both
moral and physical. I no longer wonder at the English being such
excellent caricaturists, they have such an inexhaustible number and
variety of subjects to study from. The only care should be not to
follow fact too closely, for I'll swear I have met with characters
and figures that would be condemned as extravagant, if faithfully
delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where
people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the
English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque
deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had
every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils,
like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and
twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently
efflorescent, like a full-blown cauliflower. But as to the persons
that were attached to these noses, fancy any distortion,
protuberance, and fungous embellishment that can be produced in the
human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of
malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy,
vaporous climate. One old fellow was an exception to this, for
instead of acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old
people are prone in this country, from the long course of internal
and external soakage they experience, he had grown dry and stiff in
the process of years. The skin of his face had so shrunk away that
he could not close eyes or mouth--the latter, therefore, stood on a
perpetual ghastly grin, and the former on an incessant stare. He
had but one serviceable joint in his body, which was at the bottom
of the backbone, and that creaked and grated whenever he bent. He
could not raise his feet from the ground, but skated along the
drawing-room carpet whenever he wished to ring the bell. The only
sign of moisture in his whole body was a pellucid drop that I
occasionally noticed on the end of a long, dry nose. He used
generally to shuffle about in company with a little fellow that was
fat on one side and lean on the other. That is to say, he was
warped on one side as if he had been scorched before the fire; he
had a wry neck, which made his head lean on one shoulder; his hair
was smugly powdered, and he had a round, smirking, smiling, apple
face, with a bloom on it like that of a frost-bitten leaf in
autumn. We had an old, fat general by the name of Trotter, who had,
I suspect, been promoted to his high rank to get him out of the way
of more able and active officers, being an instance that a man may
occasionally rise in the world through absolute lack of merit. I
could not help watching the movements of this redoubtable old Hero,
who, I'll warrant, has been the champion and safeguard of half the
garrison towns in England, and fancying to myself how Bonaparte
would have delighted in having such toast-and-butter generals to
deal with. This old cad is doubtless a sample of those generals
that flourished in the old military school, when armies would
manoeuvre and watch each other for months; now and then have a
desperate skirmish, and, after marching and countermarching about
the 'Low Countries' through a glorious campaign, retire on the
first pinch of cold weather into snug winter quarters in some fat
Flemish town, and eat and drink and fiddle through the winter.
Boney must have sadly disconcerted the comfortable system of these
old warriors by the harrowing, restless, cut-and-slash mode of
warfare that he introduced. He has put an end to all the old _carte
and tierce_ system in which the cavaliers of the old school fought
so decorously, as it were with a small sword in one hand and a
chapeau bras in the other. During his career there has been a sad
laying on the shelf of old generals who could not keep up with the
hurry, the fierceness and dashing of the new system; and among the
number I presume has been my worthy house-mate, old Trotter. The
old gentleman, in spite of his warlike title, had a most pacific
appearance. He was large and fat, with a broad, hazy, muffin face,
a sleepy eye, and a full double chin. He had a deep ravine from
each corner of his mouth, not occasioned by any irascible
contraction of the muscles, but apparently the deep-worn channels
of two rivulets of gravy that oozed out from the huge mouthfuls
that he masticated. But I forbear to dwell on the odd beings that
were congregated together in one hotel. I have been thus prolix
about the old general because you desired me in one of your letters
to give you ample details whenever I happened to be in company with
the 'great and glorious,' and old Trotter is more deserving of the
epithet than any of the personages I have lately encountered."
It was at the same resort of fashion and disease that Irving observed a
phenomenon upon which Brevoort had commented as beginning to be
noticeable in America.
"Your account [he writes] of the brevity of the old lady's nether
garments distresses me.... I cannot help observing that this
fashion of short skirts must have been invented by the French
ladies as a complete trick upon John Bull's 'woman-folk.' It was
introduced just at the time the English flocked in such crowds to
Paris. The French women, you know, are remarkable for pretty feet
and ankles, and can display them in perfect security. The English
are remarkable for the contrary. Seeing the proneness of the
English women to follow French fashions, they therefore led them
into this disastrous one, and sent them home with their petticoats
up to their knees, exhibiting such a variety of sturdy little legs
as would have afforded Hogarth an ample choice to match one of his
assemblages of queer heads. It is really a great source of
curiosity and amusement on the promenade of a watering-place to
observe the little sturdy English women, trudging about in their
stout leather shoes, and to study the various 'understandings'
betrayed to view by this mischievous fashion."
The years passed rather wearily in England. Peter continued to be an
invalid, and Washington himself, never robust, felt the pressure more
and more of the irksome and unprosperous business affairs. Of his own
want of health, however, he never complains; he maintains a patient
spirit in the ill turns of fortune, and his impatience in the business
complications is that of a man hindered from his proper career. The
times were depressing.
"In America [he writes to Brevoort] you have financial
difficulties, the embarrassments of trade, the distress of
merchants, but here you have what is far worse, the distress of the
poor--not merely mental sufferings, but the absolute miseries of
nature: hunger, nakedness, wretchedness of all kinds that the
laboring people in this country are liable to. In the best of times
they do but subsist, but in adverse times they starve. How the
country is to extricate itself from its present embarrassment, how
it is to escape from the poverty that seems to be overwhelming it,
and how the government is to quiet the multitudes that are already
turbulent and clamorous, and are yet but in the beginning of their
real miseries, I cannot conceive."
The embarrassments of the agricultural and laboring classes and of the
government were as serious in 1816 as they have again become in 1881.
During 1817 Irving was mostly in the depths of gloom, a prey to the
monotony of life and torpidity of intellect. Rays of sunlight pierce the
clouds occasionally. The Van Wart household at Birmingham was a frequent
refuge for him, and we have pretty pictures of the domestic life there;
glimpses of Old Parr, whose reputation as a gourmand was only second to
his fame as a Grecian, and of that delightful genius, the Rev. Rann
Kennedy, who might have been famous if he had ever committed to paper
the long poems that he carried about in his head, and the engaging sight
of Irving playing the flute for the little Van Warts to dance. During
the holidays Irving paid another visit to the haunts of Isaac Walton,
and his description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party
on the banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was
still sensitive to the allurements of life, and liable to wander over
the "dead-line" of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day
in Elysium. "When we had descended from the last precipice," he says,
"and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant
meadow--then--fancy me, oh, thou 'sweetest of poets,' wandering by the
course of this romantic stream--a lovely girl hanging on my arm,
pointing out the beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating in
the most dulcet voice tracts of heaven-born poetry. If a strawberry
smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it
must feel as I felt at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful
year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions
of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be
attributed to the author of the "Sketch-Book."
The death of Irving's mother in the spring of 1817 determined him to
remain another year abroad. Business did not improve. His
brother-in-law Van Wart called a meeting of his creditors, the Irving
brothers floundered on into greater depths of embarrassment, and
Washington, who could not think of returning home to face poverty in New
York, began to revolve a plan that would give him a scanty but
sufficient support. The idea of the "Sketch-Book" was in his mind. He
had as yet made few literary acquaintances in England. It is an
illustration of the warping effect of friendship upon the critical
faculty that his opinion of Moore at this time was totally changed by
subsequent intimacy. At a later date the two authors became warm friends
and mutual admirers of each other's productions. In June, 1817, "Lalla
Rookh" was just from the press, and Irving writes to Brevoort: "Moore's
new poem is just out. I have not sent it to you, for it is dear and
worthless. It is written in the most effeminate taste, and fit only to
delight boarding-school girls and lads of nineteen just in their first
loves. Moore should have kept to songs and epigrammatic conceits. His
stream of intellect is too small to bear expansion--it spreads into
mere surface." Too much cream for the strawberry!
Notwithstanding business harassments in the summer and fall of 1817 he
found time for some wandering about the island; he was occasionally in
London, dining at Murray's, where he made the acquaintance of the elder
D'Israeli and other men of letters (one of his notes of a dinner at
Murray's is this: "Lord Byron told Murray that he was much happier after
breaking with Lady Byron--he hated this still, quiet life"); he was
publishing a new edition of the "Knickerbocker," illustrated by Leslie
and Allston; and we find him at home in the friendly and brilliant
society of Edinburgh; both the magazine publishers, Constable and
Blackwood, were very civil to him, and Mr. Jeffrey (Mrs. Renwick was his
sister) was very attentive; and he passed some days with Walter Scott,
whose home life he so agreeably describes in his sketch of "Abbotsford."
He looked back longingly to the happy hours there (he writes to his
brother): "Scott reading, occasionally, from 'Prince Arthur'; telling
border stories or characteristic anecdotes; Sophy Scott singing with
charming _naïveté_ a little border song; the rest of the family disposed
in listening groups, while greyhounds, spaniels, and cats bask in
unbounded indulgence before the fire. Everything about Scott is perfect
character and picture."
In the beginning of 1818 the business affairs of the brothers became so
irretrievably involved that Peter and Washington went through the
humiliating experience of taking the bankrupt act. Washington's
connection with the concern was little more than nominal, and he felt
small anxiety for himself, and was eager to escape from an occupation
which had taken all the elasticity out of his mind. But on account of
his brothers, in this dismal wreck of a family connection, his soul was
steeped in bitterness. Pending the proceedings of the commissioners, he
shut himself up day and night to the study of German, and while waiting
for the examination used to walk up and down the room, conning over the
German verbs.
In August he went up to London and cast himself irrevocably upon the
fortune of his pen. He had accumulated some materials, and upon these
he set to work. Efforts were made at home to procure for him the
position of Secretary of Legation in London, which drew from him the
remark, when they came to his knowledge, that he did not like to have
his name hackneyed about among the office-seekers in Washington.
Subsequently his brother William wrote him that Commodore Decatur was
keeping open for him the office of Chief Clerk in the Navy Department.
To the mortification and chagrin of his brothers, Washington declined
the position. He was resolved to enter upon no duties that would
interfere with his literary pursuits.
This resolution, which exhibited a modest confidence in his own powers,
and the energy with which he threw himself into his career, showed the
fibre of the man. Suddenly, by the reverse of fortune, he who had been
regarded as merely the ornamental genius of the family became its stay
and support. If he had accepted the aid of his brothers, during the
experimental period of his life, in the loving spirit of confidence in
which it was given, he was not less ready to reverse the relations when
the time came; the delicacy with which his assistance was rendered, the
scrupulous care taken to convey the feeling that his brothers were doing
him a continued favor in sharing his good fortune, and their own
unjealous acceptance of what they would as freely have given if
circumstances had been different, form one of the pleasantest instances
of brotherly concord and self-abnegation. I know nothing more admirable
than the life-long relations of this talented and sincere family.
Before the "Sketch-Book" was launched, and while Irving was casting
about for the means of livelihood, Walter Scott urged him to take the
editorship of an Anti-Jacobin periodical in Edinburgh. This he declined
because he had no taste for politics, and because he was averse to
stated, routine literary work. Subsequently Mr. Murray offered him a
salary of a thousand guineas to edit a periodical to be published by
himself. This was declined, as also was another offer to contribute to
the "London Quarterly" with the liberal pay of one hundred guineas an
article. For the "Quarterly" he would not write, because, he says, "it
has always been so hostile to my country, I cannot draw a pen in its
service." This is worthy of note in view of a charge made afterwards,
when he was attacked for his English sympathies, that he was a frequent
contributor to this anti-American review. His sole contributions to it
were a gratuitous review of the book of an American author, and an
explanatory article, written at the desire of his publisher, on the
"Conquest of Granada." It is not necessary to dwell upon the small
scandal about Irving's un-American feeling. If there was ever a man who
loved his country and was proud of it; whose broad, deep, and strong
patriotism did not need the saliency of ignorant partisanship, it was
Washington Irving. He was like his namesake an American, and with the
same pure loyalty and unpartisan candor.
The first number of the "Sketch-Book" was published in America in May,
1819. Irving was then thirty-six years old. The series was not completed
till September, 1820. The first installment was carried mainly by two
papers, "The Wife" and "Rip Van Winkle;" the one full of tender pathos
that touched all hearts, because it was recognized as a genuine
expression of the author's nature; and the other a happy effort of
imaginative humor,--one of those strokes of genius that recreate the
world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was an
old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will
endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea. A
great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.
The "Sketch-Book" created a sensation in America, and the echo of it was
not long in reaching England. The general chorus of approval and the
rapid sale surprised Irving, and sent his spirits up, but success had
the effect on him that it always has on a fine nature. He writes to
Leslie: "Now you suppose I am all on the alert, and full of spirit and
excitement. No such thing. I am just as good for nothing as ever I was;
and, indeed, have been flurried and put out of my way by these puffings.
I feel something as I suppose you did when your picture met with
success,--anxious to do something better, and at a loss what to do."
It was with much misgiving that Irving made this venture. "I feel great
diffidence," he writes Brevoort, March 3, 1819, "about this reappearance
in literature. I am conscious of my imperfections, and my mind has been
for a long time past so pressed upon and agitated by various cares and
anxieties, that I fear it has lost much of its cheerfulness and some of
its activity. I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise
and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion among our
American writers at present. I have preferred addressing myself to the
feelings and fancy of the reader more than to his judgment. My writings
may appear, therefore, light and trifling in our country of philosophers
and politicians. But if they possess merit in the class of literature to
which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work. I seek only
to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others
to play the fiddle and French-horn." This diffidence was not assumed.
All through his career, a breath of criticism ever so slight acted
temporarily like a hoar-frost upon his productive power. He always saw
reasons to take sides with his critic. Speaking of "vanity" in a letter
of March, 1820, when Scott and Lockhart and all the Reviews were in a
full chorus of acclaim, he says: "I wish I did possess more of it, but
it seems my curse at present to have anything but confidence in myself
or pleasure in anything I have written."
In a similar strain he had written, in September, 1819, on the news of
the cordial reception of the "Sketch-Book" in America:--
"The manner in which the work has been received and the eulogiums
that have been passed upon it in the American papers and periodical
works, have completely overwhelmed me. They go far, _far_ beyond my
most sanguine expectations, and indeed are expressed with such
peculiar warmth and kindness as to affect me in the tenderest
manner. The receipt of your letter, and the reading of some of the
criticisms this morning, have rendered me nervous for the whole
day. I feel almost appalled by such success, and fearful that it
cannot be real, or that it is not fully merited, or that I shall
not act up to the expectations that may be formed. We are
whimsically constituted beings. I had got out of conceit of all
that I had written, and considered it very questionable stuff; and
now that it is so extravagantly bepraised, I begin to feel afraid
that I shall not do as well again. However, we shall see as we get
on. As yet I am extremely irregular and precarious in my fits of
composition. The least thing puts me out of the vein, and even
applause flurries me and prevents my writing, though of course it
will ultimately be a stimulus....
"I have been somewhat touched by the manner in which my writings
have been noticed in the 'Evening Post.' I had considered Coleman
as cherishing an ill-will toward me, and, to tell the truth, have
not always been the most courteous in my opinions concerning him.
It is a painful thing either to dislike others or to fancy they
dislike us, and I have felt both pleasure and self-reproach at
finding myself so mistaken with respect to Mr. Coleman. I like to
out with a good feeling as soon as it rises, and so I have dropt
Coleman a line on the subject.
"I hope you will not attribute all this sensibility to the kind
reception I have met to an author's vanity. I am sure it proceeds
from very different sources. Vanity could not bring the tears into
my eyes as they have been brought by the kindness of my countrymen.
I have felt cast down, blighted, and broken-spirited, and these
sudden rays of sunshine agitate me more than they revive me. I
hope--I hope I may yet do something more worthy of the
appreciation lavished on me."
Irving had not contemplated publishing in England, but the papers began
to be reprinted, and he was obliged to protect himself. He offered the
sketches to Murray, the princely publisher, who afterwards dealt so
liberally with him, but the venture was declined in a civil note,
written in that charming phraseology with which authors are familiar,
but which they would in vain seek to imitate. Irving afterwards greatly
prized this letter. He undertook the risks of the publication himself,
and the book sold well, although "written by an author the public knew
nothing of, and published by a bookseller who was going to ruin." In a
few months Murray, who was thereafter proud to be Irving's publisher,
undertook the publication of the two volumes of the "Sketch-Book," and
also of the "Knickerbocker" history, which Mr. Lockhart had just been
warmly praising in "Blackwood's." Indeed, he bought the copyright of the
"Sketch-Book" for two hundred pounds. The time for the publisher's
complaisance had arrived sooner even than Scott predicted in one of his
kindly letters to Irving, "when
'Your name is up and may go
From Toledo to Madrid.'"
Irving passed five years in England. Once recognized by the literary
world, whatever was best in the society of letters and of fashion was
open to him. He was a welcome guest in the best London houses, where he
met the foremost literary personages of the time, and established most
cordial relations with many of them; not to speak of statesmen,
soldiers, and men and women of fashion, there were the elder D'Israeli,
Southey, Campbell, Hallam, Gifford, Milman, Foscolo, Rogers, Scott, and
Belzoni fresh from his Egyptian explorations. In Irving's letters this
old society passes in review: Murray's drawing-rooms; the amusing
blue-stocking coteries of fashion of which Lady Caroline Lamb was a
promoter; the Countess of Besborough's, at whose house The Duke could be
seen; the Wimbledon country seat of Lord and Lady Spence; Belzoni, a
giant of six feet five, the centre of a group of eager auditors of the
Egyptian marvels; Hallam, affable and unpretending, and a copious
talker; Gifford, a small, shriveled, deformed man of sixty, with
something of a humped back, eyes that diverge, and a large mouth,
reclining on a sofa, propped up by cushions, with none of the petulance
that you would expect from his Review, but a mild, simple, unassuming
man,--he it is who prunes the contributions and takes the sting out of
them (one would like to have seen them before the sting was taken out);
and Scott, the right honest-hearted, entering into the passing scene
with the hearty enjoyment of a child, to whom literature seems a sport
rather than a labor or ambition, an author void of all the petulance,
egotism, and peculiarities of the craft. We have Moore's authority for
saying that the literary dinner described in the "The Tales of a
Traveller," whimsical as it seems and pervaded by the conventional
notion of the relations of publishers and authors, had a personal
foundation. Irving's satire of both has always the old-time Grub Street
flavor, or at least the reminiscent tone, which is, by the way, quite
characteristic of nearly everything that he wrote about England. He was
always a little in the past tense. Buckthorne's advice to his friend
is, never to be eloquent to an author except in praise of his own works,
or, what is nearly as acceptable, in disparagement of the work of his
contemporaries. "If ever he speaks favorably of the productions of a
particular friend, dissent boldly from him; pronounce his friend to be a
blockhead; never fear his being vexed. Much as people speak of the
irritability of authors, I never found one to take offense at such
contradictions. No, no, sir, authors are particularly candid in
admitting the faults of their friends." At the dinner Buckthorne
explains the geographical boundaries in the land of literature: you may
judge tolerably well of an author's popularity by the wine his
bookseller gives him. "An author crosses the port line about the third
edition, and gets into claret; and when he has reached the sixth or
seventh, he may revel in champagne and burgundy." The two ends of the
table were occupied by the two partners, one of whom laughed at the
clever things said by the poet, while the other maintained his
sedateness and kept on carving. "His gravity was explained to us by my
friend Buckthorne. He informed me that the concerns of the house were
admirably distributed among the partners. Thus, for instance, said he,
the grave gentleman is the carving partner, who attends to the joints;
and the other is the laughing partner, who attends to the jokes." If any
of the jokes from the lower end of the table reached the upper end, they
seldom produced much effect. "Even the laughing partner did not think it
necessary to honor them with a smile; which my neighbor Buckthorne
accounted for by informing me that there was a certain degree of
popularity to be obtained before a bookseller could afford to laugh at
an author's jokes."
In August, 1820, we find Irving in Paris, where his reputation secured
him a hearty welcome: he was often at the Cannings' and at Lord
Holland's; Talma, then the king of the stage, became his friend, and
there he made the acquaintance of Thomas Moore, which ripened into a
familiar and lasting friendship. The two men were drawn to each other;
Irving greatly admired the "noble-hearted, manly, spirited little
fellow, with a mind as generous as his fancy is brilliant." Talma was
playing Hamlet to overflowing houses, which hung on his actions with
breathless attention, or broke into ungovernable applause; ladies were
carried fainting from the boxes. The actor is described as short in
stature, rather inclined to fat, with a large face and a thick neck; his
eyes are bluish, and have a peculiar cast in them at times. He said to
Irving that he thought the French character much changed--graver; the
day of the classic drama, mere declamation and fine language, had gone
by; the Revolution had taught them to demand real life, incident,
passion, character. Irving's life in Paris was gay enough, and seriously
interfered with his literary projects. He had the fortunes of his
brother Peter on his mind also, and invested his earnings, then and for
some years after, in enterprises for his benefit that ended in
disappointment.
The "Sketch-Book" was making a great fame for him in England. Jeffrey,
in the "Edinburgh Review," paid it a most flattering tribute, and even
the savage "Quarterly" praised it. A rumor attributed it to Scott, who
was always masquerading; at least, it was said, he might have revised
it, and should have the credit of its exquisite style. This led to a
sprightly correspondence between Lady Littleton, the daughter of Earl
Spencer, one of the most accomplished and lovely women of England, and
Benjamin Rush, Minister to the Court of St. James, in the course of
which Mr. Rush suggested the propriety of giving out under his official
seal that Irving was the author of "Waverley." "Geoffrey Crayon is the
most fashionable fellow of the day," wrote the painter Leslie. Lord
Byron, in a letter to Murray, underscored his admiration of the author,
and subsequently said to an American: "His Crayon,--I know it by heart;
at least, there is not a passage that I cannot refer to immediately."
And afterwards he wrote to Moore, "His writings are my delight." There
seemed to be, as some one wrote, "a kind of conspiracy to hoist him over
the heads of his contemporaries." Perhaps the most satisfactory evidence
of his popularity was his publisher's enthusiasm. The publisher is an
infallible contemporary barometer.
It is worthy of note that an American should have captivated public
attention at the moment when Scott and Byron were the idols of the
English-reading world.
In the following year Irving was again in England, visiting his sister
in Birmingham, and tasting moderately the delights of London. He was,
indeed, something of an invalid. An eruptive malady,--the revenge of
nature, perhaps, for defeat in her earlier attack on his
lungs,--appearing in his ankles, incapacitated him for walking,
tormented him at intervals, so that literary composition was impossible,
sent him on pilgrimages to curative springs, and on journeys undertaken
for distraction and amusement, in which all work except that of seeing
and absorbing material had to be postponed. He was subject to this
recurring invalidism all his life, and we must regard a good part of the
work he did as a pure triumph of determination over physical
discouragement. This year the fruits of his interrupted labor appeared
in "Bracebridge Hall," a volume that was well received, but did not add
much to his reputation, though it contained "Dolph Heyliger," one of his
most characteristic Dutch stories, and the "Stout Gentleman," one of
his daintiest and most artistic bits of restrained humor.[1]
[Footnote 1: I was once [says his biographer] reading aloud in
his presence a very flattering review of his works, which had
been sent him by the critic in 1848, and smiled as I came to
this sentence: "His most comical pieces have always a serious
end in view." "You laugh," said he, with that air of whimsical
significance so natural to him, "but it is true. I have kept
that to myself hitherto, but that man has found me out. He has
detected the moral of the _Stout Gentleman_."]
Irving sought relief from his malady by an extended tour in Germany. He
sojourned some time in Dresden, whither his reputation had preceded him,
and where he was cordially and familiarly received, not only by the
foreign residents, but at the prim and antiquated little court of King
Frederick Augustus and Queen Amalia. Of Irving at this time Mrs. Emily
Fuller (_née_ Foster), whose relations with him have been referred to,
wrote in 1860:--
"He was thoroughly a gentleman, not merely in external manners and
look, but to the inner-most fibres and core of his heart:
sweet-tempered, gentle, fastidious, sensitive, and gifted with the
warmest affections; the most delightful and invariably interesting
companion; gay and full of humor, even in spite of occasional fits
of melancholy, which he was, however, seldom subject to when with
those he liked; a gift of conversation that flowed like a full
river in sunshine,--bright, easy, and abundant."
