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Literary and Social Essays

G >> George William Curtis >> Literary and Social Essays




The merry, exuberant, satirical Diedrich Knickerbocker was transformed
into the genial, urbane, and tender-hearted Geoffrey Crayon. Our
fathers and grandfathers knew him well. They had been bred upon
Addison and Goldsmith, the essayists and the poets of the eighteenth
century, and in Geoffrey Crayon they recognized and welcomed another
member of that delightful literary society. He was all the more
welcome that he was an American--one of themselves. The bland and
courteous Geoffrey, indeed, had few rivals among his countrymen.
In our little American world of letters at that time he came and
conquered. Bryant's "Thanatopsis", had been published only two years
before; Halleck's and Drake's lively but strictly local "Croakers"
were still appearing, and Edward Everett had just hailed Percival's
first volume as authorizing great expectations.

But prophecy is always dangerous. The year before, Sydney Smith had
said, in the _Edinburgh Review_, "Literature the Americans have
none--no native literature we mean. It is all imported. They had a
Franklin, indeed, and may afford to live half a century on his
fame. There is, or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his
baptismal name was Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia
by Jefferson, and an epic poem by Mr. Joel Barlow, and some pieces of
pleasantry by Mr. Irving. But why should Americans write books, when
a six weeks' passage brings them, in their own tongue, _our_ sense,
science, and genius, on bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats,
grist-mills are their natural objects for centuries to come. Then,
when they have got to the Pacific Ocean, epic poems, plays, pleasures
of memory, and all the elegant gratifications of an ancient people who
have tamed the wild earth, and sat down to amuse themselves. This is
the natural march of human affairs." As the sarcastic Yorkshire canon,
sitting on the Edinburgh Olympus, wiped his pen, the _Sketch Book_
was published. The good canon was right as to our small literary
product, but even an _Edinburgh Review_ could not wisely play the
prophet.

This Mr. Everett also discovered, for his "great expectations" of
Percival were not fulfilled. A desponding student of our poetry
recently sighs that Percival is a forgotten poet, and then, seizing a
promiscuous assortment of names, exclaims that Charles Sprague,
William Wirt, Washington Irving, and Jack Downing may be referred to
as forgotten authors. But this is the luxury of woe. Why should not
Percival be a forgotten poet? That is to say, what is there in the
verse of Percival that should command interest and attention to-day?
He was a remarkably accomplished man and a most excellent gentleman,
and his name is very familiar in the reading-books of the time when
grandfathers of to-day were going to school. But he was a noted poet
not because he took rank with his contemporaries--with Byron and Scott
and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth--but because there
were very few Americans who wrote verses, and our fathers patriotically
stood by them.

Yet because the note of a singer of another day is not heard by us, it
does not follow that he did not touch the heart of his time. Grenville
Mellen is a forgotten poet also, and Rufus Dawes and John Neal and
James G. Eastburn. If the gentle reader will turn to the pages of
Kettell, or any early American anthology, he will seem to himself to
be walking among tombs. Upon each page might be suitably inscribed,
"Sacred to the memory" of almost every one of the singers. But can we
say with honest reproach, "forgotten poets"? The loiterer in the wood
hears the song of the wood-thrush, but is the hermit-bird wronged, or
is his song less sweet, because it is not echoed round the world? Is
Fame to be held responsible for not retaining the name of every
minstrel who loiters by and touches his harp lightly, and sings a
sweet song as he passes on? Is it a hard fate to give pleasure to
those who listen because those out of hearing do not applaud?

Many an author may have a tone and a touch which please the ear and
taste of his own day, and which, as characteristic of a time, may be
only curious to a later taste, like the costumes and dances of our
great-grandmothers. But young America, sauntering at the club and at
Newport, would not willingly wear the boots of Beau Nash, nor even the
cloak of Beau Brummel. The law which provides that nothing shall be
lost is equally observable in the realm of literary fame. Is anything
of literature lost that deserves longer remembrance? or, more properly,
can it be lost? A fair answer to the question can be found in the reply
to another, whether delving in Kettell, or in any other anthology,
reveals treasures dropped by Fame as precious as those she carries.

