Chapter IV: Early Work

_KNICKERBOCKER’S HISTORY_, _SKETCH BOOK_, _BRACEBRIDGE HALL_, _TALES OF A TRAVELLER_

The dignified appearance of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s learned work, the quiet simplicity of the principal title, and the sober dedication gave no hint to the serious-minded that they were buying one of the most extraordinary books of humor in the English language. The deception could not last long, but it is to be hoped that on the day of publication some honest seeker after knowledge took a copy home with the intent to profit at once by its stores of erudition.

On a basis of historical truth Irving reared a delightfully grotesque historical edifice. The method is analogous to that children employ when they put a candle on the floor that they may laugh at the odd shadows of themselves cast on wall and ceiling. The figures are monstrous, distorted, yet always resembling. Nothing could be at once more lifelike and more unreal than Irving’s account of New Amsterdam and its people under the three Dutch governors.

Here is a world of amusement to be had for the asking. One reader will enjoy the ironical philosophy, another the sly thrusts at current politics, a third the boisterous fun of certain episodes, such as the fight between stout Risingh and Peter Stuyvesant, the hint of which may have been caught from Fielding’s account of how Molly Seagrim valorously put her enemies to flight. But the book will always be most cherished for its quaint pictures of snug and drowsy comfort, for its world of broad-bottomed burghers, amphibious housewives, and demure Dutch damsels wooed by inarticulate lovers smoking long pipes, and for the rich Indian summer atmosphere with which the poet-humorist invested the scenes of a not wholly idyllic past.

_The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon_ is in one respect well named; it has the heterogeneous character that we associate with an artist’s portfolio. Notes of travel, stories, meditations, and portraits are thrown together in pleasant disorder. A paper on ‘Roscoe’ is followed by the sketch entitled ‘The Wife,’ and the history of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is succeeded by an essay on the attitude of English writers towards America. In another sense the volume is not a mere sketch-book, for each sketch is a highly finished picture. Here is often a self-consciousness radically unlike the abandon of the _History of New York_. At times Irving falls quite into the ‘Keepsake’ manner. A faint aroma as of withered rose leaves steals from the pages, a languid atmosphere of sweet melancholy dear to the early Nineteenth Century.

Other pages are breezy enough. The five chapters on Christmas at Bracebridge Hall, the essay on ‘Little Britain,’ on the ‘Mutability of Literature,’ and that on ‘John Bull’ are emphatically not in the ‘Keepsake’ vein. Of themselves they would have sufficed to redeem _The Sketch Book_ from the worst charge that can be brought against a piece of literature,--the charge of being merely fashionable. But the extraordinary vitality which this book has enjoyed for eighty-five years it owes in the main to ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’ Written in small form, embodying simple incidents, saturated with humor, classic in their conciseness of style, these stories are faultless examples of Irving’s art.

Irving dearly loved a lovable vagabond, and Rip is his ideal. The story is told in a succession of pictures. The reader visualizes scenery, character, incident, the purple mountains, the village nestling at their feet, the ne’er-do-weel whom children love, the termagant wife, the junto before the inn door, the journey into the mountains, the strange little beings at their solemn game, the draught of the fatal liquor, the sleep, the awakening, the return home, the bewilderment, the recognition,--do we not know it by heart? Have we not read the narrative a hundred times, trying in vain to penetrate the secret of its perfection? Something of the logic of poetry went into the creation of this idyl. We are left with the feeling that Irving himself could not have changed a word for the better.

‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is etched with a deeper stroke, is broader, more farcical. There is no pathos, but downright fun and frolic from the first line to the last. The audacious exaggeration of every feature in the portrait of Ichabod Crane is inimitably clever. The schoolmaster gets no pity and needs none. And the reader is justified in his unsympathetic attitude when later he learns that Ichabod, instead of having been carried off by the headless Hessian, merely changed his quarters, and when last heard of had studied law, written for the newspapers, and gone into politics.

In _Bracebridge Hall_ Geoffrey Crayon returns to the English country house where he had spent a Christmas, to enjoy at leisure old manners, old customs, old-world ideas and people. Never were simpler materials used in the making of a book; never was a more entertaining book compounded of such simple materials. The incidents are of the most quiet sort, a walk, a dinner, a visit to a neighboring grange or to a camp of gypsies, a reading in the library or the telling of a story after dinner. The philosophy is naïve, but the humor is exquisite and unflagging.

The reader meets his old friends, the Squire, Master Simon, old Christy, and the Oxonian. New characters are introduced, Lady Lillycraft and General Harbottle, Ready-money Jack, Slingsby the schoolmaster, and the Radical who reads Cobbett, and goes armed with pamphlets and arguments. Among them all none is more attractive than the Squire. With his scorn of commercialism, his love of ancient customs, his good-humored tolerance of gypsies and poachers, with his body of maxims from Peacham and other old writers, and his amusing contempt for Lord Chesterfield--these and other delightful traits make Mr. Bracebridge one of the most ingratiating characters in fiction.

_Bracebridge Hall_ contains interpolated stories, the ‘Stout Gentleman,’ the ‘Student of Salamanca,’ and the finely finished tale of ‘Annette Delabarre.’ The papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker are not yet exhausted; having furnished Rip and Ichabod to _The Sketch Book_ they now contribute to _Bracebridge Hall_ the story of ‘Dolph Heyliger.’

The _Tales of a Traveller_, a medley of episodes and sketches, is divided into four parts. In the first part the Nervous Gentleman of Bracebridge Hall continues his narrations. These adventures, supposed to have been told at a hunt dinner, or at breakfast the following morning, are intertwined, Arabian Nights fashion, story within story. They are grotesque (the ‘Bold Dragoon,’ with the richly humorous account of the dance of the furniture), or weird and ghastly (the ‘German Student’), or romantic (the ‘Young Italian’).

The second part, ‘Buckthorne and his Friends,’ displays the seamy side of English dramatic and literary life. Modern realism had not yet been invented, and it is easy to laugh over the sorrows of Flimsy, who, in his coat of Lord Townley cut and dingy-white stockinet pantaloons, bears a closer relation to Mr. Vincent Crummles than to any one of the characters of _A Mummer’s Wife_.

Part third, the ‘Italian Banditti,’ is in a style which no longer interests, though many worse written narratives do. But in the last part, ‘The Money-Diggers,’ Irving comes back to his own. He is again wandering along the shores of the pleasant island of Mannahatta, fishing at Hellegat, lying under the trees at Corlear Hook while a Cape Cod whaler tells the story of ‘The Devil and Tom Walker.’ Ramm Rapelye fills his chair at the club and smokes and grunts, ever maintaining a mastiff-like gravity. Once more we see the little old city which had not entirely lost its picturesque Dutch features. Here stands Wolfert Webber’s house, with its gable end of yellow brick turned toward the street. ‘The gigantic sunflowers loll their broad jolly faces over the fences, seeming to ogle most affectionately the passers-by.’ Dirk Waldron, ‘the son of four fathers,’ sits in Webber’s kitchen, feasting his eyes on the opulent charms of Amy. He says nothing, but at intervals fills the old cabbage-grower’s pipe, strokes the tortoise-shell cat, or replenishes the teapot from the bright copper kettle singing before the fire. ‘All these quiet little offices may seem of trifling import; but when true love is translated into Low Dutch, it is in this way it eloquently expresses itself.’

Had Irving’s reputation depended on the four books just now characterized, it would have been a great reputation and the note of originality precisely what we now find it. But there was need of work in other fields to show the catholicity of his interests and the range of his powers.