Those were pleasant days at Dresden, filled up with the society of
bright and warm-hearted people, varied by royal boar hunts, stiff
ceremonies at the little court, tableaux, and private theatricals, yet
tinged with a certain melancholy, partly constitutional, that appears in
most of his letters. His mind was too unsettled for much composition. He
had little self-confidence, and was easily put out by a breath of
adverse criticism. At intervals he would come to the Fosters to read a
manuscript of his own.
"On these occasions strict orders were given that no visitor should
be admitted till the last word had been read, and the whole praised
or criticised, as the case may be. Of criticism, however, we were
very spare, as a slight word would put him out of conceit of a
whole work. One of the best things he has published was thrown
aside, unfinished, for years, because the friend to whom he read
it, happening, unfortunately, not to be well, and sleepy, did not
seem to take the interest in it he expected. Too easily
discouraged, it was not till the latter part of his career that he
ever appreciated himself as an author. One condemning whisper
sounded louder in his ear than the plaudits of thousands."
This from Miss Emily Foster, who elsewhere notes his kindliness in
observing life:--
"Some persons, in looking upon life, view it as they would view a
picture, with a stern and criticising eye. He also looks upon life
as a picture, but to catch its beauties, its lights,--not its
defects and shadows. On the former he loves to dwell. He has a
wonderful knack at shutting his eyes to the sinister side of
anything. Never beat a more kindly heart than his; alive to the
sorrows, but not to the faults, of his friends, but doubly alive to
their virtues and goodness. Indeed, people seemed to grow more good
with one so unselfish and so gentle."
In London, some years later:--
"He was still the same; time changed him very little. His
conversation was as interesting as ever [he was always an excellent
relater]; his dark gray eyes still full of varying feeling; his
smile half playful, half melancholy, but ever kind. All that was
mean, or envious, or harsh, he seemed to turn from so completely
that, when with him, it seemed that such things were not. All
gentle and tender affections, Nature in her sweetest or grandest
moods, pervaded his whole imagination, and left no place for low or
evil thoughts; and when in good spirits, his humor, his droll
descriptions, and his fun would make the gravest or the saddest
laugh."
As to Irving's "state of mind" in Dresden, it is pertinent to quote a
passage from what we gather to be a journal kept by Miss Flora Foster:--
"He has written. He has confessed to my mother, as to a true and
dear friend, his love for E----, and his conviction of its utter
hopelessness. He feels himself unable to combat it. He thinks he
must try, by absence, to bring more peace to his mind. Yet he
cannot bear to give up our friendship,--an intercourse become so
dear to him, and so necessary to his daily happiness. Poor Irving!"
It is well for our peace of mind that we do not know what is going down
concerning us in "journals." On his way to the Herrnhuthers, Mr. Irving
wrote to Mrs. Foster:--
"When I consider how I have trifled with my time, suffered painful
vicissitudes of feeling, which for a time damaged both mind and
body,--when I consider all this, I reproach myself that I did not
listen to the first impulse of my mind, and abandon Dresden long
since. And yet I think of returning! Why should I come back to
Dresden? The very inclination that dooms me thither should furnish
reasons for my staying away."
In this mood, the Herrnhuthers, in their right-angled, whitewashed
world, were little attractive.
"If the Herrnhuthers were right in their notions, the world would
have been laid out in squares and angles and right lines, and
everything would have been white and black and snuff-color, as they
have been clipped by these merciless retrenchers of beauty and
enjoyment. And then their dormitories! Think of between one and two
hundred of these simple gentlemen cooped up at night in one great
chamber! What a concert of barrel-organs in this great resounding
saloon! And then their plan of marriage! The very birds of the air
choose their mates from preference and inclination; but this
detestable system of _lot_! The sentiment of love may be, and is,
in a great measure, a fostered growth of poetry and romance, and
balderdashed with false sentiment; but with all its vitiations, it
is the beauty and the charm, the flavor and the fragrance, of all
intercourse between man and woman; it is the rosy cloud in the
morning of life; and if it does too often resolve itself into the
shower, yet, to my mind, it only makes our nature more fruitful in
what is excellent and amiable."
Better suited him Prague, which is certainly a part of the "naughty
world" that Irving preferred:--
"Old Prague still keeps up its warrior look, and swaggers about
with its rusty corselet and helm, though both sadly battered. There
seems to me to be an air of style and fashion about the first
people of Prague, and a good deal of beauty in the fashionable
circle. This, perhaps, is owing to my contemplating it from a
distance, and my imagination lending it tints occasionally. Both
actors and audience, contemplated from the pit of a theatre, look
better than when seen in the boxes and behind the scenes. I like to
contemplate society in this way occasionally, and to dress it up by
the help of fancy, to my own taste. When I get in the midst of it,
it is too apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and
_ennui_ of being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but
to be a mere spectator is amusing. I am glad, therefore, that I
brought no letters to Prague. I shall leave it with a favorable
idea of its society and manners, from knowing nothing accurate of
either; and with a firm belief that every pretty woman I have seen
is an angel, as I am apt to think every pretty woman, until I have
found her out."
In July, 1823, Irving returned to Paris, to the society of the Moores
and the fascinations of the gay town, and to fitful literary work. Our
author wrote with great facility and rapidity when the inspiration was
on him, and produced an astonishing amount of manuscript in a short
period; but he often waited and fretted through barren weeks and months
for the movement of his fitful genius. His mind was teeming constantly
with new projects, and nothing could exceed his industry when once he
had taken a work in hand; but he never acquired the exact methodical
habits which enable some literary men to calculate their power and
quantity of production as accurately as that of a cotton mill.
The political changes in France during the period of Irving's long
sojourn in Paris do not seem to have taken much of his attention. In a
letter dated October 5, 1824, he says: "We have had much bustle in Paris
of late, between the death of one king and the succession of another. I
have become a little callous to public sights, but have,
notwithstanding, been to see the funeral of the late king, and the
entrance into Paris of the present one. Charles X. begins his reign in a
very conciliating manner, and is really popular. The Bourbons have
gained great accession of power within a few years."
The succession of Charles X. was also observed by another foreigner, who
was making agreeable personal notes at that time in Paris, but who is
not referred to by Irving, who for some unexplained reason failed to
meet the genial Scotsman at breakfast. Perhaps it is to his failure to
do so that he owes the semi-respectful reference to himself in Carlyle's
"Reminiscences." Lacking the stimulus to his vocabulary of personal
acquaintance, Carlyle simply wrote: "Washington Irving was said to be in
Paris, a kind of lion at that time, whose books I somewhat esteemed.
One day the Emerson-Tennant people bragged that they had engaged him to
breakfast with us at a certain _café_ next morning. We all attended
duly, Strackey among the rest, but no Washington came. 'Couldn't rightly
come,' said Malcolm to me in a judicious _aside_, as we cheerfully
breakfasted without him. I never saw Washington at all, but still have a
mild esteem of the good man." This ought to be accepted as evidence of
Carlyle's disinclination to say ill-natured things of those he did not
know.
The "Tales of a Traveller" appeared in 1824. In the author's opinion,
with which the best critics agreed, it contained some of his best
writing. He himself said in a letter to Brevoort, "There was more of an
artistic touch about it, though this is not a thing to be appreciated by
the many." It was rapidly written. The movement has a delightful
spontaneity, and it is wanting in none of the charms of his style,
unless, perhaps, the style is over-refined; but it was not a novelty,
and the public began to criticise and demand a new note. This may have
been one reason why he turned to a fresh field and to graver themes.
For a time he busied himself on some American essays of a semi-political
nature, which were never finished, and he seriously contemplated a Life
of Washington; but all these projects were thrown aside for one that
kindled his imagination,--the Life of Columbus; and in February, 1826,
he was domiciled at Madrid, and settled down to a long period of
unremitting and intense labor.
CHAPTER VII.
IN SPAIN.
Irving's residence in Spain, which was prolonged till September, 1829,
was the most fruitful period in his life, and of considerable
consequence to literature. It is not easy to overestimate the debt of
Americans to the man who first opened to them the fascinating domain of
early Spanish history and romance. We can conceive of it by reflecting
upon the blank that would exist without "The Alhambra," "The Conquest of
Granada," "The Legends of the Conquest of Spain," and I may add the
popular loss if we had not "The Lives of Columbus and his Companions."
Irving had the creative touch, or at least the magic of the pen, to give
a definite, universal, and romantic interest to whatever he described.
We cannot deny him that. A few lines about the inn of the Red Horse at
Stratford-on-Avon created a new object of pilgrimage right in the
presence of the house and tomb of the poet. And how much of the romantic
interest of all the English-reading world in the Alhambra is due to him;
the name invariably recalls his own, and every visitor there is
conscious of his presence. He has again and again been criticised almost
out of court, and written down to the rank of the mere idle humorist;
but as often as I take up "The Conquest of Granada" or "The Alhambra" I
am aware of something that has eluded the critical analysis, and I
conclude that if one cannot write for the few it may be worth while to
write for the many.
It was Irving's intention, when he went to Madrid, merely to make a
translation of some historical documents which were then appearing,
edited by M. Navarrete, from the papers of Bishop Las Casas and the
journals of Columbus, entitled "The Voyages of Columbus." But when he
found that this publication, although it contained many documents,
hitherto unknown, that threw much light on the discovery of the New
World, was rather a rich mass of materials for a history than a history
itself, and that he had access in Madrid libraries to great collections
of Spanish colonial history, he changed his plan, and determined to
write a Life of Columbus. His studies for this led him deep into the old
chronicles and legends of Spain, and out of these, with his own travel
and observation, came those books of mingled fables, sentiment, fact,
and humor which are after all the most enduring fruits of his residence
in Spain.
Notwithstanding his absorption in literary pursuits, Irving was not
denied the charm of domestic society, which was all his life his chief
delight. The house he most frequented in Madrid was that of Mr.
D'Oubril, the Russian Minister. In his charming household were Madame
D'Oubril and her niece, Mademoiselle Antoinette Bollviller, and Prince
Dolgorouki, a young _attaché_ of the legation. His letters to Prince
Dolgorouki and to Mademoiselle Antoinette give a most lively and
entertaining picture of his residence and travels in Spain. In one of
them to the prince, who was temporarily absent from the city, we have
glimpses of the happy hours, the happiest of all hours, passed in this
refined family circle. Here is one that exhibits the still fresh
romance in the heart of forty-four years:--
"Last evening, at your house, we had one of the most lovely
tableaux I ever beheld. It was the conception of Murillo,
represented by Madame A----. Mademoiselle Antoinette arranged the
tableau with her usual good taste, and the effect was enchanting.
It was more like a vision of something spiritual and celestial than
a representation of anything merely mortal; or rather it was woman
as in my romantic days I have been apt to imagine her, approaching
to the angelic nature. I have frequently admired Madame A----as a
mere beautiful woman, when I have seen her dressed up in the
fantastic attire of the _mode_; but here I beheld her elevated into
a representative of the divine purity and grace, exceeding even the
_beau idéal_ of the painter, for she even surpassed in beauty the
picture of Murillo. I felt as if I could have knelt down and
worshiped her. Heavens! what power women would have over us, if
they knew how to sustain the attractions which nature has bestowed
upon them, and which we are so ready to assist by our imaginations!
For my part, I am superstitious in my admiration of them, and like
to walk in a perpetual delusion, decking them out as divinities. I
thank no one to undeceive me, and to prove that they are mere
mortals."
And he continues in another strain:--
How full of interest everything is connected with the old times in
Spain! I am more and more delighted with the old literature of the
country, its chronicles, plays, and romances. It has the wild vigor
and luxuriance of the forests of my native country, which, however
savage and entangled, are more captivating to my imagination than
the finest parks and cultivated woodlands.
"As I live in the neighborhood of the library of the Jesuits'
College of St. Isidoro, I pass most of my mornings there. You
cannot think what a delight I feel in passing through its
galleries, filled with old parchment-bound books. It is a perfect
wilderness of curiosity to me. What a deep-felt, quiet luxury there
is in delving into the rich ore of these old, neglected volumes!
How these hours of uninterrupted intellectual enjoyment, so
tranquil and independent, repay one for the _ennui_ and
disappointment too often experienced in the intercourse of society!
How they serve to bring back the feelings into a harmonious tone,
after being jarred and put out of tune by the collisions with the
world!"
With the romantic period of Spanish history Irving was in ardent
sympathy. The story of the Saracens entranced his mind; his imagination
disclosed its Oriental quality while he pored over the romance and the
ruin of that land of fierce contrasts, of arid wastes beaten by the
burning sun, valleys blooming with intoxicating beauty, cities of
architectural splendor and picturesque squalor. It is matter of regret
that he, who seemed to need the southern sun to ripen his genius, never
made a pilgrimage into the East, and gave to the world pictures of the
lands that he would have touched with the charm of their own color and
the witchery of their own romance.
I will quote again from the letters, for they reveal the man quite as
well as the more formal and better known writings. His first sight of
the Alhambra is given in a letter to Mademoiselle Bollviller:--
"Our journey through La Mancha was cold and uninteresting,
excepting when we passed through the scenes of some of the exploits
of Don Quixote. We were repaid, however, by a night amidst the
scenery of the Sierra Morena, seen by the light of the full moon. I
do not know how this scenery would appear in the daytime, but by
moonlight it is wonderfully wild and romantic, especially after
passing the summit of the Sierra. As the day dawned we entered the
stern and savage defiles of the Despeña Perros, which equals the
wild landscapes of Salvator Rosa. For some time we continued
winding along the brinks of precipices, overhung with cragged and
fantastic rocks; and after a succession of such rude and sterile
scenes we swept down to Carolina, and found ourselves in another
climate. The orange-trees, the aloes, and myrtle began to make
their appearance; we felt the warm temperature of the sweet South,
and began to breathe the balmy air of Andalusia. At Andujar we were
delighted with the neatness and cleanliness of the houses, the
_patios_ planted with orange and citron trees, and refreshed by
fountains. We passed a charming evening on the banks of the famous
Guadalquivir, enjoying the mild, balmy air of a southern evening,
and rejoicing in the certainty that we were at length in this land
of promise....
"But Granada, _bellissima_ Granada! Think what must have been our
delight when, after passing the famous bridge of Pinos, the scene
of many a bloody encounter between Moor and Christian, and
remarkable for having been the place where Columbus was overtaken
by the messenger of Isabella, when about to abandon Spain in
despair, we turned a promontory of the arid mountains of Elvira,
and Granada, with its towers, its Alhambra, and its snowy
mountains, burst upon our sight! The evening sun shone gloriously
upon its red towers as we approached it, and gave a mellow tone to
the rich scenery of the vega. It was like the magic glow which
poetry and romance have shed over this enchanting place....
"The more I contemplate these places, the more my admiration is
awakened for the elegant habits and delicate taste of the Moorish
monarchs. The delicately ornamented walls; the aromatic groves,
mingling with the freshness and the enlivening sounds of fountains
and rivers of water; the retired baths, bespeaking purity and
refinement; the balconies and galleries, open to the fresh mountain
breeze, and overlooking the loveliest scenery of the valley of the
Darro and the magnificent expanse of the vega,--it is impossible to
contemplate this delicious abode and not feel an admiration of the
genius and the poetical spirit of those who first devised this
earthly paradise. There is an intoxication of heart and soul in
looking over such scenery at this genial season. All nature is just
teeming with new life, and putting on the first delicate verdure
and bloom of spring. The almond-trees are in blossom; the fig-trees
are beginning to sprout; everything is in the tender bud, the
young leaf, or the half-open flower. The beauty of the season is
but half developed, so that while there is enough to yield present
delight there is the flattering promise of still further enjoyment.
Good heavens! after passing two years amidst the sunburnt wastes of
Castile, to be let loose to rove at large over this fragrant and
lovely land!"
It was not easy, however, even in the Alhambra, perfectly to call up the
past:--
"The verity of the present checks and chills the imagination in its
picturings of the past. I have been trying to conjure up images of
Boabdil passing in regal splendor through these courts; of his
beautiful queen; of the Abencerrages, the Gomares, and the other
Moorish cavaliers, who once filled these halls with the glitter of
arms and the splendor of Oriental luxury; but I am continually
awakened from my reveries by the jargon of an Andalusian peasant
who is setting out rose-bushes, and the song of a pretty Andalusian
girl who shows the Alhambra, and who is chanting a little romance
that has probably been handed down from generation to generation
since the time of the Moors."
In another letter, written from Seville, he returns to the subject of
the Moors. He is describing an excursion to Alcala de la Guadayra:--
"Nothing can be more charming than the windings of the little river
among banks hanging with gardens and orchards of all kinds of
delicate southern fruits, and tufted with flowers and aromatic
plants. The nightingales throng this lovely little valley as
numerously as they do the gardens of Aranjuez. Every bend of the
river presents a new landscape, for it is beset by old Moorish
mills of the most picturesque forms, each mill having an embattled
tower,--a memento of the valiant tenure by which those gallant
fellows, the Moors, held this earthly paradise, having to be ready
at all times for war, and as it were to work with one hand and
fight with the other. It is impossible to travel about Andalusia
and not imbibe a kind feeling for those Moors. They deserved this
beautiful country. They won it bravely; they enjoyed it generously
and kindly. No lover ever delighted more to cherish and adorn a
mistress, to heighten and illustrate her charms, and to vindicate
and defend her against all the world than did the Moors to
embellish, enrich, elevate, and defend their beloved Spain.
Everywhere I meet traces of their sagacity, courage, urbanity, high
poetical feeling, and elegant taste. The noblest institutions in
this part of Spain, the best inventions for comfortable and
agreeable living, and all those habitudes and customs which throw a
peculiar and Oriental charm over the Andalusian mode of living may
be traced to the Moors. Whenever I enter these beautiful marble
_patios_, set out with shrubs and flowers, refreshed by fountains,
sheltered with awnings from the sun; where the air is cool at
noonday, the ear delighted in sultry summer by the sound of falling
water; where, in a word, a little paradise is shut up within the
walls of home, I think on the poor Moors, the inventors of all
these delights. I am at times almost ready to join in sentiment
with a worthy friend and countryman of mine whom I met in Malaga,
who swears the Moors are the only people that ever deserved the
country, and prays to Heaven that they may come over from Africa
and conquer it again."
In a following paragraph we get a glimpse of a world, however, that the
author loves still more:--
"Tell me everything about the children. I suppose the discreet
princess will soon consider it an indignity to be ranked among the
number. I am told she is growing with might and main, and is
determined not to stop until she is a woman outright. I would give
all the money in my pocket to be with those dear little women at
the round table in the saloon, or on the grass-plot in the garden,
to tell them some marvelous tales."
And again:--
"Give my love to all my dear little friends of the round table,
from the discreet princess down to the little blue-eyed boy. Tell
_la petite Marie_ that I still remain true to her, though
surrounded by all the beauties of Seville; and that I swear (but
this she must keep between ourselves) that there is not a little
woman to compare with her in all Andalusia."
The publication of "The Life of Columbus," which had been delayed by
Irving's anxiety to secure historical accuracy in every detail, did not
take place till February, 1828. For the English copyright Mr. Murray
paid him £3,150. He wrote an abridgment of it, which he presented to his
generous publisher, and which was a very profitable book (the first
edition of ten thousand copies sold immediately). This was followed by
the "Companions," and by "The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada," for
which he received two thousand guineas. "The Alhambra" was not published
till just before Irving's return to America, in 1832, and was brought
out by Mr. Bentley, who bought it for one thousand guineas.
"The Conquest of Granada," which I am told Irving in his latter years
regarded as the best of all his works, was declared by Coleridge "a
_chef-d'oeuvre_ of its kind." I think it bears re-reading as well as any
of the Spanish books. Of the reception of the "Columbus" the author was
very doubtful. Before it was finished he wrote:--
"I have lost confidence in the favorable disposition of my
countrymen, and look forward to cold scrutiny and stern criticism,
and this is a line of writing in which I have not hitherto
ascertained my own powers. Could I afford it, I should like to
write, and to lay my writings aside when finished. There is an
independent delight in study and in the creative exercise of the
pen; we live in a world of dreams, but publication lets in the
noisy rabble of the world, and there is an end of our dreaming."
In a letter to Brevoort, February 23, 1828, he fears that he can never
regain
"That delightful confidence which I once enjoyed of not the good
opinion, but the good will, of my countrymen. To me it is always
ten times more gratifying to be liked than to be admired; and I
confess to you, though I am a little too proud to confess it to the
world, the idea that the kindness of my countrymen toward me was
withering caused me for a long time the most weary depression of
spirits, and disheartened me from making any literary exertions."
It has been a popular notion that Irving's career was uniformly one of
ease. In this same letter he exclaims: "With all my exertions, I seem
always to keep about up to my chin in troubled water, while the world, I
suppose, thinks I am sailing smoothly, with wind and tide in my favor."
In a subsequent letter to Brevoort, dated at Seville, December 26, 1828,
occurs almost the only piece of impatience and sarcasm that this long
correspondence affords. "Columbus" had succeeded beyond his expectation,
and its popularity was so great that some enterprising American had
projected an abridgment, which it seems would not be protected by the
copyright of the original. Irving writes:--
"I have just sent to my brother an abridgment of 'Columbus' to be
published immediately, as I find some paltry fellow is pirating an
abridgment. Thus every line of life has its depredation. 'There be
land rats and water rats, land pirates and water pirates,--I mean
thieves,' as old Shylock says. I feel vexed at this shabby attempt
to purloin this work from me, it having really cost me more toil
and trouble than all my other productions, and being one that I
trusted would keep me current with my countrymen; but we are making
rapid advances in literature in America, and have already attained
many of the literary vices and diseases of the old countries of
Europe. We swarm with reviewers, though we have scarce original
works sufficient for them to alight and prey upon, and we closely
imitate all the worst tricks of the trade and of the craft in
England. Our literature, before long, will be like some of those
premature and aspiring whipsters, who become old men before they
are young ones, and fancy they prove their manhood by their
profligacy and their diseases."
But the work had an immediate, continued, and deserved success. It was
critically contrasted with Robertson's account of Columbus, and it is
open to the charge of too much rhetorical color here and there, and it
is at times too diffuse; but its substantial accuracy is not questioned,
and the glow of the narrative springs legitimately from the romance of
the theme. Irving understood, what our later historians have fully
appreciated, the advantage of vivid individual portraiture in historical
narrative. His conception of the character and mission of Columbus is
largely outlined, but firmly and most carefully executed, and is one of
the noblest in literature. I cannot think it idealized, though it
required a poetic sensibility to enter into sympathy with the
magnificent dreamer, who was regarded by his own generation as the fool
of an idea. A more prosaic treatment would have utterly failed to
represent that mind, which existed from boyhood in an ideal world, and,
amid frustrated hopes, shattered plans, and ignoble returns for his
sacrifices, could always rebuild its glowing projects, and conquer
obloquy and death itself with immortal anticipations.
Towards the close of his residence in Spain, Irving received
unexpectedly the appointment of Secretary of Legation to the Court of
St. James, at which Louis McLane was American Minister; and after some
hesitation, and upon the urgency of his friends, he accepted it. He was
in the thick of literary projects. One of these was the History of the
Conquest of Mexico, which he afterwards surrendered to Mr. Prescott and
another was the "Life of Washington," which was to wait many years for
fulfillment. His natural diffidence and his reluctance to a routine life
made him shrink from the diplomatic appointment; but once engaged in it,
and launched again in London society, he was reconciled to the
situation. Of honors there was no lack, nor of the adulation of social
and literary circles. In April, 1830, the Royal Society of Literature
awarded him one of the two annual gold medals placed at the disposal of
the society by George IV., to be given to authors of literary works of
eminent merit, the other being voted to the historian Hallam; and this
distinction was followed by the degree of D.C.L. from the University of
Oxford,--a title which the modest author never used.