There are two ways in which authors survive: one by the constant
reading of his works, the other by his name. Is Milton a forgotten
author? But how much is he read, compared with the contemporary
singers? Is Plato forgotten? Yet how many know him except by name?
Irving thus far holds both. Time, like a thrifty husbandman, winnows
its wheat, blowing away much chaff, but the golden grain remains. This
is true not only of the whole multitude of authors, but of the works
of each author. How many of them really survive in the anthology only?
_Astoria_ and _Captain Bonneville_ and _Mahomet_ and other books of
Irving will disappear; but _Knickerbocker_ and _Rip Van Winkle_ still
buffet the relentless wave of oblivion, and their buoyancy is
undiminished.

As for Sprague--a mild, genial, charming gentleman, who carried his
simple freshness of nature and of manner to the end, and about whose
venerable head in State Street always shone the faint halo of early
poetic renown--his literary talent was essentially for a day, not for
all time. But what then? On Christmas Eve we hear the passing music in
the street that supplies for us the song of the waits. Distant and
melodious, it pensively recalls the days and the faces and the voices
that are no more. But the singers are not the same waits that we heard
long ago; still less are they those that the youth of a century ago
heard with the same musing melancholy. But the substance of the song,
and the emotion which it awakens, and the tender pathos of association
--these are all the same. Sprague was a wait of yesterday, of last year,
of fifty years ago. Others sing in the street the song that he sang,
and, singing, they pass on, and the sweet strain grows fainter, softer,
and fainter and fainter, and the echoes answer, "Dying, dying, dying,"
and it is gone.

See how tenderly Mr. Stedman speaks of the troubadours who are singing
for us now, whose names are familiar, who trill and twitter in the
magazines, and in tasteful and delicate volumes, which seem to tempt
the stream of time to suffer such light and graceful barks to slip
along unnoted to future ages. But the kindly critic's tone forecasts
the fate of the sparkling ventures.

Moore tells us of the Indian maids upon the banks of the Ganges who
light a tiny taper, and, on a frail little chip, set it afloat upon
the river. It twinkles and dwindles, and flashes and expires. Mr.
Stedman watches the minor poets trimming their tapers and carefully
launching their chips upon the brimming river. "Pleasant journey," he
cries cheerily from the shore, as if he were speaking to hearty
Captain Cook going up the side of his great ship, and shaking out his
mighty canvas to circumnavigate the globe. "Pleasant journey," cries
the cheery critic; but there is a wistful something in his tone that
betrays a consciousness of the swift extinction of the pretty perfumed
flickering flame.

So scant, indeed, was the blossom of our literature when the _Sketch
Book_ was published, that even twenty years later, when Emerson
described the college Commencement Day as the only tribute of a
country too busy to give to letters any more, Geoffrey Crayon, with
the exception of Cooper, had really no American competitors. Long
afterwards I met Mr. Irving one morning at the office of Mr. Putnam,
his publisher, and in his cordial way, with a twinkle in his eye, and
in his pleasant husky voice, he said, "You young literary fellows
to-day have a harder time than we old fellows had. You trip over each
other's heels; there are so many of you. We had it all our own way.
But the account is square, for you can make as much by a lecture as we
made by a book." Then, laughing slyly, he added, "A pretty figure I
should make lecturing in this voice." Indeed, his modesty forbade him
to risk that voice in public addresses.

Irving, I think, made but one speech. It was at the dinner given
to him upon his return from Europe in 1832, after his absence of
seventeen years. Like other distinguished Americans who have felt
the fascination of the old home of their ancestors, and who have not
thought that a narrow heart and a barbaric disdain of everything
foreign attested the truest patriotism, he was suspected of some
alienation from his country. His speech was full of emotion, and his
protestation of love for his native land was received with boundless
acclamation. But he could not overcome his aversion to speech-making.
When Dickens came, and the great dinner was given to him in New York,
Irving was predestined to preside. Nobody else could be even
mentioned. He was himself conscious of it, and was filled with
melancholy forebodings. Professor Felton, of Harvard, compared
Irving's haunting terror and dismay at the prospect of this speech to
that of Mr. Pickwick at the prospect of leading that dreadful horse
all day.