CHAPTER VIII.
RETURN TO AMERICA: SUNNYSIDE: THE MISSION TO MADRID.
In 1831 Mr. Irving was thrown, by his diplomatic position, into the
thick of the political and social tumult, when the Reform Bill was
pending and war was expected in Europe. It is interesting to note that
for a time he laid aside his attitude of the dispassionate observer, and
caught the general excitement. He writes in March, expecting that the
fate of the cabinet will be determined in a week, looking daily for
decisive news from Paris, and fearing dismal tidings from Poland.
"However," he goes on to say in a vague way, "the great cause of all the
world will go on. What a stirring moment it is to live in! I never took
such intense interest in newspapers. It seems to me as if life were
breaking out anew with me, or that I were entering upon quite a new and
almost unknown career of existence, and I rejoice to find my
sensibilities, which were waning as to many objects of past interest,
reviving with all their freshness and vivacity at the scenes and
prospects opening around me." He expects the breaking of the thralldom
of falsehood woven over the human mind; and, more definitely, hopes that
the Reform Bill will prevail. Yet he is oppressed by the gloom hanging
over the booksellers' trade, which he thinks will continue until reform
and cholera have passed away.
During the last months of his residence in England, the author renewed
his impressions of Stratford (the grateful landlady of the Red Horse Inn
showed him a poker which was locked up among the treasures of her house,
on which she had caused to be engraved "Geoffrey Crayon's Sceptre");
spent some time at Newstead Abbey; and had the sorrowful pleasure in
London of seeing Scott once more, and for the last time. The great
novelist, in the sad eclipse of his powers, was staying in the city, on
his way to Italy, and Mr. Lockhart asked Irving to dine with him. It was
but a melancholy repast. "Ah," said Scott, as Irving gave him his arm,
after dinner, "the times are changed, my good fellow, since we went over
the Eildon Hills together. It is all nonsense to tell a man that his
mind is not affected when his body is in this state."
Irving retired from the legation in September, 1831, to return home, the
longing to see his native land having become intense; but his arrival in
New York was delayed till May, 1832.
If he had any doubts of the sentiments of his countrymen toward him, his
reception in New York dissipated them. America greeted her most famous
literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love and admiration. The
public banquet in New York, that was long remembered for its brilliancy,
was followed by the tender of the same tribute in other cities,--an
honor which his unconquerable shrinking from this kind of publicity
compelled him to decline. The "Dutch Herodotus, Diedrich Knickerbocker,"
to use the phrase of a toast, having come out of one such encounter with
fair credit, did not care to tempt Providence further. The thought of
making a dinner-table speech threw him into a sort of whimsical
panic,--a noble infirmity, which characterized also Hawthorne and
Thackeray.
The enthusiasm manifested for the homesick author was equaled by his own
for the land and the people he supremely loved. Nor was his surprise at
the progress made during seventeen years less than his delight in it.
His native place had become a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants;
the accumulation of wealth and the activity of trade astonished him, and
the literary stir was scarcely less unexpected. The steamboat had come
to be used, so that he seemed to be transported from place to place by
magic; and on a near view the politics of America seemed not less
interesting than those of Europe. The nullification battle was set; the
currency conflict still raged; it was a time of inflation and land
speculation; the West, every day more explored and opened, was the land
of promise for capital and energy. Fortunes were made in a day by buying
lots in "paper towns." Into some of these speculations Irving put his
savings; the investments were as permanent as they were unremunerative.
Irving's first desire, however, on his recovery from the state of
astonishment into which these changes plunged him, was to make himself
thoroughly acquainted with the entire country and its development. To
this end he made an extended tour in the South and West, which passed
beyond the bounds of frontier settlement. The fruit of his excursion
into the Pawnee country, on the waters of the Arkansas, a region
untraversed by white men, except solitary trappers, was "A Tour on the
Prairies," a sort of romance of reality, which remains to-day as good a
description as we have of hunting adventure on the plains. It led also
to the composition of other books on the West, which were more or less
mere pieces of book-making for the market.
Our author was far from idle. Indeed, he could not afford to be.
Although he had received considerable sums from his books, and perhaps
enough for his own simple wants, the responsibility of the support of
his two brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, and several nieces, devolved upon
him. And, besides, he had a longing to make himself a home, where he
could pursue his calling undisturbed, and indulge the sweets of domestic
and rural life, which of all things lay nearest his heart. And these
two undertakings compelled him to be diligent with his pen to the end of
his life. The spot he chose for his "Roost" was a little farm on the
bank of the river at Tarrytown, close to his old Sleepy Hollow haunt,
one of the loveliest, if not the most picturesque, situations on the
Hudson. At first he intended nothing more than a summer retreat,
inexpensive and simply furnished. But his experience was that of all who
buy, and renovate, and build. The farm had on it a small stone Dutch
cottage, built about a century before, and inhabited by one of the Van
Tassels. This was enlarged, still preserving the quaint Dutch
characteristics; it acquired a tower and a whimsical weathercock, the
delight of the owner ("it was brought from Holland by Gill Davis, the
King of Coney Island, who says he got it from a windmill which they were
demolishing at the gate of Rotterdam, which windmill has been mentioned
in 'Knickerbocker'"), and became one of the most snug and picturesque
residences on the river. When the slip of Melrose ivy, which was
brought over from Scotland by Mrs. Renwick and given to the author, had
grown and well overrun it, the house, in the midst of sheltering groves
and secluded walks, was as pretty a retreat as a poet could desire. But
the little nook proved to have an insatiable capacity for swallowing up
money, as the necessities of the author's establishment increased: there
was always something to be done to the grounds; some alterations in the
house; a green-house, a stable, a gardener's cottage, to be built,--and
to the very end the outlay continued. The cottage necessitated economy
in other personal expenses, and incessant employment of his pen. But
Sunnyside, as the place was named, became the dearest spot on earth to
him; it was his residence, from which he tore himself with reluctance,
and to which he returned with eager longing; and here, surrounded by
relatives whom he loved, he passed nearly all the remainder of his
years, in as happy conditions, I think, as a bachelor ever enjoyed. His
intellectual activity was unremitting, he had no lack of friends, there
was only now and then a discordant note in the general estimation of his
literary work, and he was the object of the most tender care from his
nieces. Already, he writes, in October, 1838, "my little cottage is well
stocked. I have Ebenezer's five girls, and himself also, whenever he can
be spared from town; sister Catherine and her daughter; Mr. Davis
occasionally, with casual visits from all the rest of our family
connection. The cottage, therefore, is never lonely." I like to dwell in
thought upon this happy home, a real haven of rest after many
wanderings; a seclusion broken only now and then by enforced absence,
like that in Madrid as minister, but enlivened by many welcome guests.
Perhaps the most notorious of these was a young Frenchman, a "somewhat
quiet guest," who, after several months' imprisonment on board a French
man-of-war, was set on shore at Norfolk, and spent a couple of months in
New York and its vicinity, in 1837. This visit was vividly recalled to
Irving in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Storrow, who was in Paris in
1853, and had just been presented at court:--
"Louis Napoleon and Eugénie Montijo, Emperor and Empress of France!
one of whom I have had a guest at my cottage on the Hudson; the
other, whom, when a child, I have had on my knee at Granada. It
seems to cap the climax of the strange dramas of which Paris has
been the theatre during my life-time. I have repeatedly thought
that each grand _coup de théâtre_ would be the last that would
occur in my time; but each has been succeeded by another equally
striking; and what will be the next, who can conjecture?
"The last time I saw Eugénie Montijo she was one of the reigning
belles of Madrid; and she and her giddy circle had swept away my
charming young friend, the beautiful and accomplished ---- ----,
into their career of fashionable dissipation. Now Eugénie is upon a
throne, and ---- a voluntary recluse in a convent of one of the
most rigorous orders! Poor ----! Perhaps, however, her fate may
ultimately be the happiest of the two. 'The storm' with her 'is
o'er, and she's at rest;' but the other is launched upon a
returnless shore, on a dangerous sea, infamous for its tremendous
shipwrecks. Am I to live to see the catastrophe of her career, and
the end of this suddenly conjured-up empire, which seems to be of
'such stuff as dreams are made of'?"
As we have seen, the large sums Irving earned by his pen were not spent
in selfish indulgence. His habits and tastes were simple, and little
would have sufficed for his individual needs. He cared not much for
money, and seemed to want it only to increase the happiness of those who
were confided to his care. A man less warm-hearted and more selfish, in
his circumstances, would have settled down to a life of more ease and
less responsibility.
To go back to the period of his return to America. He was now past
middle life, having returned to New York in his fiftieth year. But he
was in the full flow of literary productiveness. I have noted the dates
of his achievements, because his development was somewhat tardy compared
with that of many of his contemporaries; but he had the "staying"
qualities. The first crop of his mind was of course the most original;
time and experience had toned down his exuberant humor; but the spring
of his fancy was as free, his vigor was not abated, and his art was more
refined. Some of his best work was yet to be done. And it is worthy of
passing mention, in regard to his later productions, that his admirable
sense of literary proportion, which is wanting in many good writers,
characterized his work to the end.
High as his position was as a man of letters at this time, the
consideration in which he was held was much broader than that,--it was
that of one of the first citizens of the Republic. His friends, readers,
and admirers were not merely the literary class and the general public,
but included nearly all the prominent statesmen of the time. Almost any
career in public life would have been open to him if he had lent an ear
to their solicitations. But political life was not to his taste, and it
would have been fatal to his sensitive spirit. It did not require much
self-denial, perhaps, to decline the candidacy for mayor of New York, or
the honor of standing for Congress; but he put aside also the
distinction of a seat in Mr. Van Buren's Cabinet as Secretary of the
Navy. His main reason for declining it, aside from a diffidence in his
own judgment in public matters, was his dislike of the turmoil of
political life in Washington, and his sensitiveness to personal attacks
which beset the occupants of high offices. But he also had come to a
political divergence with Mr. Van Buren. He liked the man,--he liked
almost everybody,--and esteemed him as a friend, but he apprehended
trouble from the new direction of the party in power. Irving was almost
devoid of party prejudice, and he never seemed to have strongly marked
political opinions. Perhaps his nearest confession to a creed is
contained in a letter he wrote to a member of the House of
Representatives, Gouverneur Kemble, a little time before the offer of a
position in the cabinet, in which he said that he did not relish some
points of Van Buren's policy, nor believe in the honesty of some of his
elbow counselors. I quote a passage from it:--
"As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican, and
attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of my
country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no bitterness
in my creed. I have no relish for Puritans, either in religion or
politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme, and for
overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous
career.... Ours is a government of compromise. We have several
great and distinct interests bound up together, which, if not
separately consulted and severally accommodated may harass and
impair each other.... I always distrust the soundness of political
councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and disparaging
attacks upon any great class of our fellow-citizens. Such are those
urged to the disadvantage of the great trading and financial
classes of our country."
During the ten years preceding his mission to Spain, Irving kept fagging
away at the pen, doing a good deal of miscellaneous and ephemeral work.
Among his other engagements was that of regular contributor to the
"Knickerbocker Magazine," for a salary of two thousand dollars. He wrote
the editor that he had observed that man, as he advances in life, is
subject to a plethora of the mind, occasioned by an accumulation of
wisdom upon the brain, and that he becomes fond of telling long stories
and doling out advice, to the annoyance of his friends. To avoid
becoming the bore of the domestic circle, he proposed to ease off this
surcharge of the intellect by inflicting his tediousness on the public
through the pages of the periodical. The arrangement brought reputation
to the magazine (which was published in the days when the honor of
being in print was supposed by the publisher to be ample compensation to
the scribe), but little profit to Mr. Irving. During this period he
interested himself in an international copyright, as a means of
fostering our young literature. He found that a work of merit, written
by an American who had not established a commanding name in the market,
met very cavalier treatment from our publishers, who frankly said that
they need not trouble themselves about native works, when they could
pick up every day successful books from the British press, for which
they had to pay no copyright. Irving's advocacy of the proposed law was
entirely unselfish, for his own market was secure.
His chief works in these ten years were, "A Tour on the Prairies,"
"Recollections of Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey," "The Legends of the
Conquest of Spain," "Astoria" (the heavy part of the work of it was done
by his nephew Pierre), "Captain Bonneville," and a number of graceful
occasional papers, collected afterwards under the title of "Wolfert's
Roost." Two other books may properly be mentioned here, although they
did not appear until after his return from his absence of four years and
a half at the court of Madrid; these are the "Biography of Goldsmith"
and "Mahomet and his Successors." At the age of sixty-six, he laid aside
the "Life of Washington," on which he was engaged, and rapidly "threw
off" these two books. The "Goldsmith" was enlarged from a sketch he had
made twenty-five years before. It is an exquisite, sympathetic piece of
work, without pretension or any subtle verbal analysis, but on the whole
an excellent interpretation of the character. Author and subject had
much in common: Irving had at least a kindly sympathy for the
vagabondish inclinations of his predecessor, and with his humorous and
cheerful regard of the world; perhaps it is significant of a deeper
unity in character that both, at times, fancied they could please an
intolerant world by attempting to play the flute. The "Mahomet" is a
popular narrative, which throws no new light on the subject; it is
pervaded by the author's charm of style and equity of judgment, but it
lacks the virility of Gibbon's masterly picture of the Arabian prophet
and the Saracenic onset.
We need not dwell longer upon this period. One incident of it, however,
cannot be passed in silence: that was the abandonment of his life-long
project of writing the History of the Conquest of Mexico to Mr. William
H. Prescott. It had been a scheme of his boyhood; he had made
collections of materials for it during his first residence in Spain; and
he was actually and absorbedly engaged in the composition of the first
chapters, when he was sounded by Mr. Cogswell, of the Astor Library, in
behalf of Mr. Prescott. Some conversation showed that Mr. Prescott was
contemplating the subject upon which Mr. Irving was engaged, and the
latter instantly authorized Mr. Cogswell to say that he abandoned it.
Although our author was somewhat far advanced, and Mr. Prescott had not
yet collected his materials, Irving renounced the glorious theme in such
a manner that Prescott never suspected the pain and loss it cost him,
nor the full extent of his own obligation. Some years afterwards Irving
wrote to his nephew that in giving it up he in a manner gave up his
bread, as he had no other subject to supply its place: "I was," he
wrote, "dismounted from my _cheval de bataille_, and have never been
completely mounted since." But he added that he was not sorry for the
warm impulse that induced him to abandon the subject, and that Mr.
Prescott's treatment of it had justified his opinion of him.
Notwithstanding Prescott's very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some
regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico. His method, as he
outlined it, would have been the natural one. Instead of partially
satisfying the reader's curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the
Aztec civilization was exposed, Irving would have begun with the entry
of the conquerors, and carried his reader step by step onward, letting
him share all the excitement and surprise of discovery which the
invaders experienced, and learn of the wonders of the country in the
manner most likely to impress both the imagination and the memory; and
with his artistic sense of the value of the picturesque he would have
brought into strong relief the _dramatis personæ_ of the story.
In 1842, Irving was tendered the honor of the mission to Madrid. It was
an entire surprise to himself and to his friends. He came to look upon
this as the "crowning honor of his life," and yet when the news first
reached him he paced up and down his room, excited and astonished,
revolving in his mind the separation from home and friends, and was
heard murmuring, half to himself and half to his nephew, "It is
hard,--very hard; yet I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the
shorn lamb." His acceptance of the position was doubtless influenced by
the intended honor to his profession, by the gratifying manner in which
it came to him, by his desire to please his friends, and the belief,
which was a delusion, that diplomatic life in Madrid would offer no
serious interruption to his "Life of Washington," in which he had just
become engaged. The nomination, the suggestion of Daniel Webster,
Tyler's Secretary of State, was cordially approved by the President and
cabinet, and confirmed almost by acclamation in the Senate. "Ah," said
Mr. Clay, who was opposing nearly all the President's appointments,
"this is a nomination everybody will concur in!" "If a person of more
merit and higher qualification," wrote Mr. Webster in his official
notification, "had presented himself, great as is my personal regard
for you, I should have yielded it to higher considerations." No other
appointment could have been made so complimentary to Spain, and it
remains to this day one of the most honorable to his own country.
In reading Irving's letters written during his third visit abroad, you
are conscious that the glamour of life is gone for him, though not his
kindliness towards the world, and that he is subject to few illusions;
the show and pageantry no longer enchant,--they only weary. The novelty
was gone, and he was no longer curious to see great sights and great
people. He had declined a public dinner in New York, and he put aside
the same hospitality offered by Liverpool and by Glasgow. In London he
attended the Queen's grand fancy ball, which surpassed anything he had
seen in splendor and picturesque effect. "The personage," he writes,
"who appeared least to enjoy the scene seemed to me to be the little
Queen herself. She was flushed and heated, and evidently fatigued and
oppressed with the state she had to keep up and the regal robes in
which she was arrayed, and especially by a crown of gold, which weighed
heavy on her brow, and to which she was continually raising her hand to
move it slightly when it pressed. I hope and trust her real crown sits
easier." The bearing of Prince Albert he found prepossessing, and he
adds, "He speaks English very well;" as if that were a useful
accomplishment for an English Prince Consort. His reception at court and
by the ministers and diplomatic corps was very kind, and he greatly
enjoyed meeting his old friends, Leslie, Rogers, and Moore. At Paris, in
an informal presentation to the royal family, he experienced a very
cordial welcome from the King and Queen and Madame Adelaide, each of
whom took occasion to say something complimentary about his writings;
but he escaped as soon as possible from social engagements. "Amidst all
the splendors of London and Paris, I find my imagination refuses to take
fire, and my heart still yearns after dear little Sunnyside." Of an
anxious friend in Paris, who thought Irving was ruining his prospects by
neglecting to leave his card with this or that duchess who had sought
his acquaintance, he writes: "He attributes all this to very excessive
modesty, not dreaming that the empty intercourse of saloons with people
of rank and fashion could be a bore to one who has run the rounds of
society for the greater part of half a century, and who likes to consult
his own humor and pursuits."
When Irving reached Madrid the affairs of the kingdom had assumed a
powerful dramatic interest, wanting in none of the romantic elements
that characterize the whole history of the peninsula. "The future career
[he writes] of this gallant soldier, Espartero, whose merits and
services have placed him at the head of the government, and the future
fortunes of these isolated little princesses, the Queen and her sister,
have an uncertainty hanging about them worthy of the fifth act in a
melodrama." The drama continued, with constant shifting of scene, as
long as Irving remained in Spain, and gave to his diplomatic life
intense interest, and at times perilous excitement. His letters are full
of animated pictures of the changing progress of the play; and although
they belong rather to the gossip of history than to literary biography,
they cannot be altogether omitted. The duties which the minister had to
perform were unusual, delicate, and difficult; but I believe he
acquitted himself of them with the skill of a born diplomatist. When he
went to Spain before, in 1826, Ferdinand VII. was, by aid of French
troops, on the throne, the liberties of the kingdom were crushed, and
her most enlightened men were in exile. While he still resided there, in
1829, Ferdinand married, for his fourth wife, Maria Christina, sister of
the King of Naples, and niece of the Queen of Louis Philippe. By her he
had two daughters, his only children. In order that his own progeny
might succeed him, he set aside the Salique law (which had been imposed
by France) just before his death, in 1833, and revived the old Spanish
law of succession. His eldest daughter, then three years old, was
proclaimed Queen, by the name of Isabella II., and her mother guardian
during her minority, which would end at the age of fourteen. Don Carlos,
the king's eldest brother, immediately set up the standard of rebellion,
supported by the absolutist aristocracy, the monks, and a great part of
the clergy. The liberals rallied to the Queen. The Queen Regent did
not, however, act in good faith with the popular party: she resisted all
salutary reform, would not restore the Constitution of 1812 until
compelled to by a popular uprising, and disgraced herself by a
scandalous connection with one Muños, one of the royal body guards. She
enriched this favorite and amassed a vast fortune for herself, which she
sent out of the country. In 1839, when Don Carlos was driven out of the
country by the patriot soldier Espartero, she endeavored to gain him
over to her side, but failed. Espartero became Regent, and Maria
Christina repaired to Paris, where she was received with great
distinction by Louis Philippe, and Paris became the focus of all sorts
of machinations against the constitutional government of Spain, and of
plots for its overthrow. One of these had just been defeated at the time
of Irving's arrival. It was a desperate attempt of a band of soldiers of
the rebel army to carry off the little Queen and her sister, which was
frustrated only by the gallant resistance of the halberdiers in the
palace. The little princesses had scarcely recovered from the horror of
this night attack when our minister presented his credentials to the
Queen through the Regent, thus breaking a diplomatic dead-lock, in which
he was followed by all the other embassies except the French. I take
some passages from the author's description of his first audience at the
royal palace:--
"We passed through the spacious court, up the noble staircase, and
through the long suites of apartments of this splendid edifice,
most of them silent and vacant, the casements closed to keep out
the heat, so that a twilight reigned throughout the mighty pile,
not a little emblematical of the dubious fortunes of its inmates.
It seemed more like traversing a convent than a palace. I ought to
have mentioned that in 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 this immense
edifice, and dubious whether their own lives were not the object of
the assault!
"After passing through various chambers of the palace, now silent
and sombre, but which I had traversed in former days, on grand
court occasions in the time of Ferdinand VII., when they were
glittering with all the splendor of a court, we paused in a great
saloon, with high-vaulted ceiling incrusted with florid devices in
porcelain, and hung with silken tapestry, but all in dim twilight,
like the rest of the palace. At one end of the saloon the door
opened to an almost interminable range of other chambers, through
which, at a distance, we had a glimpse of some indistinct figures
in black. They glided into the saloon slowly, and with noiseless
steps. It was the little Queen, with her governess, Madame Mina,
widow of the general of that name, and her guardian, the excellent
Arguelles, all in deep mourning for the Duke of Orleans. The little
Queen advanced some steps within the saloon and then paused. Madame
Mina took her station a little distance behind her. The Count
Almodovar then introduced me to the Queen in my official capacity,
and she received me with a grave and quiet welcome, expressed in a
very low voice. She is nearly twelve years of age, and is
sufficiently well grown for her years. She had a somewhat fair
complexion, quite pale, with bluish or light gray eyes; a grave
demeanor, but a graceful deportment. I could not but regard her
with deep interest, knowing what important concerns depended upon
the life of this fragile little being, and to what a stormy and
precarious career she might be destined. Her solitary position,
also, separated from all her kindred except her little sister, a
mere effigy of royalty in the hands of statesmen, and surrounded by
the formalities and ceremonials of state, which spread sterility
around the occupant of a throne."
I have quoted this passage not more on account of its intrinsic
interest, than as a specimen of the author's consummate art of conveying
an impression by what I may call the tone of his style; and this appears
in all his correspondence relating to this picturesque and eventful
period. During the four years of his residence the country was in a
constant state of excitement and often of panic. Armies were marching
over the kingdom. Madrid was in a state of siege, expecting an assault
at one time; confusion reigned amid the changing adherents about the
person of the child Queen. The duties of a minister were perplexing
enough, when the Spanish government was changing its character and its
_personnel_ with the rapidity of shifting scenes in a pantomime. "This
consumption of ministers," wrote Irving to Mr. Webster, "is appalling.
To carry on a negotiation with such transient functionaries is like
bargaining at the window of a railroad car: before you can get a reply
to a proposition the other party is out of sight."