Poor Irving went about muttering, "I shall certainly break down. I
know I shall break down." At last the day, the hour, and the very
moment itself arrived, and he rose to propose the health of Dickens.
He began pleasantly and smoothly in two or three sentences, then
hesitated, stammered, smiled, and stopped; tried in vain to begin
again, then gracefully gave it up, announced the toast--"Charles
Dickens, the guest of the nation"--then sank into his chair amid
immense applause, whispering to his neighbor, "There, I told you I
should break down, and I've done it."

When Thackeray came, Irving consented to preside at a dinner if
speeches were absolutely forbidden. The condition was faithfully
observed, but it was the most extraordinary instance of American
self-command on record. Whenever two or three Americans are gathered
together, somebody must make a speech; and no wonder, because somebody
always speaks so well. The custom is now so confirmed that it is
foolish and useless to oppose it.

I remember a few years since that a dinner was given to a famous
American artist long resident abroad, and, as the condition of the
attendance of a distinguished guest whose presence was greatly
desired, the same agreement was made that Irving required at the
Thackeray dinner. It was a company of exceedingly clever and brilliant
men, but the gayety of the feast was extinguished by the general
consciousness that the situation was abnormal. It was a fruit without
flavor, a flower without fragrance, a symphony without melody, a
dinner without speeches. But the dinner of which I speak, when the
condition of Irving's presence was that there should be no speeches,
was the great exception. It was the only dinner of the kind that I
have ever known. But Irving's cheery anecdote and gayety, the songs
and banter of the company, the happy chat and sparkling wit, took the
place of eloquence, and I recall no dinner more delightful.

However scant was our literature when the _Sketch Book_ appeared, it
is a mistake to suppose that Irving owes his success to English
admiration. That was, undoubtedly, very agreeable to him and to his
countrymen. But it is well to correct a misapprehension which is still
cherished. Many years ago an English critic said that Irving was much
more relished and admired in England than in his own country, and
added: "It is only recently critics on the lookout for a literature
have elevated him to his proper and almost more than his proper place.
This docility to English guidance in the case of their best, or almost
their best, prose writer, may perhaps be followed by a similar
docility in the case of their best, or almost their best, poet, Poe,
whom also England had preceded the United States in recognizing." This
comical patron is all the more amusing from his comparative estimate
of Poe.

If it were true that Irving's countrymen had not recognized and
honored him from the first, it might be suspected that it was because
they were descendants of the people who showed little contemporaneous
appreciation of Shakespeare. But it is certainly creditable to the
literary England which was busy idolizing Scott and Byron, that it
recognized also the charming genius of Irving, and that Leslie, the
painter, could truly write of him, "Geoffrey Crayon is the most
fashionable fellow of the day."

But while the English appreciation of Irving is very creditable to
England, English conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was
that appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the
time when Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted
there was apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and
the professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor
Lounsbury says in his admirable _Life of Cooper_, undoubtedly greatly
affected by English opinion. But there was an American reading public
independent of the few literary periodicals, as was shown when
Cooper's _Spy_ was published at the end of 1821, the year in which
Bryant's first volume of poems and Dana's _Idle Man_ appeared. Cooper
had published his _Precaution_ in 1819, a book which Professor
Lounsbury is one of the very few men who are known to have read. He
was an unknown author. But the _Spy_ was instantly successful. Some of
the timid English journals awaited the English opinion, for Murray had
declined, upon Gifford's advice, to publish the book. But a publisher
was found, and England and Europe followed America in their approval.
Cooper always said, and truly, that it was to his countrymen alone
that he owed his first success, and his biographer concedes that the
success of the _Spy_ was determined before the opinion of Europe was
known.

Nearly three years before, in May, 1819, the first number of Irving's
_Sketch Book_ was published. He sent the manuscript to his brother, who
had regretted Irving's refusal of a government place in the Navy
Board, and to whom he wrote, "My talents are merely literary, and all
my habits of thinking, reading, etc., have been in a different
direction from that required for the active politician.... In fact, I
consider myself at present as making a literary experiment, in the
course of which I only care to be kept in bread and cheese. Should it
not succeed--should my writings not acquire critical applause--I am
content to throw up the pen, and that to any commonplace employment.
But if they should succeed, it would repay me for a world of care and
privation to be placed among the established authors of my country,
and to win the affection of my countrymen."

The first number of the _Sketch Book_ was published simultaneously in
New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its success was
immediate. In September, 1819, Irving wrote: "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 quite overwhelmed
me ... I feel almost appalled by such success." The echo of the
acclamation reached England. Murray at first declined to publish it,
as he had at first declined Cooper's _Spy_. But when England
ascertained that the American judgment was correct, and that it was a
popular work, Murray was willing to publish it.

The delightful genius which his country had recognized with joy it
never ceased proudly and tenderly to honor. When, in 1832, he returned
to his native land, as his latest biographer, Mr. Warner, records,
"America greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous
outburst of love and admiration." It was in his own country that he
had published his works. It was his own countrymen whose applause
apprised England of the charm of the new author; and it is a humorous
mentor who now teaches us that it was our happy docility to English
guidance which enabled us to recognize and honor him.

Was it docility to the same beneficent guidance which enabled us to
perceive the genius of Carlyle, whose works we first collected, and
taught England to read and admire? Did it enable us, also, to inform
England that in Robert Browning she had another poet? Was it the
same docility which enabled us to reveal to England one of her most
philosophic observers in Herbert Spencer, and to offer to Darwin his
most appreciative correspondents and interpreters in Chauncey Wright,
John Fiske, and Professors Gray and Wyman? There are many offences to
be scored against us, but failure to know our own literary genius is
not one of them.

Indeed, there is not one great literary fame in America that was not
first recognized here. Not to one of them has docility to English
literary opinion conducted us, as is often believed. Bryant and Cooper
and Irving, Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, Emerson and Channing,
Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes were authors whom
we were content to admire and love without knowing or asking whether
England had heard of them, or what she thought of them. The
"greatness" of Poe England may have preceded us in recognizing. That
is an assertion which we are not disposed to dispute. But Walter Scott
was not more immediately popular and beloved in England than was
Washington Irving in America; and American guidance led England to
Scott quite as much as English guidance drew America to Irving.

The first number of the _Sketch Book_ contained the tale of _Rip Van
Winkle_, one of the most charming and suggestive of legends, whose
hero is an exceedingly pathetic creation. It is, indeed, a mere
sketch, a hint, a suggestion; but the imagination readily completes
it. It is the more remarkable and interesting because, although the
first American literary creation, it is not in the least
characteristic of American life, but, on the contrary, is a quiet and
delicate satire upon it. The kindly vagabond asserts the charm of
loitering idleness in the sweet leisure of woods and fields against
the characteristic American excitement of the overflowing crowd and
crushing competition of the city, its tremendous energy and incessant
devotion to money-getting.

It is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or to justify the morality of
his example. It is the imagination that interprets him; and how
soothing to those who give their lives to the furious accumulation of
the means of living to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or
finding nuts with the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset!
Later figures of our literature allure us--Hester Prynne, wrapped in
her cloak of Nersus, the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline,
Uncle Tom, and Topsy--but the charm of this figure is unfading. The
new writers introduce us to their worlds, and with pleasure we make
the acquaintance of new friends. The new standards of another literary
spirit are raised, a fresh literary impulse surrounds us; but it
is not thunder that we hear in the Kaatskills on a still summer
afternoon it is the distant game of Hendrick Hudson and his men; and
on the shore of our river, rattling and roaring with the frenzied
haste and endless activity of prosperous industry, still Rip Van
Winkle lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of the imagination, the
constant and unconscious satirist of American life.