Apart from politics, Irving's residence was full of half-melancholy
recollections and associations. In a letter to his old comrade Prince
Dolgorouki, then Russian Minister at Naples, he recalls the days of
their delightful intercourse at the D'Oubrils:--
"Time dispels charms and illusions. You remember how much I was
struck with a beautiful young woman (I will not mention names) who
appeared in a tableau as Murillo's Virgin of the Assumption? She
was young, recently married, fresh and unhackneyed in society, and
my imagination decked her out with everything that was pure,
lovely, innocent, and angelic in womanhood. She was pointed out to
me in the theatre shortly after my arrival in Madrid. I turned with
eagerness to the original of the picture that had ever remained
hung up in sanctity in my mind. I found her still handsome, though
somewhat matronly in appearance, seated, _with her daughters,_ in
the box of a fashionable nobleman, younger than herself, rich in
purse but poor in intellect, and who was openly and notoriously her
_cavalier servante_. The charm was broken, the picture fell from
the wall. She may have the customs of a depraved country and
licentious state of society to excuse her; but I can never think of
her again in the halo of feminine purity and loveliness that
surrounded the Virgin of Murillo."
During Irving's ministry he was twice absent, briefly in Paris and
London, and was called to the latter place for consultation in regard to
the Oregon boundary dispute, in the settlement of which he rendered
valuable service. Space is not given me for further quotations from
Irving's brilliant descriptions of court, characters, and society in
that revolutionary time, nor of his half-melancholy pilgrimage to the
southern scenes of his former reveries. But I will take a page from a
letter to his sister, Mrs. Paris, describing his voyage from Barcelona
to Marseilles, which exhibits the lively susceptibility of the author
and diplomat who was then in his sixty-first year:--
"While I am writing at a table in the cabin, I am sensible of the
power of a pair of splendid Spanish eyes which are occasionally
flashing upon me, and which almost seem to throw a light upon the
paper. Since I cannot break the spell, I will describe the owner of
them. She is a young married lady, about four or five and twenty,
middle sized, finely modeled, a Grecian outline of face, a
complexion sallow yet healthful, raven black hair, eyes dark,
large, and beaming, softened by long eyelashes, lips full and rosy
red, yet finely chiseled, and teeth of dazzling whiteness. She is
dressed in black, as if in mourning; on one hand is a black glove;
the other hand, ungloved, is small, exquisitely formed, with taper
fingers and blue veins. She has just put it up to adjust her
clustering black locks. I never saw female hand more exquisite.
Really, if I were a young man, I should not be able to draw the
portrait of this beautiful creature so calmly.
"I was interrupted in my letter writing, by an observation of the
lady whom I was describing. She had caught my eye occasionally, as
it glanced from my letter toward her. 'Really, Señor,' said she, at
length, with a smile, 'one would think you were a painter taking my
likeness.' I could not resist the impulse. 'Indeed,' said I, 'I am
taking it; I am writing to a friend the other side of the world,
discussing things that are passing before me, and I could not help
noting down one of the best specimens of the country that I had met
with.' A little bantering took place between the young lady, her
husband, and myself, which ended in my reading off, as well as I
could into Spanish, the description I had just written down. It
occasioned a world of merriment, and was taken in excellent part.
The lady's cheek, for once, mantled with the rose. She laughed,
shook her head, and said I was a very fanciful portrait painter;
and the husband declared that, if I would stop at St. Filian, all
the ladies in the place would crowd to have their portraits
taken,--my pictures were so flattering. I have just parted with
them. The steamship stopped in the open sea, just in front of the
little bay of St. Filian; boats came off from shore for the party.
I helped the beautiful original of the portrait into the boat, and
promised her and her husband if ever I should come to St. Filian I
would pay them a visit. The last I noticed of her was a Spanish
farewell wave of her beautiful white hand, and the gleam of her
dazzling teeth as she smiled adieu. So there's a very tolerable
touch of romance for a gentleman of my years."
When Irving announced his recall from the court of Madrid, the young
Queen said to him in reply: "You may take with you into private life the
intimate conviction that your frank and loyal conduct has contributed to
draw closer the amicable relations which exist between North America and
the Spanish nation, and that your distinguished personal merits have
gained in my heart the appreciation which you merit by more than one
title." The author was anxious to return. From the midst of court life
in April, 1845, he had written: "I long to be once more back at dear
little Sunnyside, while I have yet strength and good spirits to enjoy
the simple pleasures of the country, and to rally a happy family group
once more about me. I grudge every year of absence that rolls by.
To-morrow is my birthday. I shall then be sixty-two years old. The
evening of life is fast drawing over me; still I hope to get back among
my friends while there is a little sunshine left."
It was the 19th of September, 1846, says his biographer, "when the
impatient longing of his heart was gratified, and he found himself
restored to his home for the thirteen years of happy life still
remaining to him."
CHAPTER IX.
THE CHARACTERISTIC WORKS.
The Knickerbocker's "History of New York" and the "Sketch-Book" never
would have won for Irving the gold medal of the Royal Society of
Literature, or the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford.
However much the world would have liked frankly to honor the writer for
that which it most enjoyed and was under most obligations for, it would
have been a violent shock to the constitution of things to have given
such honor to the mere humorist and the writer of short sketches. The
conventional literary proprieties must be observed. Only some laborious,
solid, and improving work of the pen could sanction such distinction,--a
book of research or an historical composition. It need not necessarily
be dull, but it must be grave in tone and serious in intention, in order
to give the author high recognition.
Irving himself shared this opinion. He hoped, in the composition of his
"Columbus" and his "Washington," to produce works which should justify
the good opinion his countrymen had formed of him, should reasonably
satisfy the expectations excited by his lighter books, and lay for him
the basis of enduring reputation. All that he had done before was the
play of careless genius, the exercise of frolicsome fancy, which might
amuse and perhaps win an affectionate regard for the author, but could
not justify a high respect or secure a permanent place in literature.
For this, some work of scholarship and industry was needed.
And yet everybody would probably have admitted that there was but one
man then living who could have created and peopled the vast and humorous
world of the Knickerbockers; that all the learning of Oxford and
Cambridge together would not enable a man to draw the whimsical portrait
of Ichabod Crane, or to outline the fascinating legend of Rip Van
Winkle; while Europe was full of scholars of more learning than Irving,
and writers of equal skill in narrative, who might have told the story
of Columbus as well as he told it and perhaps better. The
under-graduates of Oxford who hooted their admiration of the shy author
when he appeared in the theatre to receive his complimentary degree
perhaps understood this, and expressed it in their shouts of "Diedrich
Knickerbocker," "Ichabod Crane," "Rip Van Winkle."
Irving's "gift" was humor; and allied to this was sentiment. These
qualities modified and restrained each other; and it was by these that
he touched the heart. He acquired other powers which he himself may have
valued more highly, and which brought him more substantial honors; but
the historical compositions, which he and his contemporaries regarded as
a solid basis of fame, could be spared without serious loss, while the
works of humor, the first fruits of his genius, are possessions in
English literature the loss of which would be irreparable. The world may
never openly allow to humor a position "above the salt," but it clings
to its fresh and original productions, generation after generation,
finding room for them in its accumulating literary baggage, while more
"important" tomes of scholarship and industry strew the line of its
march.
I feel that this study of Irving as a man of letters would be
incomplete, especially for the young readers of this generation, if it
did not contain some more extended citations from those works upon which
we have formed our estimate of his quality. We will take first a few
passages from the "History of New York."
* * * * *
It has been said that Irving lacked imagination. That, while he had
humor and feeling and fancy, he was wanting in the higher quality, which
is the last test of genius. We have come to attach to the word
"imagination" a larger meaning than the mere reproduction in the mind of
certain absent objects of sense that have been perceived; there must be
a suggestion of something beyond these, and an ennobling suggestion, if
not a combination, that amounts to a new creation. Now, it seems to me
that the transmutation of the crude and theretofore unpoetical
materials, which he found in the New World, into what is as absolute a
creation as exists in literature, was a distinct work of the
imagination. Its humorous quality does not interfere with its largeness
of outline, nor with its essential poetic coloring. For, whimsical and
comical as is the "Knickerbocker" creation, it is enlarged to the
proportion of a realm, and over that new country of the imagination is
always the rosy light of sentiment.
This largeness of modified conception cannot be made apparent in such
brief extracts as we can make, but they will show its quality and the
author's humor. The Low-Dutch settlers of the Nieuw Nederlandts are
supposed to have sailed from Amsterdam in a ship called the Goede Vrouw,
built by the carpenters of that city, who always model their ships on
the fair forms of their countrywomen. This vessel, whose beauteous model
was declared to be the greatest belle in Amsterdam, had one hundred feet
in the beam, one hundred feet in the keel, and one hundred feet from the
bottom of the stern-post to the taffrail. Those illustrious adventurers
who sailed in her landed on the Jersey flats, preferring a marshy
ground, where they could drive piles and construct dykes. They made a
settlement at the Indian village of Communipaw, the egg from which was
hatched the mighty city of New York. In the author's time this place had
lost its importance:--
"Communipaw is at present but a small village pleasantly situated,
among rural scenery, on that beauteous part of the Jersey shore
which was known in ancient legends by the name of Pavonia,[1] and
commands a grand prospect of the superb bay of New York. It is
within but half an hour's sail of the latter place, provided you
have a fair wind, and may be distinctly seen from the city. Nay, it
is a well-known fact, which I can testify from my own experience,
that on a clear still summer evening, you may hear, from the
Battery of New York, the obstreperous peals of broad-mouthed
laughter of the Dutch negroes at Communipaw, who, like most other
negroes, are famous for their risible powers. This is peculiarly
the case on Sunday evenings, when, it is remarked by an ingenious
and observant philosopher who has made great discoveries in the
neighborhood of this city, that they always laugh loudest, which he
attributes to the circumstance of their having their holiday
clothes on.
"These negroes, in fact, like the monks of the dark ages, engross
all the knowledge of the place, and being infinitely more
adventurous and more knowing than their masters, carry on all the
foreign trade; making frequent voyages to town in canoes loaded
with oysters, buttermilk, and cabbages. They are great astrologers,
predicting the different changes of weather almost as accurately as
an almanac; they are moreover exquisite performers on
three-stringed fiddles; in whistling they almost boast the
far-famed powers of Orpheus's lyre, for not a horse or an ox in the
place, when at the plough or before the wagon, will budge a foot
until he hears the well-known whistle of his black driver and
companion. And from their amazing skill at casting up accounts upon
their fingers, they are regarded with as much veneration us were
the disciples of Pythagoras of yore, when initiated into the sacred
quaternary of numbers.
"As to the honest burghers of Communipaw, like wise men and sound
philosophers, they never look beyond their pipes, nor trouble their
heads about any affairs out of their immediate neighborhood; so
that they live in profound and enviable ignorance of all the
troubles, anxieties, and revolutions of this distracted planet. I
am even told that many among them do verily believe that Holland,
of which they have heard so much from tradition, is situated
somewhere on Long Island,--that _Spiking-devil_ and _the Narrows_
are the two ends of the world,--that the country is still under the
dominion of their High Mightinesses,--and that the city of New York
still goes by the name of Nieuw Amsterdam. They meet every Saturday
afternoon at the only tavern in the place, which bears as a sign a
square-headed likeness of the Prince of Orange, where they smoke a
silent pipe, by way of promoting social conviviality, and
invariably drink a mug of cider to the success of Admiral Van
Tromp, who they imagine is still sweeping the British channel with
a broom at his mast-head.
"Communipaw, in short, is one of the numerous little villages in
the vicinity of this most beautiful of cities, which are so many
strongholds and fastnesses, whither the primitive manners of our
Dutch forefathers have retreated, and where they are cherished with
devout and scrupulous strictness. The dress of the original
settlers is handed down inviolate, from father to son: the
identical broad-brimmed hat, broad-skirted coat, and broad-bottomed
breeches, continue from generation to generation; and several
gigantic knee-buckles of massy silver are still in wear, that made
gallant display in the days of the patriarchs of Communipaw. The
language likewise continues unadulterated by barbarous innovations;
and so critically correct is the village schoolmaster in his
dialect, that his reading of a Low-Dutch psalm has much the same
effect on the nerves as the filing of a handsaw."
[Footnote 1: Pavonia in the ancient maps, is given to a tract
of country extending from about Hoboken to Amboy.]
The early prosperity of this settlement is dwelt on with satisfaction by
the author:--
"The neighboring Indians in a short time became accustomed to the
uncouth sound of the Dutch language, and an intercourse gradually
took place between them and the new-comers. The Indians were much
given to long talks, and the Dutch to long silence;--in this
particular, therefore, they accommodated each other completely. The
chiefs would make long speeches about the big bull, the Wabash, and
the Great Spirit, to which the others would listen very
attentively, smoke their pipes, and grunt _yah, mynher_,--whereat
the poor savages were wondrously delighted. They instructed the new
settlers in the best art of curing and smoking tobacco, while the
latter, in return, made them drunk with true Hollands,--and then
taught them the art of making bargains.
"A brisk trade for furs was soon opened; the Dutch traders were
scrupulously honest in their dealings and purchased by weight,
establishing it as an invariable table of avoirdupois, that the
hand of a Dutchman weighed one pound, and his foot two pounds. It
is true, the simple Indians were often puzzled by the great
disproportion between bulk and weight, for let them place a bundle
of furs, never so large, in one scale, and a Dutchman put his hand
or foot in the other, the bundle was sure to kick the beam;--never
was a package of furs known to weigh more than two pounds in the
market of Communipaw!
"This is a singular fact,--but I have it direct from my
great-great-grandfather, who had risen to considerable importance
in the colony, being promoted to the office of weigh-master, on
account of the uncommon heaviness of his foot.
"The Dutch possessions in this part of the globe began now to
assume a very thriving appearance, and were comprehended under the
general title of Nieuw Nederlandts, on account, as the Sage Vander
Donck observes, of their great resemblance to the Dutch
Netherlands,--which indeed was truly remarkable, excepting that the
former were rugged and mountainous, and the latter level and
marshy. About this time the tranquillity of the Dutch colonists was
doomed to suffer a temporary interruption. In 1614, Captain Sir
Samuel Argal, sailing under a commission from Dale, governor of
Virginia, visited the Dutch settlements on Hudson River, and
demanded their submission to the English crown and Virginian
dominion. To this arrogant demand, as they were in no condition to
resist it, they submitted for the time, like discreet and
reasonable men.
"It does not appear that the valiant Argal molested the settlement
of Communipaw; on the contrary, I am told that when his vessel
first hove in sight, the worthy burghers were seized with such a
panic, that they fell to smoking their pipes with astonishing
vehemence; insomuch that they quickly raised a cloud, which,
combining with the surrounding woods and marshes, completely
enveloped and concealed their beloved village, and overhung the
fair regions of Pavonia--so that the terrible Captain Argal passed
on totally unsuspicious that a sturdy little Dutch settlement lay
snugly couched in the mud, under cover of all this pestilent vapor.
In commemoration of this fortunate escape, the worthy inhabitants
have continued to smoke, almost without intermission, unto this
very day; which is said to be the cause of the remarkable fog which
often hangs over Communipaw of a clear afternoon."
The golden age of New York was under the reign of Walter Van Twiller,
the first governor of the province, and the best it ever had. In his
sketch of this excellent magistrate Irving has embodied the abundance
and tranquillity of those halcyon days:--
"The renowned Wouter (or Walter) Van Twiller was descended from a
long line of Dutch burgomasters, who had successively dozed away
their lives, and grown fat upon the bench of magistracy in
Rotterdam; and who had comported themselves with such singular
wisdom and propriety, that they were never either heard or talked
of--which, next to being universally applauded, should be the
object of ambition of all magistrates and rulers. There are two
opposite ways by which some men make a figure in the world: one, by
talking faster than they think, and the other, by holding their
tongues and not thinking at all. By the first, many a smatterer
acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many
a dunderpate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be
considered the very type of wisdom. This, by the way, is a casual
remark, which I would not, for the universe, have it thought I
apply to Governor Van Twiller. It is true he was a man shut up
within himself, like an oyster, and rarely spoke, except in
monosyllables; but then it was allowed he seldom said a foolish
thing. So invincible was his gravity that he was never known to
laugh or even to smile through the whole course of a long and
prosperous life. Nay, if a joke were uttered in his presence, that
set light-minded hearers in a roar, it was observed to throw him
into a state of perplexity. Sometimes he would deign to inquire
into the matter, and when, after much explanation, the joke was
made as plain as a pike-staff, he would continue to smoke his pipe
in silence, and at length, knocking out the ashes, would exclaim,
'Well! I see nothing in all that to laugh about.'
"With all his reflective habits, he never made up his mind on a
subject. His adherents accounted for this by the astonishing
magnitude of his ideas. He conceived every subject on so grand a
scale that he had not room in his head to turn it over and examine
both sides of it. Certain it is, that, if any matter were
propounded to him on which ordinary mortals would rashly determine
at first glance, he would put on a vague, mysterious look, shake
his capacious head, smoke some time in profound silence, and at
length observe, that 'he had his doubts about the matter'; which
gained him the reputation of a man slow of belief and not easily
imposed upon. What is more, it has gained him a lasting name; for
to this habit of the mind has been attributed his surname of
Twiller; which is said to be a corruption of the original Twijfler,
or, in plain English, _Doubter_.
"The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and
proportioned, as though it had been moulded by the hands of some
cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur.
He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five
inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere, and of such
stupendous dimensions, that dame Nature, with all her sex's
ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of
supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and
settled it firmly on the top of his backbone, just between the
shoulders. His body was oblong and particularly capacious at
bottom; which was wisely ordered by Providence, seeing that he was
a man of sedentary habits, and very averse to the idle labor of
walking. His legs were short, but sturdy in proportion to the
weight they had to sustain; so that when erect he had not a little
the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible
index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of
those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with
what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in
the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament,
and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of
everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and
streaked with dusky red, like a spitzenberg apple.
"His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four
stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and
doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the
four-and-twenty. Such was the renowned Wouter Van Twiller,--a true
philosopher, for his mind was either elevated above, or tranquilly
settled below, the cares and perplexities of this world. He had
lived in it for years, without feeling the least curiosity to know
whether the sun revolved round it, or it round the sun; and he had
watched, for at least half a century, the smoke curling from his
pipe to the ceiling, without once troubling his head with any of
those numerous theories by which a philosopher would have perplexed
his brain, in accounting for its rising above the surrounding
atmosphere.
"In his council he presided with great state and solemnity. He sat
in a huge chair of solid oak, hewn in the celebrated forest of the
Hague, fabricated by an experienced timmerman of Amsterdam, and
curiously carved about the arms and feet into exact imitations of
gigantic eagle's claws. Instead of a sceptre, he swayed a long
Turkish pipe, wrought with jasmin and amber, which had been
presented to a stadtholder of Holland at the conclusion of a treaty
with one of the petty Barbary powers. In this stately chair would
he sit, and this magnificent pipe would he smoke, shaking his
right knee with a constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours
together upon a little print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black
frame against the opposite wall of the council-chamber. Nay, it has
even been said, that when any deliberation of extraordinary length
and intricacy was on the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his
eyes for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed
by external objects; and at such times the internal commotion of
his mind was evinced by certain regular guttural sounds, which his
admirers declared were merely the noise of conflict, made by his
contending doubts and opinions....
"I have been the more anxious to delineate fully the person and
habits of Wouter Van Twiller, from the consideration that he was
not only the first but also the best governor that ever presided
over this ancient and respectable province; and so tranquil and
benevolent was his reign, that I do not find throughout the whole
of it a single instance of any offender being brought to
punishment,--a most indubitable sign of a merciful governor, and a
case unparalleled, excepting in the reign of the illustrious King
Log, from whom, it is hinted, the renowned Van Twiller was a lineal
descendant.
"The very outset of the career of this excellent magistrate was
distinguished by an example of legal acumen that gave flattering
presage of a wise and equitable administration. The morning after
he had been installed in office, and at the moment that he was
making his breakfast from a prodigious earthen dish, filled with
milk and Indian pudding, he was interrupted by the appearance of
Wandle Schoonhoven, a very important old burgher of New Amsterdam,
who complained bitterly of one Barent Bleecker, inasmuch as he
refused to come to a settlement of accounts, seeing that there was
a heavy balance in favor of the said Wandle. Governor Van Twiller,
as I have already observed, was a man of few words; he was likewise
a mortal enemy to multiplying writings--or being disturbed at his
breakfast. Having listened attentively to the statement of Wandle
Schoonhoven, giving an occasional grunt, as he shoveled a spoonful
of Indian pudding into his mouth,--either as a sign that he
relished the dish, or comprehended the story,--he called unto him
his constable, and pulling out of his breeches-pocket a huge
jack-knife, dispatched it after the defendant as a summons,
accompanied by his tobacco-box as a warrant.
"This summary process was as effectual in those simple days as was
the seal-ring of the great Haroun Alraschid among the true
believers. The two parties being confronted before him, each
produced a book of accounts, written in a language and character
that would have puzzled any but a High-Dutch commentator, or a
learned decipherer of Egyptian obelisks. The sage Wouter took them
one after the other, and having poised them in his hands, and
attentively counted over the number of leaves, fell straightway
into a very great doubt, and smoked for half an hour without saying
a word; at length, laying his finger beside his nose, and shutting
his eyes for a moment, with the air of a man who has just caught a
subtle idea by the tail, he slowly took his pipe from his mouth,
puffed forth a column of tobacco-smoke, and with marvelous gravity
and solemnity pronounced, that, having carefully counted over the
leaves and weighed the books, it was found, that one was just as
thick and as heavy as the other: therefore, it was the final
opinion of the court that the accounts were equally balanced:
therefore, Wandle should give Barent a receipt, and Barent should
give Wandle a receipt, and the constable should pay the costs.
"This decision, being straightway made known, diffused general joy
throughout New Amsterdam, for the people immediately perceived that
they had a very wise and equitable magistrate to rule over them.
But its happiest effect was, that not another lawsuit took place
throughout the whole of his administration; and the office of
constable fell into such decay, that there was not one of those
losel scouts known in the province for many years. I am the more
particular in dwelling on this transaction, not only because I deem
it one of the most sage and righteous judgments on record, and well
worthy the attention of modern magistrates, but because it was a
miraculous event in the history of the renowned Wouter--being the
only time he was ever known to come to a decision in the whole
course of his life."
This peaceful age ended with the accession of William the Testy, and the
advent of the enterprising Yankees. During the reigns of William Kieft
and Peter Stuyvesant, between the Yankees of the Connecticut and the
Swedes of the Delaware, the Dutch community knew no repose, and the
"History" is little more than a series of exhausting sieges and
desperate battles, which would have been as heroic as any in history if
they had been attended with loss of life. The forces that were gathered
by Peter Stuyvesant for the expedition to avenge upon the Swedes the
defeat at Fort Casimir, and their appearance on the march, give some
notion of the military prowess of the Dutch. Their appearance, when they
were encamped on the Bowling Green, recalls the Homeric age:--
"In the centre, then, was pitched the tent of the men of battle of
the Manhattoes, who, being the inmates of the metropolis, composed
the lifeguards of the governor. These were commanded by the valiant
Stoffel Brinkerhoof, who, whilom had acquired such immortal fame at
Oyster Bay; they displayed as a standard a beaver _rampant_ on a
field of orange, being the arms of the province, and denoting the
persevering industry and the amphibious origin of the Nederlands.
"On their right hand might be seen the vassals of that renowned
Mynheer, Michael Paw, who lorded it over the fair regions of
ancient Pavonia, and the lands away south even unto the Navesink
mountains, and was moreover patroon of Gibbet Island. His standard
was borne by his trusty squire, Cornelius Van Vorst; consisting of
a huge oyster _recumbent_ upon a sea-green field; being the
armorial bearings of his favorite metropolis Communipaw. He brought
to the camp a stout force of warriors, heavily armed, being each
clad in ten pair of linsey-woolsey breeches, and overshadowed by
broad-brimmed beavers, with short pipes twisted in their hat-bands.
These were the men who vegetated in the mud along the shores of
Pavonia, being of the race of genuine copperheads, and were fabled
to have sprung from oysters.
"At a little distance was encamped the tribe of warriors who came
from the neighborhood of Hell-gate. These were commanded by the Suy
Dams, and the Van Dams,--incontinent hard swearers, as their names
betoken. They were terrible looking fellows, clad in broad-skirted
gaberdines, of that curious colored cloth called thunder and
lightning,--and bore as a standard three devil's darning-needles,
_volant_, in a flame-colored field.
"Hard by was the tent of the men of battle from the marshy borders
of the Waale-Boght and the country thereabouts. These were of a
sour aspect, by reason that they lived on crabs, which abound in
these parts. They were the first institutors of that honorable
order of knighthood called _Fly-market shirks_, and, if tradition
speak true, did likewise introduce the far-famed step in dancing
called 'double trouble.' They were commanded by the fearless
Jacobus Varra Vanger,--and had, moreover, a jolly band of
Breuckelen ferry-men, who performed a brave concerto on conch
shells.
"But I refrain from pursuing this minute description which goes on
to describe the warriors of Bloemen-dael, and Weehawk, and
Hoboken, and sundry other places, well known in history and song;
for now do the notes of martial music alarm the people of New
Amsterdam, sounding afar from beyond the walls of the city. But
this alarm was in a little while relieved, for lo! from the midst
of a vast cloud of dust, they recognized the brimstone-colored
breeches and splendid silver leg of Peter Stuyvesant, glaring in
the sunbeams; and beheld him approaching at the head of a
formidable army, which he had mustered along the banks of the
Hudson. And here the excellent but anonymous writer of the
Stuyvesant manuscript breaks out into a brave and glorious
description of the forces, as they defiled through the principal
gate of the city, that stood by the head of Wall Street.
"First of all came the Van Bummels, who inhabit the pleasant
borders of the Bronx: these were short fat men, wearing exceeding
large trunk-breeches, and were renowned for feats of the trencher.
They were the first inventors of suppawn, or mush and milk.--Close
in their rear marched the Van Vlotens, of Kaatskill, horrible
quaffers of new cider, and arrant braggarts in their liquor.--After
them came the Van Pelts of Groodt Esopus, dexterous horsemen,
mounted upon goodly switch-tailed steeds of the Esopus breed. These
were mighty hunters of minks and musk-rats, whence came the word
_Peltry_.--Then the Van Nests of Kinderhoeck, valiant robbers of
birds'-nests, as their name denotes. To these, if report may be
believed, are we indebted for the invention of slap-jacks, or
buckwheat-cakes.--Then the Van Higginbottoms, of Wapping's creek.
These came armed with ferules and birchen rods, being a race of
schoolmasters, who first discovered the marvelous sympathy between
the seat of honor and the seat of intellect,--and that the shortest
way to get knowledge into the head was to hammer it into the
bottom.--Then the Van Grolls, of Antony's Nose, who carried their
liquor in fair round little pottles, by reason they could not bouse
it out of their canteens, having such rare long noses.--Then the
Gardeniers, of Hudson and thereabouts, distinguished by many
triumphant feats, such as robbing water-melon patches, smoking
rabbits out of their holes, and the like, and by being great lovers
of roasted pigs' tails. These were the ancestors of the renowned
congressman of that name.--Then the Van Hoesens, of Sing-Sing,
great choristers and players upon the jews-harp. These marched two
and two, singing the great song of St. Nicholas.--Then the
Couenhovens, of Sleepy Hollow. These gave birth to a jolly race of
publicans, who first discovered the magic artifice of conjuring a
quart of wine into a pint bottle.--Then the Van Kortlandts, who
lived on the wild banks of the Croton, and were great killers of
wild ducks, being much spoken of for their skill in shooting with
the long bow.--Then the Van Bunschotens, of Nyack and Kakiat, who
were the first that did ever kick with the left foot. They were
gallant bushwhackers and hunters of raccoons by moonlight.--Then
the Van Winkles, of Haerlem, potent suckers of eggs, and noted for
running of horses, and running up of scores at taverns. They were
the first that ever winked with both eyes at once.--Lastly came the
KNICKERBOCKERS, of the great town of Scaghtikoke, where the folk
lay stones upon the houses in windy weather, lest they should be
blown away. These derive their name, as some say, from _Knicker_,
to shake, and _Beker_, a goblet, indicating thereby that they were
sturdy toss-pots of yore; but, in truth, it was derived from
_Knicker_, to nod, and _Boeken_, books: plainly meaning that they
were great nodders or dozers over books. From them did descend the
writer of this history."
In the midst of Irving's mock-heroics, he always preserves a substratum
of good sense. An instance of this is the address of the redoubtable
wooden-legged governor, on his departure at the head of his warriors to
chastise the Swedes:--
"Certain it is, not an old woman in New Amsterdam but considered
Peter Stuyvesant as a tower of strength, and rested satisfied that
the public welfare was secure so long as he was in the city. It is
not surprising, then, that they looked upon his departure as a sore
affliction. With heavy hearts they draggled at the heels of his
troop, as they marched down to the river-side to embark. The
governor, from the stern of his schooner, gave a short but truly
patriarchal address to his citizens, wherein he recommended them to
comport like loyal and peaceable subjects--to go to church
regularly on Sundays, and to mind their business all the week
besides. That the women should be dutiful and affectionate to their
husbands,--looking after nobody's concerns but their
own,--eschewing all gossipings and morning gaddings,--and carrying
short tongues and long petticoats. That the men should abstain from
intermeddling in public concerns, intrusting the cares of
government to the officers appointed to support them,--staying at
home, like good citizens, making money for themselves, and getting
children for the benefit of their country. That the burgomasters
should look well to the public interest,--not oppressing the poor
nor indulging the rich,--not tasking their ingenuity to devise new
laws, but faithfully enforcing those which were already
made,--rather bending their attention to prevent evil than to
punish it; ever recollecting that civil magistrates should consider
themselves more as guardians of public morals than rat-catchers
employed to entrap public delinquents. Finally, he exhorted them,
one and all, high and low, rich and poor, to conduct themselves _as
well as they could_, assuring them that if they faithfully and
conscientiously complied with this golden rule, there was no danger
but that they would all conduct themselves well enough. This done,
he gave them a paternal benediction, the sturdy Antony sounded a
most loving farewell with his trumpet, the jolly crews put up a
shout of triumph, and the invincible armada swept off proudly down
the bay."
The account of an expedition against Fort Christina deserves to be
quoted in full, for it is an example of what war might be, full of
excitement, and exercise, and heroism, without danger to life. We take
up the narrative at the moment when the Dutch host,--
"Brimful of wrath and cabbage,"--
and excited by the eloquence of the mighty Peter, lighted their pipes,
and charged upon the fort.
"The Swedish garrison, ordered by the cunning Risingh not to fire
until they could distinguish the whites of their assailants' eyes,
stood in horrid silence on the covert-way, until the eager Dutchmen
had ascended the glacis. Then did they pour into them such a
tremendous volley, that the very hills quaked around, and were
terrified even unto an incontinence of water, insomuch that certain
springs burst forth from their sides, which continue to run unto
the present day. Not a Dutchman but would have bitten the dust
beneath that dreadful fire, had not the protecting Minerva kindly
taken care that the Swedes should, one and all, observe their usual
custom of shutting their eyes and turning away their heads at the
moment of discharge.
"The Swedes followed up their fire by leaping the counterscarp, and
falling tooth and nail upon the foe with curious outcries. And now
might be seen prodigies of valor, unmatched in history or song.
Here was the sturdy Stoffel Brinkerhoff brandishing his
quarter-staff, like the giant Blanderon his oak-tree (for he
scorned to carry any other weapon), and drumming a horrific tune
upon the hard heads of the Swedish soldiery. There were the Van
Kortlandts, posted at a distance, like the Locrian archers of yore,
and plying it most potently with the long-bow, for which they were
so justly renowned. On a rising knoll were gathered the valiant
men of Sing-Sing, assisting marvelously in the fight by chanting
the great song of St. Nicholas; but as to the Gardeniers of Hudson,
they were absent on a marauding party, laying waste the neighboring
water-melon patches.
"In a different part of the field were the Van Grolls of Antony's
Nose, struggling to get to the thickest of the fight, but horribly
perplexed in a defile between two hills, by reason of the length of
their noses. So also the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and Kakiat, so
renowned for kicking with the left foot, were brought to a stand
for want of wind, in consequence of the hearty dinner they had
eaten, and would have been put to utter rout but for the arrival of
a gallant corps of voltigeurs, composed of the Hoppers, who
advanced nimbly to their assistance on one foot. Nor must I omit to
mention the valiant achievements of Antony Van Corlear, who, for a
good quarter of an hour, waged stubborn fight with a little pursy
Swedish drummer, whose hide he drummed most magnificently, and whom
he would infallibly have annihilated on the spot, but that he had
come into the battle with no other weapon but his trumpet.
"But now the combat thickened. On came the mighty Jacobus Varra
Vanger and the fighting-men of the Wallabout; after them thundered
the Van Pelts of Esopus, together with the Van Rippers and the Van
Brunts, bearing down all before them; then the Suy Dams, and the
Van Dams, pressing forward with many a blustering oath, at the head
of the warriors of Hell-gate, clad in their thunder-and-lightning
gaberdines; and lastly, the standard-bearers and body-guard of
Peter Stuyvesant, bearing the great beaver of the Manhattoes.
"And now commenced the horrid din, the desperate struggle, the
maddening ferocity, the frantic desperation, the confusion and
self-abandonment of war. Dutchman and Swede commingled, tugged,
panted, and blowed. The heavens were darkened with a tempest of
missives. Bang! went the guns; whack! went the broad-swords; thump!
went the cudgels; crash! went the musket-stocks; blows, kicks,
cuffs, scratches, black eyes and bloody noses swelling the horrors
of the scene! Thick thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter,
higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, head-over-heels, rough-and-tumble!
Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried
the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the
mine! roared stout Risingh. Tanta-rar-ra-ra! twanged the trumpet of
Antony Van Corlear;--until all voice and sound became
unintelligible,--grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of
triumph mingling in one hideous clamor. The earth shook as if
struck with a paralytic stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered
at the sight; rocks burrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even
Christina Creek turned from its course and ran up a hill in
breathless terror!
"Long hung the contest doubtful; for though a heavy shower of rain,
sent by the "cloud-compelling Jove," in some measure cooled their
ardor, as doth a bucket of water thrown on a group of fighting
mastiffs, yet did they but pause for a moment, to return with
tenfold fury to the charge. Just at this juncture a vast and dense
column of smoke was seen slowly rolling toward the scene of battle.
The combatants paused for a moment, gazing in mute astonishment,
until the wind, dispelling the murky cloud, revealed the flaunting
banner of Michael Paw, the Patroon of Communipaw. That valiant
chieftain came fearlessly on at the head of a phalanx of oyster-fed
Pavonians and a _corps de reserve_ of the Van Arsdales and Van
Bummels, who had remained behind to digest the enormous dinner they
had eaten. These now trudged manfully forward, smoking their pipes
with outrageous vigor, so as to raise the awful cloud that has been
mentioned, but marching exceedingly slow, being short of leg, and
of great rotundity in the belt.
"And now the deities who watched over the fortunes of the
Nederlanders having unthinkingly left the field, and stepped into a
neighboring tavern to refresh themselves with a pot of beer, a
direful catastrophe had wellnigh ensued. Scarce had the myrmidons
of Michael Paw attained the front of battle, when the Swedes,
instructed by the cunning Risingh, leveled a shower of blows full
at their tobacco-pipes. Astounded at this assault, and dismayed at
the havoc of their pipes, these ponderous warriors gave way, and
like a drove of frightened elephants broke through the ranks of
their own army. The little Hoppers were borne down in the surge;
the sacred banner emblazoned with the gigantic oyster of Communipaw
was trampled in the dirt; on blundered and thundered the
heavy-sterned fugitives, the Swedes pressing on their rear and
applying their feet _a parte poste_ of the Van Arsdales and the Van
Bummels with a vigor that prodigiously accelerated their movements;
nor did the renowned Michael Paw himself fail to receive divers
grievous and dishonorable visitations of shoe-leather.
"But what, oh Muse! was the rage of Peter Stuyvesant, when from
afar he saw his army giving way! In the transports of his wrath he
sent forth a roar, enough to shake the very hills. The men of the
Manhattoes plucked up new courage at the sound, or, rather, they
rallied at the voice of their leader, of whom they stood more in
awe than of all the Swedes in Christendom. Without waiting for
their aid, the daring Peter dashed, sword in hand, into the
thickest of the foe. Then might be seen achievements worthy of the
days of the giants. Wherever he went the enemy shrank before him;
the Swedes fled to right and left, or were driven, like dogs, into
their own ditch; but as he pushed forward, singly with headlong
courage, the foe closed behind and hung upon his rear. One aimed a
blow full at his heart; but the protecting power which watches over
the great and good turned aside the hostile blade and directed it
to a side-pocket, where reposed an enormous iron tobacco-box,
endowed, like the shield of Achilles, with supernatural powers,
doubtless from bearing the portrait of the blessed St. Nicholas.
Peter Stuyvesant turned like an angry bear upon the foe, and
seizing him, as he fled, by an immeasurable queue, 'Ah, whoreson
caterpillar,' roared he, 'here's what shall make worms' meat of
thee!' so saying he whirled his sword and dealt a blow that would
have decapitated the varlet, but that the pitying steel struck
short and shaved the queue forever from his crown. At this moment
an arquebusier leveled his piece from a neighboring mound, with
deadly aim; but the watchful Minerva, who had just stopped to tie
up her garter, seeing the peril of her favorite hero, sent old
Boreas with his bellows, who, as the match descended to the pan,
gave a blast that blew the priming from the touch-hole.
"Thus waged the fight, when the stout Risingh, surveying the field
from the top of a little ravelin, perceived his troops banged,
beaten, and kicked by the invincible Peter. Drawing his falchion,
and uttering a thousand anathemas, he strode down to the scene of
combat with some such thundering strides as Jupiter is said by
Hesiod to have taken when he strode down the spheres to hurl his
thunder-bolts at the Titans.
"When the rival heroes came face to face, each made a prodigious
start in the style of a veteran stage-champion. Then did they
regard each other for a moment with the bitter aspect of two
furious ram-cats on the point of a clapper-clawing. Then did they
throw themselves into one attitude, then into another, striking
their swords on the ground, first on the right side, then on the
left: at last at it they went with incredible ferocity. Words
cannot tell the prodigies of strength and valor displayed in this
direful encounter,--an encounter compared to which the far-famed
battles of Ajax with Hector, of Æneas with Turnus, Orlando with
Rodomont, Guy of Warwick with Colbrand the Dane, or of that
renowned Welsh knight, Sir Owen of the Mountains, with the giant
Guylon, were all gentle sports and holiday recreations. At length
the valiant Peter, watching his opportunity, aimed a blow enough to
cleave his adversary to the very chine; but Risingh, nimbly raising
his sword, warded it off so narrowly, that, glancing on one side,
it shaved away a huge canteen in which he carried his
liquor,--thence pursuing its trenchant course, it severed off a
deep coat-pocket, stored with bread and cheese,--which provant,
rolling among the armies, occasioned a fearful scrambling between
the Swedes and Dutchmen, and made the general battle to wax more
furious than ever.
"Enraged to see his military stores laid waste, the stout Risingh,
collecting all his forces, aimed a mighty blow full at the hero's
crest. In vain did his fierce little cocked hat oppose its course.
The biting steel clove through the stubborn ram beaver, and would
have cracked the crown of any one not endowed with supernatural
hardness of head; but the brittle weapon shivered in pieces on the
skull of Hardkoppig Piet, shedding a thousand sparks, like beams of
glory, round his grizzly visage.
"The good Peter reeled with the blow, and turning up his eyes
beheld a thousand suns, besides moons and stars, dancing about the
firmament; at length, missing his footing, by reason of his wooden
leg, down he came on his seat of honor with a crash which shook the
surrounding hills, and might have wrecked his frame, had he not
been received into a cushion softer than velvet, which Providence,
or Minerva, or St. Nicholas, or some cow, had benevolently prepared
for his reception.
"The furious Risingh, in despite of the maxim, cherished by all
true knights, that 'fair play is a jewel,' hastened to take
advantage of the hero's fall; but, as he stooped to give a fatal
blow, Peter Stuyvesant dealt him a thwack over the sconce with his
wooden leg, which set a chime of bells ringing triple bob-majors in
his cerebellum. The bewildered Swede staggered with the blow, and
the wary Peter seizing a pocket-pistol, which lay hard by,
discharged it full at the head of the reeling Risingh. Let not my
reader mistake; it was not a murderous weapon loaded with powder
and ball, but a little sturdy stone pottle charged to the muzzle
with a double dram of true Dutch courage, which the knowing Antony
Van Corlear carried about him by way of replenishing his valor, and
which had dropped from his wallet during his furious encounter with
the drummer. The hideous weapon sang through the air, and true to
its course as was the fragment of a rock discharged at Hector by
bully Ajax, encountered the head of the gigantic Swede with
matchless violence.
"This heaven-directed blow decided the battle. The ponderous
pericranium of General Jan Risingh sank upon his breast; his knees
tottered under him; a deathlike torpor seized upon his frame, and
he tumbled to the earth with such violence that old Pluto started
with affright, lest he should have broken through the roof of his
infernal palace.
"His fall was the signal of defeat and victory: the Swedes gave
way, the Dutch pressed forward; the former took to their heels, the
latter hotly pursued. Some entered with them, pell-mell, through
the sally-port; others stormed the bastion, and others scrambled
over the curtain. Thus in a little while the fortress of Fort
Christina, which, like another Troy, had stood a siege of full ten
hours, was carried by assault, without the loss of a single man on
either side. Victory, in the likeness of a gigantic ox-fly, sat
perched upon the cocked hat of the gallant Stuyvesant; and it was
declared by all the writers whom he hired to write the history of
his expedition that on this memorable day he gained a sufficient
quantity of glory to immortalize a dozen of the greatest heroes in
Christendom!"
In the "Sketch-Book," Irving set a kind of fashion in narrative essays,
in brief stories of mingled humor and pathos, which was followed for
half a century. He himself worked the same vein in "Bracebridge Hall,"
and "Tales of a Traveller." And there is no doubt that some of the most
fascinating of the minor sketches of Charles Dickens, such as the story
of the Bagman's Uncle, are lineal descendants of, if they were not
suggested by, Irving's "Adventure of My Uncle," and the "Bold Dragoon."
The taste for the leisurely description and reminiscent essay of the
"Sketch-Book" does not characterize the readers of this generation, and
we have discovered that the pathos of its elaborated scenes is somewhat
"literary." The sketches of "Little Britain," and "Westminster Abbey,"
and, indeed, that of "Stratford-on-Avon," will for a long time retain
their place in selections of "good reading;" but the "Sketch-Book" is
only floated, as an original work, by two papers, the "Rip Van Winkle"
and the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow;" that is to say by the use of the
Dutch material, and the elaboration of the "Knickerbocker Legend," which
was the great achievement of Irving's life. This was broadened and
deepened and illustrated by the several stories of the "Money Diggers,"
of "Wolfert Webber" and "Kidd the Pirate," in "The Tales of a
Traveller," and by "Dolph Heyliger" in "Bracebridge Hall." Irving was
never more successful than in painting the Dutch manners and habits of
the early time, and he returned again and again to the task until he not
only made the shores of the Hudson and the islands of New York harbor
and the East River classic ground, but until his conception of Dutch
life in the New World had assumed historical solidity and become a
tradition of the highest poetic value. If in the multiplicity of books
and the change of taste the bulk of Irving's works shall go out of
print, a volume made up of his Knickerbocker history and the legends
relating to the region of New York and the Hudson would survive as long
as anything that has been produced in this country.
The philosophical student of the origin of New World society may find
food for reflection in the "materiality" of the basis of the
civilization of New York. The picture of abundance and of enjoyment of
animal life is perhaps not overdrawn in Irving's sketch of the home of
the Van Tassels, in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." It is all the extract
we can make room for from that careful study:--
"Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each
week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van
Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer.
She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge;
ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's peaches,
and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but her vast
expectations. She was, withal, a little of a coquette, as might be
perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of ancient and
modern fashions, as most suited to set off her charms. She wore the
ornaments of pure yellow gold which her great-great-grandmother had
brought over from Saardam; the tempting stomacher of the olden
time; and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the
prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.
"Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it
is not to be wondered at that so tempting a morsel soon found favor
in his eyes, more especially after he had visited her in her
paternal mansion. Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a
thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true,
sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his
own farm; but within those everything was snug, happy, and
well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud
of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance rather than the
style in which he lived. His stronghold was situated on the banks
of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks in
which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree
spread its broad branches over it, at the foot of which bubbled up
a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well,
formed of a barrel, and then stole sparkling away through the grass
to a neighboring brook, that bubbled along among alders and dwarf
willows. Hard by the farm-house was a vast barn, that might have
served for a church, every window and crevice of which seemed
bursting forth with the treasures of the farm. The flail was busily
resounding within it from morning till night; swallows and martins
skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with
one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their
heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others
swelling and cooing and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the
sunshine on the roof. Sleek, unwieldy porkers were grunting in the
repose and abundance of their pens, whence sallied forth, now and
then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air. A stately
squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying
whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through
the farm-yard, and guinea fowls fretting about it, like
ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish, discontented cry.
Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a
husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished
wings, and crowing in the pride and gladness of his
heart--sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, and then
generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives and children to
enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered.
"The pedagogue's mouth watered as he looked upon this sumptuous
promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind's eye he
pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding
in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly
put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of
crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy, and the ducks
pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent
competency of onion-sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the
future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey
but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing,
and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright
chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side-dish, with
uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous
spirit disdained to ask while living.
"As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his
great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of
wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchard
burdened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of
Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit
these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea how they
might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in
immense tracts of wild land and shingle palaces in the wilderness.
Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to
him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted
on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and
kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing
mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky,
Tennessee, or the Lord knows where.
"When he entered the house, the conquest of his heart was complete.
It was one of those spacious farm-houses, with high-ridged, but
lowly-sloping roofs, built in the style handed down from the first
Dutch settlers; the low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the
front, capable of being closed up in bad weather. Under this were
hung flails, harness, various utensils of husbandry, and nets for
fishing in the neighboring river. Benches were built along the
sides for summer use; and a great spinning-wheel at one end, and a
churn at the other, showed the various uses to which this important
porch might be devoted. From this piazza the wondering Ichabod
entered the hall, which formed the centre of the mansion and the
place of usual residence. Here, rows of resplendent pewter, ranged
on a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one corner stood a huge bag
of wool ready to be spun; in another a quantity of linsey-woolsey
just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, and strings of dried
apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons along the walls, mingled
with the gaud of red peppers; and a door left ajar gave him a peep
into the best parlor, where the claw-footed chairs and dark
mahogany tables shone like mirrors; and irons, with their
accompanying shovel and tongs, glistened from their covert of
asparagus tops; mock-oranges and conch-shells decorated the
mantelpiece; strings of various colored birds' eggs were suspended
above it; a great ostrich egg was hung from the centre of the room,
and a corner cupboard, knowingly left open, displayed immense
treasures of old silver and well-mended china."