He seems to me peculiarly congenial with the temperament of Irving.
He, too, was essentially a loiterer. He had the same freshness of
sympathy, the same gentleness of nature, the same taste for leisure
and repose. His genius was reminiscent, and, as with all humorists,
its climate was that of April. The sun and the shower chased each
other. Irving's intellectual habit was emotional rather than
thoughtful. In politics and public affairs he took no part, although
office was often urged upon him, as when the friends of General
Jackson wished him to go as representative to Congress, or President
Van Buren offered him the secretaryship of the navy, or Tammany Hall,
in New York, unanimously and vociferously nominated him for mayor, an
incident in the later annals of the city which transcends the most
humorous touch in _Knickerbocker's History_. He was appointed
secretary of legation in England in 1829, and in 1842, when Daniel
Webster was secretary of state, minister to Spain.

But what we call practical politics was always distasteful to him. The
spirit which I once heard laugh at a young man new in politics because
he treated "the boys" with his own good cigars instead of buying bad
ones at the saloon--the spirit which I once heard assure a man of
public ability and fitness that he could never reach political office
unless he pushed himself, and paid agents to buy votes, because no man
could expect an office to be handed to him on a gold plate--the spirit
which, to my knowledge, displayed a handful of bank-notes in the
anteroom of a legislature, and exclaimed, "That's what makes the
laws!"--this was a spirit which, like other honorable men and
patriotic Americans, Irving despised.

He was a gentleman of manly feeling and of moral refinement, who had
had glimpses of what is called "the inside" of politics; and, as he
believed these qualities would make participation in politics
uncomfortable, he abstained. To those of us who are wiser than he, who
know that simple honesty and public spirit and self-respect and
contempt of sneaking and fawning and bribery and crawling are the
conditions of political preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this,
must naturally seem to be a queer, wrong-headed, and rather
super-celestial American, who had lived too much in the heated
atmosphere of European aristocracies and altogether too little in the
pure and bracing air of American ward politics and caucuses and
conventions. To use an old New York phrase, Irving preferred to stroll
and fish and chat with Rip Van Winkle rather than to "run wid der
machine".

The _Sketch Book_ made Irving famous, and with its predecessor,
_Knickerbocker_, and its successor, _Bracebridge Hall_, disclosed the
essential quality of his genius. But all these books performed another
and greater service than that of winning the world to read an American
book: this was the restoration of a kindlier feeling between the two
countries which, by all ties, should be the two most friendly
countries on the globe. The books were written when our old bitterness
of feeling against England had been renewed by the later war. In the
thirty years since the Revolution ended we had patriotically fostered
the quarrel with John Bull. Our domestic politics had turned largely
upon that feeling, and the game of French and English was played
almost as fiercely upon our side of the ocean as upon their own.

The great epoch of our extraordinary material development and
prosperity had not opened, and, even had John Bull been friendlier
than he was, it would have been the very flattery of falsehood had he
complimented our literature, our science, our art. Sydney Smith's
question, "Who reads an American book?" was contemptuous and
exasperating. But here was an American who wrote books which John Bull
was delighted to read, and was compelled to confess that they
depicted-the most characteristic and attractive aspects of his own
life with more delicate grace than that of any living Englishman.

It was Irving who recalled the old English Christmas. It was his
cordial and picturesque description of the great holiday of
Christendom which preceded and stimulated Dickens's _Christmas
Carols_ and Thackeray's _Holiday Tales_. It was the genial spirit
of Christmas, native to his gentle heart and his happy temperament,
which made Irving, as Thackeray called him, a peacemaker between the
mother-country and her proud and sensitive offspring of the West. He
showed John Bull that England is ours as well as his.

"Old fellow," he said, "you cannot help yourself. It is the same blood
that flows in our veins, the same language that we speak, the same
traditions that we cherish. If you love liberty, so do we; if you will
see fair play, so will we. It is natural to you, so it is to us. We
cannot escape our blood. Shakespeare is not your poet more than ours.
If your ancestors danced round the Maypole, so did our ancestors in
your ancestors' shoes. If Old England cherished Christmas and New
England did not, Bradford and Endicott and Cotton were Englishmen, not
Americans. If old English life and customs and traditions are dear to
you, listen to my story, and judge whether they are less dear to us."
Then, with a merry smile, the young stranger holds out his hand to
John Bull, and exclaims, "Behold, here is my arm! I bare it before
your eyes, and here it is--it is the strawberry-mark; come to my
bosom, I am your long-lost brother."

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