It is an abrupt transition from these homely scenes, which humor
commends to our liking, to the chivalrous pageant unrolled for us in the
"Conquest of Granada." The former are more characteristic and the more
enduring of Irving's writings, but as a literary artist his genius lent
itself just as readily to Oriental and mediæval romance as to the
Knickerbocker legend; and there is no doubt that the delicate perception
he had of chivalric achievements gave a refined tone to his mock
heroics, which greatly heightened their effect. It may almost be claimed
that Irving did for Granada and the Alhambra what he did, in a totally
different way, for New York and its vicinity.
The first passage I take from the "Conquest" is the description of the
advent at Cordova of the Lord Scales, Earl of Rivers, who was brother of
the queen of Henry VII., a soldier who had fought at Bosworth field, and
now volunteered to aid Ferdinand and Isabella in the extermination of
the Saracens. The description is put into the mouth of Fray Antonio
Agapida, a fictitious chronicler invented by Irving, an unfortunate
intervention which gives to the whole book an air of unveracity:--
"'This cavalier [he observes] was from the far island of England,
and brought with him a train of his vassals; men who had been
hardened in certain civil wars which raged in their country. They
were a comely race of men, but too fair and fresh for warriors, not
having the sunburnt, warlike hue of our old Castilian soldiery.
They were huge feeders also, and deep carousers, and could not
accommodate themselves to the sober diet of our troops, but must
fain eat and drink after the manner of their own country. They were
often noisy and unruly, also, in their wassail; and their quarter
of the camp was prone to be a scene of loud revel and sudden brawl.
They were, withal, of great pride, yet it was not like our
inflammable Spanish pride: they stood not much upon the _pundonor_,
the high punctilio, and rarely drew the stiletto in their disputes;
but their pride was silent and contumelious. Though from a remote
and somewhat barbarous island, they believed themselves the most
perfect men upon earth, and magnified their chieftain, the Lord
Scales, beyond the greatest of their grandees. With all this, it
must be said of them that they were marvelous good men in the
field, dexterous archers, and powerful with the battle-axe. In
their great pride and self-will, they always sought to press in the
advance and take the post of danger, trying to outvie our Spanish
chivalry. They did not rush on fiercely to the fight, nor make a
brilliant onset like the Moorish and Spanish troops, but they went
into the fight deliberately, and persisted obstinately, and were
slow to find out when they were beaten. Withal they were much
esteemed yet little liked by our soldiery, who considered them
staunch companions in the field, yet coveted but little fellowship
with them in the camp.
"'Their commander, the Lord Scales, was an accomplished cavalier,
of gracious and noble presence and fair speech; it was a marvel to
see so much courtesy in a knight brought up so far from our
Castilian court. He was much honored by the king and queen, and
found great favor with the fair dames about the court, who indeed
are rather prone to be pleased with foreign cavaliers. He went
always in costly state, attended by pages and esquires, and
accompanied by noble young cavaliers of his country, who had
enrolled themselves under his banner, to learn the gentle exercise
of arms. In all pageants and festivals, the eyes of the populace
were attracted by the singular bearing and rich array of the
English earl and his train, who prided themselves in always
appearing in the garb and manner of their country--and were indeed
something very magnificent delectable, and strange to behold.'
"The worthy chronicler is no less elaborate in his description of
the masters of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara, and their
valiant knights, armed at all points, and decorated with the badges
of their orders. These, he affirms, were the flower of Christian
chivalry; being constantly in service they became more steadfast
and accomplished in discipline than the irregular and temporary
levies of feudal nobles. Calm, solemn, and stately, they sat like
towers upon their powerful chargers. On parades they manifested
none of the show and ostentation of the other troops: neither, in
battle, did they endeavor to signalize themselves by any fiery
vivacity, or desperate and vainglorious exploit,--everything, with
them, was measured and sedate; yet it was observed that none were
more warlike in their appearance in the camp, or more terrible for
their achievements in the field.
"The gorgeous magnificence of the Spanish nobles found but little
favor in the eyes of the sovereigns. They saw that it caused a
competition in expense ruinous to cavaliers of moderate fortune;
and they feared that a softness and effeminacy might thus be
introduced, incompatible with the stern nature of the war. They
signified their disapprobation to several of the principal
noblemen, and recommended a more sober and soldier-like display
while in actual service.
"'These are rare troops for a tournay, my lord [said Ferdinand to
the Duke of Infantado, as he beheld his retainers glittering in
gold and embroidery]; but gold, though gorgeous, is soft and
yielding: iron is the metal for the field.'
"'Sire [replied the duke], if my men parade in gold, your majesty
will find they fight with steel.' The king smiled, but shook his
head, and the duke treasured up his speech in his heart."
Our author excels in such descriptions as that of the progress of
Isabella to the camp of Ferdinand after the capture of Loxa, and of the
picturesque pageantry which imparted something of gayety to the brutal
pastime of war:--
"It was in the early part of June that the queen departed from
Cordova, with the Princess Isabella and numerous ladies of her
court. She had a glorious attendance of cavaliers and pages, with
many guards and domestics. There were forty mules for the use of
the queen, the princess and their train.
"As this courtly cavalcade approached the Rock of the Lovers, on
the banks of the river Yeguas, they beheld a splendid train of
knights advancing to meet them. It was headed by that accomplished
cavalier the Marques Duke de Cadiz, accompanied by the adelantado
of Andalusia. He had left the camp the day after the capture of
Illora, and advanced thus far to receive the queen and escort her
over the borders. The queen received the marques with distinguished
honor, for he was esteemed the mirror of chivalry. His actions in
this war had become the theme of every tongue, and many hesitated
not to compare him in prowess with the immortal Cid.
"Thus gallantly attended, the queen entered the vanquished frontier
of Granada, journeying securely along the pleasant banks of the
Xenel, so lately subject to the scourings of the Moors. She stopped
at Loxa, where she administered aid and consolation to the wounded,
distributing money among them for their support, according to their
rank.
"The king, after the capture of Illora, had removed his camp before
the fortress of Moclin, with an intention of besieging it. Thither
the queen proceeded, still escorted through the mountain roads by
the Marques of Cadiz. As Isabella drew near to the camp, the Duke
del Infantado issued forth a league and a half to receive her,
magnificently arrayed, and followed by all his chivalry in glorious
attire. With him came the standard of Seville, borne by the
men-at-arms of that renowned city, and the Prior of St. Juan, with
his followers. They ranged themselves in order of battle, on the
left of the road by which the queen was to pass.
"The worthy Agapida is loyally minute in his description of the
state and grandeur of the Catholic sovereigns. The queen rode a
chestnut mule, seated in a magnificent saddle-chair, decorated with
silver gilt. The housings of the mule were of fine crimson cloth;
the borders embroidered with gold; the reins and head-piece were of
satin, curiously embossed with needlework of silk, and wrought with
golden letters. The queen wore a brial or regal skirt of velvet,
under which were others of brocade; a scarlet mantle, ornamented in
the Moresco fashion; and a black hat, embroidered round the crown
and brim.
"The infanta was likewise mounted on a chestnut mule, richly
caparisoned. She wore a brial or skirt of black brocade, and a
black mantle ornamented like that of the queen.
"When the royal cavalcade passed by the chivalry of the Duke del
Infantado, which was drawn out in battle array, the queen made a
reverence to the standard of Seville, and ordered it to pass to the
right hand. When she approached the camp, the multitude ran forth
to meet her, with great demonstrations of joy; for she was
universally beloved by her subjects. All the battalions sallied
forth in military array, bearing the various standards and banners
of the camp, which were lowered in salutation as she passed.
"The king now came forth in royal state, mounted on a superb
chestnut horse, and attended by many grandees of Castile. He wore a
jubon or close vest of crimson cloth, with cuisses or short skirts
of yellow satin, a loose cassock of brocade, a rich Moorish
scimiter, and a hat with plumes. The grandees who attended him were
arrayed with wonderful magnificence, each according to his taste
and invention.
"These high and mighty princes [says Antonio Agapida] regarded each
other with great deference, as allied sovereigns rather than with
connubial familiarity, as mere husband and wife. When they
approached each other, therefore, before embracing, they made three
profound reverences, the queen taking off her hat, and remaining in
a silk net or cawl, with her face uncovered. The king then
approached and embraced her, and kissed her respectfully on the
cheek. He also embraced his daughter the princess; and, making the
sign of the cross, he blessed her, and kissed her on the lips.
"The good Agapida seems scarcely to have been more struck with the
appearance of the sovereigns than with that of the English earl. He
followed [says he] immediately after the king, with great pomp,
and, in an extraordinary manner, taking precedence of all the rest.
He was mounted '_a la guisa_,' or with long stirrups, on a superb
chestnut horse, with trappings of azure silk which reached to the
ground. The housings were of mulberry, powdered with stars of gold.
He was armed in proof, and wore over his armor a short French
mantle of black brocade; he had a white French hat with plumes, and
carried on his left arm a small round buckler, banded with gold.
Five pages attended him, apparelled in silk and brocade, and
mounted on horses sumptuously caparisoned; he had also a train of
followers, bravely attired after the fashion of his country.
"He advanced in a chivalrous and courteous manner, making his
reverences first to the queen and infanta, and afterwards to the
king. Queen Isabella received him graciously, complimenting him on
his courageous conduct at Loxa, and condoling with him on the loss
of his teeth. The earl, however, made light of his disfiguring
wound, saying that 'our blessed Lord, who had built all that house,
had opened a window there, that he might see more readily what
passed within;' whereupon the worthy Fray Antonio Agapida is more
than ever astonished at the pregnant wit of this island cavalier.
The earl continued some little distance by the side of the royal
family, complimenting them all with courteous speeches, his horse
curveting and caracoling, but being managed with great grace and
dexterity,--leaving the grandees and the people at large not more
filled with admiration at the strangeness and magnificence of his
state than at the excellence of his horsemanship.
"To testify her sense of the gallantry and services of this noble
English knight, who had come from so far to assist in their wars,
the queen sent him the next day presents of twelve horses, with
stately tents, fine linen, two beds with coverings of gold brocade,
and many other articles of great value."
The protracted siege of the city of Granada was the occasion of feats of
arms and hostile courtesies which rival in brilliancy any in the
romances of chivalry. Irving's pen is never more congenially employed
than in describing these desperate but romantic encounters. One of the
most picturesque of these was known as "the queen's skirmish." The royal
encampment was situated so far from Granada that only the general aspect
of the city could be seen as it rose from the vega, covering the sides
of the hills with its palaces and towers. Queen Isabella expressed a
desire for a nearer view of the city, whose beauty was renowned
throughout the world, and the courteous Marques of Cadiz proposed to
give her this perilous gratification.
"On the morning of June the 18th, a magnificent and powerful train
issued from the Christian camp. The advanced guard was composed of
legions of cavalry, heavily armed, looking like moving masses of
polished steel. Then came the king and queen, with the prince and
princesses, and the ladies of the court, surrounded by the royal
body-guard, sumptuously arrayed, composed of the sons of the most
illustrious houses of Spain; after these was the rear-guard, a
powerful force of horse and foot; for the flower of the army
sallied forth that day. The Moors gazed with fearful admiration at
this glorious pageant, wherein the pomp of the court was mingled
with the terrors of the camp. It moved along in radiant line,
across the vega, to the melodious thunders of martial music, while
banner and plume, and silken scarf, and rich brocade, gave a gay
and gorgeous relief to the grim visage of iron war that lurked
beneath.
"The army moved towards the hamlet of Zubia, built on the skirts of
the mountain to the left of Granada, and commanding a view of the
Alhambra, and the most beautiful quarter of the city. As they
approached the hamlet, the Marques of Villena, the Count Ureña, and
Don Alonzo de Aguilar filed off with their battalions, and were
soon seen glittering along the side of the mountain above the
village. In the mean time the Marques of Cadiz, the Count de
Tendilla, the Count de Cabra, and Don Alonzo Fernandez, senior of
Alcaudrete and Montemayor, drew up their forces in battle array on
the plain below the hamlet, presenting a living barrier of loyal
chivalry between the sovereigns and the city.
"Thus securely guarded, the royal party alighted, and, entering one
of the houses of the hamlet, which had been prepared for their
reception, enjoyed a full view of the city from its terraced roof.
The ladies of the court gazed with delight at the red towers of the
Alhambra, rising from amid shady groves, anticipating the time when
the Catholic sovereigns should be enthroned within its walls, and
its courts shine with the splendor of Spanish chivalry. 'The
reverend prelates and holy friars, who always surrounded the queen,
looked with serene satisfaction,' says Fray Antonio Agapida, 'at
this modern Babylon, enjoying the triumph that awaited them, when
those mosques and minarets should be converted into churches, and
goodly priests and bishops should succeed to the infidel alfaquis.'
"When the Moors beheld the Christians thus drawn forth in full
array in the plain, they supposed it was to offer battle, and
hesitated not to accept it. In a little while the queen beheld a
body of Moorish cavalry pouring into the vega, the riders managing
their fleet and fiery steeds with admirable address. They were
richly armed, and clothed in the most brilliant colors, and the
caparisons of their steeds flamed with gold and embroidery. This
was the favorite squadron of Muza, composed of the flower of the
youthful cavaliers of Granada. Others succeeded, some heavily
armed, others _à la gineta_, with lance and buckler; and lastly
came the legions of foot-soldiers, with arquebus and cross-bow, and
spear and scimiter.
"When the queen saw this army issuing from the city, she sent to
the Marques of Cadiz, and forbade any attack upon the enemy, or the
acceptance of any challenge to a skirmish; for she was loth that
her curiosity should cost the life of a single human being.
"The marques promised to obey, though sorely against his will; and
it grieved the spirit of the Spanish cavaliers to be obliged to
remain with sheathed swords while bearded by the foe. The Moors
could not comprehend the meaning of this inaction of the
Christians, after having apparently invited a battle. They sallied
several times from their ranks, and approached near enough to
discharge their arrows; but the Christians were immovable. Many of
the Moorish horsemen galloped close to the Christian ranks,
brandishing their lances and scimiters, and defying various
cavaliers to single combat; but Ferdinand had rigorously prohibited
all duels of this kind, and they dared not transgress his orders
under his very eye.
"Here, however, the worthy Fray Antonio Agapida, in his enthusiasm
for the triumphs of the faith, records the following incident,
which we fear is not sustained by any grave chronicler of the
times, but rests merely on tradition, or the authority of certain
poets and dramatic writers, who have perpetuated the tradition in
their works. While this grim and reluctant tranquillity prevailed
along the Christian line, says Agapida, there rose a mingled shout
and sound of laughter near the gate of the city. A Moorish
horseman, armed at all points, issued forth, followed by a rabble,
who drew back as he approached the scene of danger. The Moor was
more robust and brawny than was common with his countrymen. His
visor was closed; he bore a huge buckler and a ponderous lance; his
scimiter was of a Damascus blade, and his richly ornamented dagger
was wrought by an artificer of Fez. He was known by his device to
be Tarfe, the most insolent, yet valiant, of the Moslem
warriors--the same who had hurled into the royal camp his lance,
inscribed to the queen. As he rode slowly along in front of the
army, his very steed, prancing with fiery eye and distended
nostril, seemed to breathe defiance to the Christians.
"But what were the feelings of the Spanish cavaliers when they
beheld, tied to the tail of his steed, and dragged in the dust, the
very inscription, 'AVE MARIA,' which Hernan Perez del Pulgar had
affixed to the door of the mosque! A burst of horror and
indignation broke forth from the army. Hernan was not at hand to
maintain his previous achievement; but one of his young companions
in arms, Garcilasso de la Vega by name, putting spurs to his horse,
galloped to the hamlet of Zubia, threw himself on his knees before
the king, and besought permission to accept the defiance of this
insolent infidel, and to revenge the insult offered to our Blessed
Lady. The request was too pious to be refused. Garcilasso remounted
his steed, closed his helmet, graced by four sable plumes, grasped
his buckler of Flemish workmanship, and his lance of matchless
temper, and defied the haughty Moor in the midst of his career. A
combat took place in view of the two armies and of the Castilian
court. The Moor was powerful in wielding his weapons, and
dexterous in managing his steed. He was of larger frame than
Garcilasso, and more completely armed, and the Christians trembled
for their champion. The shock of their encounter was dreadful;
their lances were shivered and sent up splinters in the air.
Garcilasso was thrown back in his saddle--his horse made a wide
career before he could recover, gather up the reins, and return to
the conflict. They now encountered each other with swords. The Moor
circled round his opponent, as a hawk circles when about to make a
swoop; his steed obeyed his rider with matchless quickness; at
every attack of the infidel, it seemed as if the Christian knight
must sink beneath his flashing scimiter. But if Garcilasso was
inferior to him in power, he was superior in agility; many of his
blows he parried; others he received upon his Flemish shield, which
was proof against the Damascus blade. The blood streamed from
numerous wounds received by either warrior. The Moor, seeing his
antagonist exhausted, availed himself of his superior force, and,
grappling, endeavored to wrest him from his saddle. They both fell
to earth; the Moor placed his knee upon the breast of his victim,
and, brandishing his dagger, aimed a blow at his throat. A cry of
despair was uttered by the Christian warriors, when suddenly they
beheld the Moor rolling lifeless in the dust. Garcilasso had
shortened his sword, and, as his adversary raised his arm to
strike, had pierced him to the heart. 'It was a singular and
miraculous victory,' says Fray Antonio Agapida; 'but the Christian
knight was armed by the sacred nature of his cause, and the Holy
Virgin gave him strength, like another David, to slay this gigantic
champion of the Gentiles.'
"The laws of chivalry were observed throughout the combat--no one
interfered on either side. Garcilasso now despoiled his adversary;
then, rescuing the holy inscription of 'AVE MARIA' from its
degrading situation, he elevated it on the point of his sword, and
bore it off as a signal of triumph, amidst the rapturous shouts of
the Christian army.
"The sun had now reached the meridian, and the hot blood of the
Moors was inflamed by its rays, and by the sight of the defeat of
their champion. Muza ordered two pieces of ordnance to open a fire
upon the Christians. A confusion was produced in one part of their
ranks: Muza called to the chiefs of the army, 'Let us waste no more
time in empty challenges--let us charge upon the enemy: he who
assaults has always an advantage in the combat.' So saying, he
rushed forward, followed by a large body of horse and foot, and
charged so furiously upon the advance guard of the Christians, that
he drove it in upon the battalion of the Marques of Cadiz.
"The gallant marques now considered himself absolved from all
further obedience to the queen's commands. He gave the signal to
attack. 'Santiago!' was shouted along the line; and he pressed
forward to the encounter, with his battalion of twelve hundred
lances. The other cavaliers followed his example, and the battle
instantly became general.
"When the king and queen beheld the armies thus rushing to the
combat, they threw themselves on their knees, and implored the Holy
Virgin to protect her faithful warriors. The prince and princess,
the ladies of the court, and the prelates and friars who were
present, did the same; and the effect of the prayers of these
illustrious and saintly persons was immediately apparent. The
fierceness with which the Moors had rushed to the attack was
suddenly cooled; they were bold and adroit for a skirmish, but
unequal to the veteran Spaniards in the open field. A panic seized
upon the foot-soldiers--they turned and took to flight. Muza and
his cavaliers in vain endeavored to rally them. Some took refuge in
the mountains; but the greater part fled to the city, in such
confusion that they overturned and trampled upon each other. The
Christians pursued them to the very gates. Upwards of two thousand
were either killed, wounded, or taken prisoners; and the two pieces
of ordnance were brought off as trophies of the victory. Not a
Christian lance but was bathed that day in the blood of an infidel.
"Such was the brief but bloody action which was known among the
Christian warriors by the name of "The Queen's Skirmish;" for when
the Marques of Cadiz waited upon her majesty to apologize for
breaking her commands, he attributed the victory entirely to her
presence. The queen, however, insisted that it was all owing to her
troops being led on by so valiant a commander. Her majesty had not
yet recovered from her agitation at beholding so terrible a scene
of bloodshed, though certain veterans present pronounced it as gay
and gentle a skirmish as they had ever witnessed."
The charm of "The Alhambra" is largely in the leisurely, loitering,
dreamy spirit in which the temporary American resident of the ancient
palace-fortress entered into its mouldering beauties and romantic
associations, and in the artistic skill with which he wove the
commonplace daily life of his attendants there into the more brilliant
woof of its past. The book abounds in delightful legends, and yet these
are all so touched with the author's airy humor that our credulity is
never overtaxed; we imbibe all the romantic interest of the place
without for a moment losing our hold upon reality. The enchantments of
this Moorish paradise become part of our mental possessions, without the
least shock to our common sense. After a few days of residence in the
part of the Alhambra occupied by Dame Tia Antonia and her family, of
which the handmaid Dolores was the most fascinating member, Irving
succeeded in establishing himself in a remote and vacant part of the
vast pile, in a suite of delicate and elegant chambers, with secluded
gardens and fountains, that had once been occupied by the beautiful
Elizabeth of Farnese, daughter of the Duke of Parma, and more than four
centuries ago by a Moorish beauty named Lindaraxa, who flourished in the
court of Muhamed the Left-Handed. These solitary and ruined chambers had
their own terrors and enchantments, and for the first nights gave the
author little but sinister suggestions and grotesque food for his
imagination. But familiarity dispersed the gloom and the superstitious
fancies.
"In the course of a few evenings a thorough change took place in
the scene and its associations. The moon, which when I took
possession of my new apartments was invisible, gradually gained
each evening upon the darkness of the night, and at length rolled
in full splendor above the towers, pouring a flood of tempered
light into every court and hall. The garden beneath my window,
before wrapped in gloom, was gently lighted up; the orange and
citron trees were tipped with silver; the fountain sparkled in the
moonbeams, and even the blush of the rose was faintly visible.
"I now felt the poetic merit of the Arabic inscription on the
walls: 'How beauteous is this garden; where the flowers of the
earth vie with the stars of heaven. What can compare with the vase
of yon alabaster fountain filled with crystal water? nothing but
the moon in her fullness, shining in the midst of an unclouded
sky!'
"On such heavenly nights I would sit for hours at my window
inhaling the sweetness of the garden, and musing on the checkered
fortunes of those whose history was dimly shadowed out in the
elegant memorials around. Sometimes, when all was quiet, and the
clock from the distant cathedral of Granada struck the midnight
hour, I have sallied out on another tour and wandered over the
whole building; but how different from my first tour! No longer
dark and mysterious; no longer peopled with shadowy foes; no longer
recalling scenes of violence and murder; all was open, spacious,
beautiful; everything called up pleasing and romantic fancies;
Lindaraxa once more walked in her garden; the gay chivalry of
Moslem Granada once more glittered about the Court of Lions! Who
can do justice to a moonlight night in such a climate and such a
place? The temperature of a summer midnight in Andalusia is
perfectly ethereal. We seem lifted up into a purer atmosphere; we
feel a serenity of soul, a buoyancy of spirits, an elasticity of
frame, which render mere existence happiness. But when moonlight is
added to all this, the effect is like enchantment. Under its
plastic sway the Alhambra seems to regain its pristine glories.
Every rent and chasm of time, every mouldering tint and
weather-stain, is gone; the marble resumes its original whiteness;
the long colonnades brighten in the moonbeams; the halls are
illuminated with a softened radiance,--we tread the enchanted
palace of an Arabian tale!
"What a delight, at such a time, to ascend to the little airy
pavilion of the queen's toilet (el tocador de la reyna), which,
like a bird-cage, overhangs the valley of the Darro, and gaze from
its light arcades upon the moonlight prospect! To the right, the
swelling mountains of the Sierra Nevada, robbed of their
ruggedness and softened into a fairy land, with their snowy summits
gleaming like silver clouds against the deep blue sky. And then to
lean over the parapet of the Tocador and gaze down upon Granada and
the Albaycin spread out like a map below; all buried in deep
repose; the white palaces and convents sleeping in the moonshine,
and beyond all these the vapory vega fading away like a dreamland
in the distance.
"Sometimes the faint click of castanets rise from the Alameda,
where some gay Andalusians are dancing away the summer night.
Sometimes the dubious tones of a guitar and the notes of an amorous
voice, tell perchance the whereabout of some moonstruck lover
serenading his lady's window.
"Such is a faint picture of the moonlight nights I have passed
loitering about the courts and halls and balconies of this most
suggestive pile; 'feeding my fancy with sugared suppositions,' and
enjoying that mixture of reverie and sensation which steal away
existence in a southern climate; so that it has been almost morning
before I have retired to bed, and been lulled to sleep by the
falling waters of the fountain of Lindaraxa."
One of the writer's vantage points of observation was a balcony of the
central window of the Hall of Ambassadors, from which he had a
magnificent prospect of mountain, valley, and vega, and could look down
upon a busy scene of human life in an alameda, or public walk, at the
foot of the hill, and the suburb of the city, filling the narrow gorge
below. Here the author used to sit for hours, weaving histories out of
the casual incidents passing under his eye, and the occupations of the
busy mortals below. The following passage exhibits his power in
transmuting the commonplace life of the present into material perfectly
in keeping with the romantic associations of the place:--
"There was scarce a pretty face or a striking figure that I daily
saw, about which I had not thus gradually framed a dramatic story,
though some of my characters would occasionally act in direct
opposition to the part assigned them, and disconcert the whole
drama. Reconnoitring one day with my glass the streets of the
Albaycin, I beheld the procession of a novice about to take the
veil; and remarked several circumstances which excited the
strongest sympathy in the fate of the youthful being thus about to
be consigned to a living tomb. I ascertained to my satisfaction
that she was beautiful, and, from the paleness of her cheek, that
she was a victim rather than a votary. She was arrayed in bridal
garments, and decked with a chaplet of white flowers, but her heart
evidently revolted at this mockery of a spiritual union, and
yearned after its earthly loves. A tall stern-looking man walked
near her in the procession: it was, of course, the tyrannical
father, who, from some bigoted or sordid motive, had compelled this
sacrifice. Amid the crowd was a dark handsome youth, in Andalusian
garb, who seemed to fix on her an eye of agony. It was doubtless
the secret lover from whom she was forever to be separated. My
indignation rose as I noted the malignant expression painted on the
countenances of the attendant monks and friars. The procession
arrived at the chapel of the convent; the sun gleamed for the last
time upon the chaplet of the poor novice, as she crossed the fatal
threshold and disappeared within the building. The throng poured in
with cowl, and cross, and minstrelsy; the lover paused for a moment
at the door. I could divine the tumult of his feelings; but he
mastered them, and entered. There was a long interval. I pictured
to myself the scene passing within: the poor novice despoiled of
her transient finery, and clothed in the conventual garb; the
bridal chaplet taken from her brow, and her beautiful head shorn of
its long silken tresses. I heard her murmur the irrevocable vow. I
saw her extended on a bier; the death-pall spread over her; the
funeral service performed that proclaimed her dead to the world;
her sighs were drowned in the deep tones of the organ, and the
plaintive requiem of the nuns; the father looked on, unmoved,
without a tear; the lover--no--my imagination refused to portray
the anguish of the lover--there the picture remained a blank.
"After a time the throng again poured forth and dispersed various
ways, to enjoy the light of the sun and mingle with the stirring
scenes of life; but the victim, with her bridal chaplet, was no
longer there. The door of the convent closed that severed her from
the world forever. I saw the father and the lover issue forth; they
were in earnest conversation. The latter was vehement in his
gesticulations; I expected some violent termination to my drama;
but an angle of a building interfered and closed the scene. My eye
afterwards was frequently turned to that convent with painful
interest. I remarked late at night a solitary light twinkling from
a remote lattice of one of its towers. 'There,' said I, 'the
unhappy nun sits weeping in her cell, while perhaps her lover paces
the street below in unavailing anguish.'
"--The officious Mateo interrupted my meditations and destroyed in
an instant the cobweb tissue of my fancy. With his usual zeal he
had gathered facts concerning the scene, which put my fictions all
to flight. The heroine of my romance was neither young nor
handsome; she had no lover; she had entered the convent of her own
free will, as a respectable asylum, and was one of the most
cheerful residents within its walls.
"It was some little while before I could forgive the wrong done me
by the nun in being thus happy in her cell, in contradiction to all
the rules of romance; I diverted my spleen, however, by watching,
for a day or two, the pretty coquetries of a dark-eyed brunette,
who, from the covert of a balcony shrouded with flowering shrubs
and a silken awning, was carrying on a mysterious correspondence
with a handsome, dark, well-whiskered cavalier, who lurked
frequently in the street beneath her window. Sometimes I saw him at
an early hour, stealing forth wrapped to the eyes in a mantle.
Sometimes he loitered at a corner, in various disguises, apparently
waiting for a private signal to slip into the house. Then there was
the tinkling of a guitar at night, and a lantern shifted from place
to place in the balcony. I imagined another intrigue like that of
Almaviva, but was again disconcerted in all my suppositions. The
supposed lover turned out to be the husband of the lady, and a
noted contrabandista; and all his mysterious signs and movements
had doubtless some smuggling scheme in view.
"--I occasionally amused myself with noting from this balcony the
gradual changes of the scenes below, according to the different
stages of the day.
"Scarce has the gray dawn streaked the sky, and the earliest cock
crowed from the cottages of the hill-side, when the suburbs give
sign of reviving animation; for the fresh hours of dawning are
precious in the summer season in a sultry climate. All are anxious
to get the start of the sun, in the business of the day. The
muleteer drives forth his loaded train for the journey; the
traveler slings his carbine behind his saddle, and mounts his steed
at the gate of the hostel; the brown peasant from the country urges
forward his loitering beasts, laden with panniers of sunny fruit
and fresh dewy vegetables, for already the thrifty housewives are
hastening to the market.
"The sun is up and sparkles along the valley, tipping the
transparent foliage of the groves. The matin bells resound
melodiously through the pure bright air, announcing the hour of
devotion. The muleteer halts his burdened animals before the
chapel, thrusts his staff through his belt behind, and enters with
hat in hand, smoothing his coal-black hair, to hear a mass, and to
put up a prayer for a prosperous wayfaring across the sierra. And
now steals forth on fairy foot the gentle Señora, in trim basquiña,
with restless fan in hand, and dark eye flashing from beneath the
gracefully folded mantilla; she seeks some well-frequented church
to offer up her morning orisons; but the nicely adjusted dress, the
dainty shoe and cobweb stocking, the raven tresses exquisitely
braided, the fresh-plucked rose, gleaming among them like a gem,
show that earth divides with Heaven the empire of her thoughts.
Keep an eye upon her, careful mother, or virgin aunt, or vigilant
duenna, whichever you may be, that walk behind!
"As the morning advances, the din of labor augments on every side;
the streets are thronged with man, and steed, and beast of burden,
and there is a hum and murmur, like the surges of the ocean. As the
sun ascends to his meridian, the hum and bustle gradually decline;
at the height of noon there is a pause. The panting city sinks into
lassitude, and for several hours there is a general repose. The
windows are closed, the curtains drawn, the inhabitants retired
into the coolest recesses of their mansions; the full-fed monk
snores in his dormitory; the brawny porter lies stretched on the
pavement beside his burden; the peasant and the laborer sleep
beneath the trees of the Alameda, lulled by the sultry chirping of
the locust. The streets are deserted, except by the water-carrier,
who refreshes the ear by proclaiming the merits of his sparkling
beverage, 'colder than the mountain snow (_mas fria que la
nieve_).'
"As the sun declines, there is again a gradual reviving, and when
the vesper bell rings out his sinking knell, all nature seems to
rejoice that the tyrant of the day has fallen. Now begins the
bustle of enjoyment, when the citizens pour forth to breathe the
evening air, and revel away the brief twilight in the walks and
gardens of the Darro and Xenil.
"As night closes, the capricious scene assumes new features. Light
after light gradually twinkles forth; here a taper from a balconied
window; there a votive lamp before the image of a saint. Thus, by
degrees, the city emerges from the pervading gloom, and sparkles
with scattered lights, like the starry firmament. Now break forth
from court and garden, and street and lane, the tinkling of
innumerable guitars, and the clicking of castanets; blending, at
this lofty height, in a faint but general concert. 'Enjoy the
moment' is the creed of the gay and amorous Andalusian, and at no
time does he practice it more zealously than on the balmy nights of
summer, wooing his mistress with the dance, the love-ditty, and
the passionate serenade."
How perfectly is the illusion of departed splendor maintained in the
opening of the chapter on "The Court of Lions."
"The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of
calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus
clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and the
imagination. As I delight to walk in these 'vain shadows,' I am
prone to seek those parts of the Alhambra which are most favorable
to this phantasmagoria of the mind; and none are more so than the
Court of Lions, and its surrounding halls. Here the hand of time
has fallen the lightest, and the traces of Moorish elegance and
splendor exist in almost their original brilliancy. Earthquakes
have shaken the foundations of this pile, and rent its rudest
towers; yet see! not one of those slender columns has been
displaced, not an arch of that light and fragile colonnade given
way, and all the fairy fretwork of these domes, apparently as
unsubstantial as the crystal fabrics of a morning's frost, exist
after the lapse of centuries, almost as fresh as if from the hand
of the Moslem artist. I write in the midst of these mementos of the
past, in the fresh hour of early morning, in the fated Hall of the
Abencerrages. The blood-stained fountain, the legendary monument of
their massacre, is before me; the lofty jet almost casts its dew
upon my paper. How difficult to reconcile the ancient tale of
violence and blood with the gentle and peaceful scene around!
Everything here appears calculated to inspire kind and happy
feelings, for everything is delicate and beautiful. The very light
falls tenderly from above, through the lantern of a dome tinted and
wrought as if by fairy hands. Through the ample and fretted arch of
the portal I behold the Court of Lions, with brilliant sunshine
gleaming along its colonnades and sparkling in its fountains. The
lively swallow dives into the court, and, rising with a surge,
darts away twittering over the roofs; the busy bee toils humming
among the flower-beds; and painted butterflies hover from plant to
plant, and flutter up and sport with each other in the sunny air.
It needs but a slight exertion of the fancy to picture some pensive
beauty of the harem loitering in these secluded haunts of Oriental
luxury.
"He, however, who would behold this scene under an aspect more in
unison with its fortunes, let him come when the shadows of evening
temper the brightness of the court, and throw a gloom into the
surrounding halls. Then nothing can be more serenely melancholy, or
more in harmony with the tale of departed grandeur.
"At such times I am apt to seek the Hall of Justice, whose deep
shadowy arcades extend across the upper end of the court. Here was
performed, in presence of Ferdinand and Isabella and their
triumphant court, the pompous ceremonial of high mass, on taking
possession of the Alhambra. The very cross is still to be seen upon
the wall, where the altar was erected, and where officiated the
Grand Cardinal of Spain, and others of the highest religious
dignitaries of the land. I picture to myself the scene when this
place was filled with the conquering host, that mixture of mitred
prelate and shaven monk, and steel-clad knight and silken courtier;
when crosses and crosiers and religious standards were mingled with
proud armorial ensigns and the banners of the haughty chiefs of
Spain, and flaunted in triumph through these Moslem halls. I
picture to myself Columbus, the future discoverer of a world,
taking his modest stand in a remote corner, the humble and
neglected spectator of the pageant. I see in imagination the
Catholic sovereigns prostrating themselves before the altar, and
pouring forth thanks for their victory; while the vaults resound
with sacred minstrelsy and the deep-toned Te Deum.
"The transient illusion is over,--the pageant melts from the
fancy,--monarch, priest, and warrior return into oblivion with the
poor Moslems over whom they exulted. The hall of their triumph is
waste and desolate. The bat flits about its twilight vault, and the
owl hoots from the neighboring tower of Comares."
It is a Moslem tradition that the court and army of Boabdil, the
Unfortunate, the last Moorish King of Granada, are shut up in the
mountain by a powerful enchantment, and that it is written in the book
of fate that when the enchantment is broken, Boabdil will descend from
the mountain at the head of his army, resume his throne in the Alhambra,
and gathering together the enchanted warriors from all parts of Spain,
reconquer the Peninsula. Nothing in this volume is more amusing and at
the same time more poetic and romantic than the story of "Governor Manco
and the Soldier," in which this legend is used to cover the exploit of a
dare-devil contrabandista. But it is too long to quote. I take,
therefore, another story, which has something of the same elements, that
of a merry, mendicant student of Salamanca, Don Vicente by name, who
wandered from village to village, and picked up a living by playing the
guitar for the peasants, among whom, he was sure of a hearty welcome.
In the course of his wandering he had found a seal-ring, having for its
device the cabalistic sign, invented by King Solomon the Wise, and of
mighty power in all cases of enchantment.
"At length he arrived at the great object of his musical
vagabondizing, the far-famed city of Granada, and hailed with
wonder and delight its Moorish towers, its lovely vega, and its
snowy mountains glistening through a summer atmosphere. It is
needless to say with what eager curiosity he entered its gates and
wandered through its streets, and gazed upon its Oriental
monuments. Every female face peering through a window or beaming
from a balcony was to him a Zorayda or a Zelinda, nor could he meet
a stately dame on the Alameda but he was ready to fancy her a
Moorish princess, and to spread his student's robe beneath her
feet.
"His musical talent, his happy humor, his youth and his good looks,
won him a universal welcome in spite of his ragged robes, and for
several days he led a gay life in the old Moorish capital and its
environs. One of his occasional haunts was the fountain of
Avellanos, in the valley of Darro. It is one of the popular resorts
of Granada, and has been so since the days of the Moors; and here
the student had an opportunity of pursuing his studies of female
beauty; a branch of study to which he was a little prone.
"Here he would take his seat with his guitar, improvise
love-ditties to admiring groups of majos and majas, or prompt with
his music the ever-ready dance. He was thus engaged one evening
when he beheld a padre of the church advancing, at whose approach
every one touched the hat. He was evidently a man of consequence;
he certainly was a mirror of good if not of holy living; robust and
rosy-faced, and breathing at every pore with the warmth of the
weather and the exercise of the walk. As he passed along he would
every now and then draw a maravedi out of his pocket and bestow it
on a beggar, with an air of signal beneficence. 'Ah, the blessed
father!' would be the cry; 'long life to him, and may he soon be a
bishop!'
"To aid his steps in ascending the hill he leaned gently now and
then on the arm of a handmaid, evidently the pet-lamb of this
kindest of pastors. Ah, such a damsel! Andalus from head to foot;
from the rose in her hair, to the fairy shoe and lacework stocking;
Andalus in every movement; in every undulation of the body:--ripe,
melting Andalus! But then so modest!--so shy!--ever, with downcast
eyes, listening to the words of the padre; or, if by chance she let
flash a side glance, it was suddenly checked and her eyes once more
cast to the ground.
"The good padre looked benignantly on the company about the
fountain, and took his seat with some emphasis on a stone bench,
while the handmaid hastened to bring him a glass of sparkling
water. He sipped it deliberately and with a relish, tempering it
with one of those spongy pieces of frosted eggs and sugar so dear
to Spanish epicures, and on returning the glass to the hand of the
damsel pinched her cheek with infinite loving-kindness.
"'Ah, the good pastor!' whispered the student to himself; 'what a
happiness would it be to be gathered into his fold with such a
pet-lamb for a companion!'
"But no such good fare was likely to befall him. In vain he essayed
those powers of pleasing which he had found so irresistible with
country curates and country lasses. Never had he touched his guitar
with such skill; never had he poured forth more soul-moving
ditties, but he had no longer a country curate or country lass to
deal with. The worthy priest evidently did not relish music, and
the modest damsel never raised her eyes from the ground. They
remained but a short time at the fountain; the good padre hastened
their return to Granada. The damsel gave the student one shy glance
in retiring; but it plucked the heart out of his bosom!
"He inquired about them after they had gone. Padre Tomás was one
of the saints of Granada, a model of regularity; punctual in his
hour of rising; his hour of taking a paseo for an appetite; his
hours of eating; his hour of taking his siesta; his hour of playing
his game of tresillo, of an evening, with some of the dames of the
cathedral circle; his hour of supping, and his hour of retiring to
rest, to gather fresh strength for another day's round of similar
duties. He had an easy sleek mule for his riding; a matronly
housekeeper skilled in preparing tidbits for his table; and the
pet-lamb, to smooth his pillow at night and bring him his chocolate
in the morning.
"Adieu now to the gay, thoughtless life of the student; the
side-glance of a bright eye had been the undoing of him. Day and
night he could not get the image of this most modest damsel out of
his mind. He sought the mansion of the padre. Alas! it was above
the class of houses accessible to a strolling student like himself.
The worthy padre had no sympathy with him; he had never been
_Estudiante sopista_, obliged to sing for his supper. He blockaded
the house by day, catching a glance of the damsel now and then as
she appeared at a casement; but these glances only fed his flame
without encouraging his hope. He serenaded her balcony at night,
and at one time was flattered by the appearance of something white
at a window. Alas, it was only the night-cap of the padre.
"Never was lover more devoted; never damsel more shy: the poor
student was reduced to despair. At length arrived the eve of St.
John, when the lower classes of Granada swarm into the country,
dance away the afternoon, and pass midsummer's night on the banks
of the Darro and the Xenil. Happy are they who on this eventful
night can wash their faces in those waters just as the cathedral
bell tells midnight; for at that precise moment they have a
beautifying power. The student, having nothing to do, suffered
himself to be carried away by the holiday-seeking throng until he
found himself in the narrow valley of the Darro, below the lofty
hill and ruddy towers of the Alhambra. The dry bed of the river;
the rocks which border it; the terraced gardens which overhang it,
were alive with variegated groups, dancing under the vines and
fig-trees to the sound of the guitar and castanets.
"The student remained for some time in doleful dumps, leaning
against one of the huge misshapen stone pomegranates which adorn
the ends of the little bridge over the Darro. He cast a wistful
glance upon the merry scene, where every cavalier had his dame; or,
to speak more appropriately, every Jack his Jill; sighed at his
own solitary state, a victim to the black eye of the most
unapproachable of damsels, and repined at his ragged garb, which
seemed to shut the gate of hope against him.
"By degrees his attention was attracted to a neighbor equally
solitary with himself. This was a tall soldier, of a stern aspect
and grizzled beard, who seemed posted as a sentry at the opposite
pomegranate. His face was bronzed by time; he was arrayed in
ancient Spanish armor, with buckler and lance, and stood immovable
as a statue. What surprised the student was, that though thus
strangely equipped, he was totally unnoticed by the passing throng,
albeit that many almost brushed against him.
"'This is a city of old time peculiarities,' thought the student,
'and doubtless this is one of them with which the inhabitants are
too familiar to be surprised.' His own curiosity, however, was
awakened, and being of a social disposition, he accosted the
soldier.
"'A rare old suit of armor that which you wear, comrade. May I ask
what corps you belong to?'
"The soldier gasped out a reply from a pair of jaws which seemed to
have rusted on their hinges.
"'The royal guard of Ferdinand and Isabella.'
"'Santa Maria! Why, it is three centuries since that corps was in
service.'
"'And for three centuries have I been mounting guard. Now I trust
my tour of duty draws to a close. Dost thou desire fortune?'
"The student held up his tattered cloak in reply.
"'I understand thee. If thou hast faith and courage, follow me, and
thy fortune is made.'
"'Softly, comrade, to follow thee would require small courage in
one who has nothing to lose but life and an old guitar, neither of
much value; but my faith is of a different matter, and not to be
put in temptation. If it be any criminal act by which I am to mend
my fortune, think not my ragged cloak will make me undertake it.'
"The soldier turned on him a look of high displeasure. 'My sword,'
said he, 'has never been drawn but in the cause of the faith and
the throne. I am a _Cristiano viejo_; trust in me and fear no
evil.'
"The student followed him wondering. He observed that no one heeded
their conversation, and that the soldier made his way through the
various groups of idlers unnoticed, as if invisible.
"Crossing the bridge, the soldier led the way by a narrow and steep
path past a Moorish mill and aqueduct, and up the ravine which
separates the domains of the Generalife from those of the Alhambra.
The last ray of the sun shone upon the red battlements of the
latter, which beetled far above; and the convent-bells were
proclaiming the festival of the ensuing day. The ravine was
overshadowed by fig-trees, vines, and myrtles, and the outer towers
and walls of the fortress. It was dark and lonely, and the
twilight-loving bats began to flit about. At length the soldier
halted at a remote and ruined tower apparently intended to guard a
Moorish aqueduct. He struck the foundation with the butt-end of his
spear. A rumbling sound was heard, and the solid stones yawned
apart, leaving an opening as wide as a door.
"'Enter in the name of the Holy Trinity', said the soldier, 'and
fear nothing.' The student's heart quaked, but he made the sign of
the cross, muttered his Ave Maria, and followed his mysterious
guide into a deep vault cut out of the solid rock under the tower,
and covered with Arabic inscriptions. The soldier pointed to a
stone seat hewn along one side of the vault. 'Behold,' said he, 'my
couch for three hundred years.' The bewildered student tried to
force a joke. 'By the blessed St. Anthony,' said he, 'but you must
have slept soundly, considering the hardness of your couch.'
"'On the contrary, sleep has been a stranger to these eyes;
incessant watchfulness has been my doom. Listen to my lot. I was
one of the royal guards of Ferdinand and Isabella; but was taken
prisoner by the Moors in one of their sorties, and confined a
captive in this tower. When preparations were made to surrender the
fortress to the Christian sovereigns, I was prevailed upon by an
alfaqui, a Moorish priest, to aid him in secreting some of the
treasures of Boabdil in this vault. I was justly punished for my
fault. The alfaqui was an African necromancer, and by his infernal
arts cast a spell upon me--to guard his treasures. Something must
have happened to him, for he never returned, and here have I
remained ever since, buried alive. Years and years have rolled
away; earthquakes have shaken this hill; I have heard stone by
stone of the tower above tumbling to the ground, in the natural
operation of time; but the spell-bound walls of this vault set both
time and earthquakes at defiance.
"'Once every hundred years, on the festival of St. John, the
enchantment ceases to have thorough sway; I am permitted to go
forth and post myself upon the bridge of the Darro, where you met
me, waiting until some one shall arrive who may have power to break
this magic spell. I have hitherto mounted guard there in vain. I
walk as in a cloud, concealed from mortal sight. You are the first
to accost me for now three hundred years. I behold the reason. I
see on your finger the seal-ring of Solomon the Wise, which is
proof against all enchantment. With you it remains to deliver me
from this awful dungeon, or to leave me to keep guard here for
another hundred years.'
"The student listened to this tale in mute wonderment. He had heard
many tales of treasures shut up under strong enchantment in the
vaults of the Alhambra, but had treated them as fables. He now felt
the value of the seal-ring, which had, in a manner, been given to
him by St. Cyprian. Still, though armed by so potent a talisman, it
was an awful thing to find himself _tête-à-tête_ in such a place
with an enchanted soldier, who, according to the laws of nature,
ought to have been quietly in his grave for nearly three centuries.
"A personage of this kind, however, was quite out of the ordinary
run, and not to be trifled with, and he assured him he might rely
upon his friendship and good will to do everything in his power for
his deliverance.
"'I trust to a motive more powerful than friendship,' said the
soldier.
"He pointed to a ponderous iron coffer, secured by locks inscribed
with Arabic characters. 'That coffer,' said he, 'contains countless
treasure in gold and jewels and precious stones. Break the magic
spell by which I am enthralled, and one half of this treasure shall
be thine.'
"'But how am I to do it?'
"'The aid of a Christian priest and a Christian maid is necessary.
The priest to exorcise the powers of darkness; the damsel to touch
this chest with the seal of Solomon. This must be done at night.
But have a care. This is solemn work, and not to be effected by the
carnal-minded. The priest must be a _Cristiano viejo_, a model of
sanctity; and must mortify the flesh before he comes here, by a
rigorous fast of four-and-twenty hours: and as to the maiden, she
must be above reproach, and proof against temptation. Linger not in
finding such aid. In three days my furlough is at an end; if not
delivered before midnight of the third, I shall have to mount guard
for another century.'
"'Fear not,' said the student, 'I have in my eye the very priest
and damsel you describe; but how am I to regain admission to this
tower?'
"'The seal of Solomon will open the way for thee.'
"The student issued forth from the tower much more gayly than he
had entered. The wall closed behind him, and remained solid as
before.
"The next morning he repaired boldly to the mansion of the priest,
no longer a poor strolling student, thrumming his way with a
guitar; but an ambassador from the shadowy world, with enchanted
treasures to bestow. No particulars are told of his negotiation,
excepting that the zeal of the worthy priest was easily kindled at
the idea of rescuing an old soldier of the faith and a strong box
of King Chico from the very clutches of Satan; and then what alms
might be dispensed, what churches built, and how many poor
relatives enriched with the Moorish treasure!
"As to the immaculate handmaid, she was ready to lend her hand,
which was all that was required, to the pious work; and if a shy
glance now and then might be believed, the ambassador began to find
favor in her modest eyes.
"The greatest difficulty, however, was the fast to which the good
padre had to subject himself. Twice he attempted it, and twice the
flesh was too strong for the spirit. It was only on the third day
that he was enabled to withstand the temptations of the cupboard;
but it was still a question whether he would hold out until the
spell was broken.
"At a late hour of the night the party groped their way up the
ravine by the light of a lantern, and bearing a basket with
provisions for exorcising the demon of hunger so soon as the other
demons should be laid in the Red Sea.
"The seal of Solomon opened their way into the tower. They found
the soldier seated on the enchanted strong-box, awaiting their
arrival. The exorcism was performed in due style. The damsel
advanced and touched the locks of the coffer with the seal of
Solomon. The lid flew open; and such treasures of gold and jewels
and precious stones as flashed upon the eye!
"'Here's cut and come again!' cried the student, exultingly, as he
proceeded to cram his pockets.
"'Fairly and softly,' exclaimed the soldier. 'Let us get the coffer
out entire, and then divide.'
"They accordingly went to work with might and main; but it was a
difficult task; the chest was enormously heavy, and had been
imbedded there for centuries. While they were thus employed the
good dominie drew on one side and made a vigorous onslaught on the
basket, by way of exorcising the demon of hunger which was raging
in his entrails. In a little while a fat capon was devoured, and
washed down by a deep potation of Val de peñas; and, by way of
grace after meat, he gave a kind-hearted kiss to the pet-lamb who
waited on him. It was quietly done in a corner, but the tell-tale
walls babbled it forth as if in triumph. Never was chaste salute
more awful in its effects. At the sound the soldier gave a great
cry of despair; the coffer, which was half raised, fell back in its
place and was locked once more. Priest, student, and damsel found
themselves outside of the tower, the wall of which closed with a
thundering jar. Alas! the good padre had broken his fast too soon!
"When recovered from his surprise, the student would have reëntered
the tower, but learnt to his dismay that the damsel, in her fright,
had let fall the seal of Solomon; it remained within the vault.
"In a word, the cathedral bell tolled midnight; the spell was
renewed; the soldier was doomed to mount guard for another hundred
years, and there he and the treasure remain to this day--and all
because the kind-hearted padre kissed his handmaid. 'Ah, father!
father!' said the student, shaking his head ruefully, as they
returned down the ravine, 'I fear there was less of the saint than
the sinner in that kiss!'
* * * * *
"Thus ends the legend as far as it has been authenticated. There is
a tradition, however, that the student had brought off treasure
enough in his pocket to set him up in the world; that he prospered
in his affairs, that the worthy padre gave him the pet-lamb in
marriage, by way of amends for the blunder in the vault; that the
immaculate damsel proved a pattern for wives as she had been for
handmaids, and bore her husband a numerous progeny; that the first
was a wonder; it was born seven months after her marriage, and
though a seven-months' boy, was the sturdiest of the flock. The
rest were all born in the ordinary course of time.
"The story of the enchanted soldier remains one of the popular
traditions of Granada, though told in a variety of ways; the common
people affirm that he still mounts guard on mid-summer eve, beside
the gigantic stone pomegranate on the bridge of the Darro; but
remains invisible excepting to such lucky mortal as may possess the
seal of Solomon."
These passages from the most characteristic of Irving's books, do not by
any means exhaust his variety, but they afford a fair measure of his
purely literary skill, upon which his reputation must rest. To my
apprehension this "charm" in literature is as necessary to the
amelioration and enjoyment of human life as the more solid achievements
of scholarship. That Irving should find it in the prosaic and
materialistic conditions of the New World as well as in the
tradition-laden atmosphere of the Old, is evidence that he possessed
genius of a refined and subtle quality if not of the most robust order.
CHAPTER X.
LAST YEARS: THE CHARACTER OF HIS LITERATURE.
The last years of Irving's life, although full of activity and
enjoyment,--abated only by the malady which had so long tormented
him,--offer little new in the development of his character, and need not
much longer detain us. The calls of friendship and of honor were many,
his correspondence was large, he made many excursions to scenes that
were filled with pleasant memories, going even as far south as Virginia,
and he labored assiduously at the "Life of Washington,"--attracted
however now and then by some other tempting theme. But his delight was
in the domestic circle at Sunnyside. It was not possible that his
occasional melancholy vein should not be deepened by change and death
and the lengthening shade of old age. Yet I do not know the closing days
of any other author of note that were more cheerful serene, and happy
than his. Of our author, in these latter days, Mr. George William Curtis
put recently into his "Easy Chair" papers an artistically-touched little
portrait: "Irving was as quaint a figure," he says, "as the Diedrich
Knickerbocker in the preliminary advertisement of the 'History of New
York.' Thirty years ago he might have been seen on an autumnal afternoon
tripping with an elastic step along Broadway, with 'low-quartered' shoes
neatly tied, and a Talma cloak--a short garment that hung from the
shoulders like the cape of a coat. There was a chirping, cheery,
old-school air in his appearance which was undeniably Dutch, and most
harmonious with the associations of his writing. He seemed, indeed, to
have stepped out of his own books; and the cordial grace and humor of
his address, if he stopped for a passing chat, were delightfully
characteristic. He was then our most famous man of letters, but he was
simply free from all self-consciousness and assumption and dogmatism."
Congenial occupation was one secret of Irving's cheerfulness and
contentment, no doubt. And he was called away as soon as his task was
done, very soon after the last volume of the "Washington" issued from
the press. Yet he lived long enough to receive the hearty approval of it
from the literary men whose familiarity with the Revolutionary period
made them the best judges of its merits.
He had time also to revise his works. It is perhaps worthy of note that
for several years, while he was at the height of his popularity, his
books had very little sale. From 1842 to 1848 they were out of print,
with the exception of some stray copies of a cheap Philadelphia edition,
and a Paris collection (a volume of this, at my hand, is one of a series
entitled a "Collection of Ancient and Modern _British_ Authors"), they
were not to be found. The Philadelphia publishers did not think there
was sufficient demand to warrant a new edition. Mr. Irving and his
friends judged the market more wisely, and a young New York publisher
offered to assume the responsibility. This was Mr. George P. Putnam. The
event justified his sagacity and his liberal enterprise; from July,
1848, to November, 1859, the author received on his copyright over
eighty-eight thousand dollars. And it should be added that the relations
between author and publisher, both in prosperity and in times of
business disaster, reflect the highest credit upon both. If the like
relations always obtained we should not have to say: "May the Lord pity
the authors in this world, and the publishers in the next."
I have outlined the life of Washington Irving in vain, if we have not
already come to a tolerably clear conception of the character of the man
and of his books. If I were exactly to follow his literary method I
should do nothing more. The idiosyncrasies of the man are the strength
and weakness of his works. I do not know any other author whose writings
so perfectly reproduce his character, or whose character may be more
certainly measured by his writings. His character is perfectly
transparent: his predominant traits were humor and sentiment; his
temperament was gay with a dash of melancholy; his inner life and his
mental operations were the reverse of complex, and his literary method
is simple. He _felt_ his subject, and he expressed his conception not so
much by direct statement or description as by almost imperceptible
touches and shadings here and there, by a diffused tone and color, with
very little show of analysis. Perhaps it is a sufficient definition to
say that his method was the sympathetic. In the end the reader is put in
possession of the luminous and complete idea upon which the author has
been brooding, though he may not be able to say exactly how the
impression has been conveyed to him; and I doubt if the author could
have explained his sympathetic process. He certainly would have lacked
precision in any philosophical or metaphysical theme, and when, in his
letters, he touches upon politics there is a little vagueness of
definition that indicates want of mental grip in that direction. But in
the region of feeling his genius is sufficient to his purpose; either
when that purpose is a highly creative one, as in the character and
achievements of his Dutch heroes, or merely that of portraiture, as in
the "Columbus" and the "Washington." The analysis of a nature so simple
and a character so transparent as Irving's, who lived in the sunlight
and had no envelope of mystery, has not the fascination that attaches to
Hawthorne.
Although the direction of his work as a man of letters was largely
determined by his early surroundings,--that is, by his birth in a land
void of traditions, and into a society without much literary life, so
that his intellectual food was of necessity a foreign literature that
was at the moment becoming a little antiquated in the land of its birth,
and his warm imagination was forced to revert to the past for that
nourishment which his crude environment did not offer,--yet he was by
nature a retrospective man. His face was set towards the past, not
towards the future. He never caught the restlessness of this century,
nor the prophetic light that shone in the faces of Coleridge, Shelley,
and Keats; if he apprehended the stir of the new spirit he still, by
mental affiliation, belonged rather to the age of Addison than to that
of Macaulay. And his placid, retrospective, optimistic strain pleased a
public that were excited and harrowed by the mocking and lamenting of
Lord Byron, and, singularly enough, pleased even the great pessimist
himself.
His writings induce to reflection, to quiet musing, to tenderness for
tradition; they amuse, they entertain, they call a check to the
feverishness of modern life; but they are rarely stimulating or
suggestive. They are better adapted, it must be owned, to please the
many than the critical few, who demand more incisive treatment and a
deeper consideration of the problems of life. And it is very fortunate
that a writer who can reach the great public and entertain it can also
elevate and refine its tastes, set before it high ideas, instruct it
agreeably, and all this in a style that belongs to the best literature.
It is a safe model for young readers; and for young readers there is
very little in the overwhelming flood of to-day that is comparable to
Irving's books, and, especially, it seems to me, because they were not
written for children.
Irving's position in American literature, or in that of the English
tongue, will only be determined by the slow settling of opinion, which
no critic can foretell, and the operation of which no criticism seems
able to explain. I venture to believe, however, that the verdict will
not be in accord with much of the present prevalent criticism. The
service that he rendered to American letters no critic disputes; nor is
there any question of our national indebtedness to him for investing a
crude and new land with the enduring charms of romance and tradition. In
this respect, our obligation to him is that of Scotland to Scott and
Burns; and it is an obligation due only, in all history, to here and
there a fortunate creator to whose genius opportunity is kind. The
Knickerbocker Legend and the romance with which Irving has invested the
Hudson are a priceless legacy; and this would remain an imperishable
possession in popular tradition if the literature creating it were
destroyed. This sort of creation is unique in modern times. New York is
the Knickerbocker city; its whole social life remains colored by his
fiction; and the romantic background it owes to him in some measure
supplies to it what great age has given to European cities. This
creation is sufficient to secure for him an immortality, a length of
earthly remembrance that all the rest of his writings together might
not give.
Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the
idiosyncrasies, of his small genus. I mean that he regarded life not
from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic,
the metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the
literary point of view. He belongs to that small class of which Johnson
and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America has
added very few. The literary point of view is taken by few in any
generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the
pressure of all the complex interests of life, and it may even seem
trivial amid the tremendous energies applied to immediate affairs; but
it is the point of view that endures; if its creations do not mould
human life, like the Roman law, they remain to charm and civilize, like
the poems of Horace. You must not ask more of them than that. This
attitude toward life is defensible on the highest grounds. A man with
Irving's gifts has the right to take the position of an observer and
describer, and not to be called on for a more active participation in
affairs than he chooses to take. He is doing the world the highest
service of which he is capable, and the most enduring it can receive
from any man. It is not a question whether the work of the literary man
is higher than that of the reformer or the statesman; it is a distinct
work, and is justified by the result, even when the work is that of the
humorist only. We recognize this in the ease of the poet. Although
Goethe has been reproached for his lack of sympathy with the
liberalizing movement of his day (as if his novels were quieting social
influences), it is felt by this generation that the author of "Faust"
needs no apology that he did not spend his energies in the effervescing
politics of the German states. I mean, that while we may like or dislike
the man for his sympathy or want of sympathy, we concede to the author
the right of his attitude; if Goethe had not assumed freedom from moral
responsibility, I suppose that criticism of his aloofness would long ago
have ceased. Irving did not lack sympathy with humanity in the concrete;
it colored whatever he wrote. But he regarded the politics of his own
country, the revolutions in France, the long struggle in Spain, without
heat; and he held aloof from projects of agitation and reform, and
maintained the attitude of an observer, regarding the life about him
from the point of view of the literary artist, as he was justified in
doing.
Irving had the defects of his peculiar genius, and these have no doubt
helped to fix upon him the complimentary disparagement of "genial." He
was not aggressive; in his nature he was wholly unpartisan, and full of
lenient charity; and I suspect that his kindly regard of the world,
although returned with kindly liking, cost him something of that respect
for sturdiness and force which men feel for writers who flout them as
fools in the main. Like Scott, he belonged to the idealists, and not to
the realists, whom our generation affects. Both writers stimulate the
longing for something better. Their creed was short: "Love God and honor
the King." It is a very good one for a literary man, and might do for a
Christian. The supernatural was still a reality in the age in which they
wrote, Irving's faith in God and his love of humanity were very simple;
I do not suppose he was much disturbed by the deep problems that have
set us all adrift. In every age, whatever is astir, literature,
theology, all intellectual activity, takes one and the same drift, and
approximates in color. The bent of Irving's spirit was fixed in his
youth, and he escaped the desperate realism of this generation, which
has no outcome, and is likely to produce little that is noble.
I do not know how to account, on principles of culture which we
recognize, for our author's style. His education was exceedingly
defective, nor was his want of discipline supplied by subsequent
desultory application. He seems to have been born with a rare sense of
literary proportion and form; into this, as into a mould, were run his
apparently lazy and really acute observations of life. That he
thoroughly mastered such literature as he fancied there is abundant
evidence; that his style was influenced by the purest English models is
also apparent. But there remains a large margin for wonder how, with his
want of training, he could have elaborated a style which is
distinctively his own, and is as copious, felicitous in the choice of
words, flowing, spontaneous, flexible, engaging, clear, and as little
wearisome when read continuously in quantity as any in the English
tongue. This is saying a great deal, though it is not claiming for him
the compactness, nor the robust vigor, nor the depth of thought, of many
others masters in it. It is sometimes praised for its simplicity. It is
certainly lucid, but its simplicity is not that of Benjamin Franklin's
style; it is often ornate, not seldom somewhat diffuse, and always
exceedingly melodious. It is noticeable for its metaphorical felicity.
But it was not in the sympathetic nature of the author, to which I just
referred, to come sharply to the point. It is much to have merited the
eulogy of Campbell that he had "added clarity to the English tongue."
This elegance and finish of style (which seems to have been as natural
to the man as his amiable manner) is sometimes made his reproach, as if
it were his sole merit, and as if he had concealed under this charming
form a want of substance. In literature form is vital. But his case does
not rest upon that. As an illustration his "Life of Washington" may be
put in evidence. Probably this work lost something in incisiveness and
brilliancy by being postponed till the writer's old age. But whatever
this loss, it is impossible for any biography to be less pretentious in
style, or less ambitious in proclamation. The only pretension of matter
is in the early chapters, in which a more than doubtful genealogy is
elaborated, and in which it is thought necessary to Washington's dignity
to give a fictitious importance to his family and his childhood, and to
accept the southern estimate of the hut in which he was born as a
"mansion." In much of this false estimate Irving was doubtless misled by
the fables of Weems. But while he has given us a dignified portrait of
Washington, it is as far as possible removed from that of the smileless
prig which has begun to weary even the popular fancy. The man he paints
is flesh and blood, presented, I believe, with substantial faithfulness
to his character; with a recognition of the defects of his education and
the deliberation of his mental operations; with at least a hint of that
want of breadth of culture and knowledge of the past, the possession of
which characterized many of his great associates; and with no
concealment that he had a dower of passions and a temper which only
vigorous self-watchfulness kept under. But he portrays, with an
admiration not too highly colored, the magnificent patience, the courage
to bear misconstruction, the unfailing patriotism, the practical
sagacity, the level balance of judgment combined with the wisest
toleration, the dignity of mind, and the lofty moral nature which made
him the great man of his epoch. Irving's grasp of this character; his
lucid marshaling of the scattered, often wearisome and uninteresting
details of our dragging, unpicturesque Revolutionary War; his just
judgment of men; his even, almost judicial, moderation of tone; and his
admirable proportion of space to events, render the discussion of style
in reference to this work superfluous. Another writer might have made a
more brilliant performance: descriptions sparkling with antitheses,
characters projected into startling attitudes by the use of epithets; a
work more exciting and more piquant, that would have started a thousand
controversies, and engaged the attention by daring conjectures and
attempts to make a dramatic spectacle; a book interesting and notable,
but false in philosophy and untrue in fact.
When the "Sketch-Book" appeared, an English critic said it should have
been first published in England, for Irving was an English writer. The
idea has been more than once echoed here. The truth is that while Irving
was intensely American in feeling he was first of all a man of letters,
and in that capacity he was cosmopolitan; he certainly was not insular.
He had a rare accommodation of tone to his theme. Of England, whose
traditions kindled his susceptible fancy, he wrote as Englishmen would
like to write about it. In Spain he was saturated with the romantic
story of the people and the fascination of the clime; and he was so true
an interpreter of both as to earn from the Spaniards the title of "the
poet Irving." I chanced once, in an inn at Frascati, to take up "The
Tales of a Traveller," which I had not seen for many years. I expected
to revive the somewhat faded humor and fancy of the past generation.
But I found not only a sprightly humor and vivacity which are modern,
but a truth to Italian local color that is very rare in any writer
foreign to the soil. As to America, I do not know what can be more
characteristically American than the Knickerbocker, the Hudson River
tales, the sketches of life and adventure in the far West. But
underneath all this diversity there is one constant quality,--the flavor
of the author. Open by chance and read almost anywhere in his score of
books,--it may be the "Tour on the Prairies," the familiar dream of the
Alhambra, or the narratives of the brilliant exploits of New World
explorers; surrender yourself to the flowing current of his transparent
style, and you are conscious of a beguilement which is the crowning
excellence of all lighter literature, for which we have no word but
"charm."
The consensus of opinion about Irving in England and America for thirty
years was very remarkable. He had a universal popularity rarely enjoyed
by any writer. England returned him to America medalled by the king,
honored by the university which is chary of its favors, followed by the
applause of the whole English people. In English households, in
drawing-rooms of the metropolis, in political circles no less than among
the literary coteries, in the best reviews, and in the popular
newspapers the opinion of him was pretty much the same. And even in the
lapse of time and the change of literary fashion authors so unlike as
Byron and Dickens were equally warm in admiration of him. To the English
indorsement America added her own enthusiasm, which was as universal.
His readers were the million, and all his readers were admirers. Even
American statesmen, who feed their minds on food we know not of, read
Irving. It is true that the uncritical opinion of New York was never
exactly re-echoed in the cool recesses of Boston culture; but the
magnates of the "North American Review" gave him their meed of cordial
praise. The country at large put him on a pinnacle. If you attempt to
account for the position he occupied by his character, which won the
love of all men, it must be remembered that the quality which won this,
whatever its value, pervades his books also.
And yet it must be said that the total impression left upon the mind by
the man and his works is not that of the greatest intellectual force. I
have no doubt that this was the impression he made upon his ablest
contemporaries. And this fact, when I consider the effect the man
produced, makes the study of him all the more interesting. As an
intellectual personality he makes no such impression, for instance, as
Carlyle, or a dozen other writers now living who could be named. The
incisive critical faculty was almost entirely wanting in him. He had
neither the power nor the disposition to cut his way transversely across
popular opinion and prejudice that Ruskin has, nor to draw around him
disciples equally well pleased to see him fiercely demolish to-day what
they had delighted to see him set up yesterday as eternal. He evoked
neither violent partisanship nor violent opposition. He was an extremely
sensitive man, and if he had been capable of creating a conflict he
would only have been miserable in it. The play of his mind depended upon
the sunshine of approval. And all this shows a certain want of
intellectual virility.
A recent anonymous writer has said that most of the writing of our day
is characterized by an intellectual strain. I have no doubt that this
will appear to be the case to the next generation. It is a strain to say
something new even at the risk of paradox, or to say something in a new
way at the risk of obscurity. From this Irving was entirely free. There
is no visible straining to attract attention. His mood is calm and
unexaggerated. Even in some of his pathos, which is open to the
suspicion of being "literary," there is no literary exaggeration. He
seems always writing from an internal calm, which is the necessary
condition of his production. If he wins at all by his style, by his
humor, by his portraiture of scenes or of character, it is by a gentle
force, like that of the sun in spring. There are many men now living, or
recently dead, intellectual prodigies, who have stimulated thought,
upset opinions, created mental eras, to whom Irving stands hardly in as
fair a relation as Goldsmith to Johnson. What verdict the next
generation will put upon their achievements I do not know; but it is
safe to say that their position and that of Irving as well will depend
largely upon the affirmation or the reversal of their views of life and
their judgments of character. I think the calm work of Irving will stand
when much of the more startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual
achievement of this age has passed away.
And this leads me to speak of Irving's moral quality, which I cannot
bring myself to exclude from a literary estimate, even in the face of
the current gospel of art for art's sake. There is something that made
Scott and Irving personally loved by the millions of their readers, who
had only the dimmest of ideas of their personality. This was some
quality perceived in what they wrote. Each one can define it for
himself; there it is, and I do not see why it is not as integral a part
of the authors--an element in the estimate of their future position--as
what we term their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, or their
art. However you rate it, you cannot account for Irving's influence in
the world without it. In his tender tribute to Irving, the great-hearted
Thackeray, who saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere literary art
in the sum total of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to
Lockhart,--"Be a good man, my dear." We know well enough that the great
author of "The Newcomes" and the great author of "The Heart of
Midlothian" recognized the abiding value in literature of integrity,
sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences; and Irving's
literature, walk round it and measure it by whatever critical
instruments you will, is a beneficent literature. The author loved good
women and little children and a pure life; he had faith in his
fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any subservience
to the highest; he retained a belief in the possibility of chivalrous
actions, and did not care to envelop them in a cynical suspicion; he was
an author still capable of an enthusiasm.* His books are wholesome, full
of sweetness and charm, of humor without any sting, of amusement without
any stain; and their more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry
nor pretension.
*Transcriber's note: Word printed as "enthusiam" in original text.
Washington Irving died on the 28th of November, 1859, at the close of a
lovely day of that Indian Summer which is nowhere more full of a
melancholy charm than on the banks of the lower Hudson, and which was in
perfect accord with the ripe and peaceful close of his life. He was
buried on a little elevation overlooking Sleepy Hollow and the river he
loved, amidst the scenes which his magic pen has made classic and his
sepulchre hallows.
* * * * *
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