Chapter VI: Part 6

This was the literary situation when Holmes was preluding in the magazine. The acknowledged poets in Boston were Dana, Sprague, and Pierpont. Are these names familiar to the readers of this essay? How much of their poetry can those readers repeat? No one knows more surely than he who writes of a living author how hard it is to forecast fame, and how dangerous is prophecy. When Edward Everett saluted Percival's early volume as the harbinger of literary triumphs, and Emerson greeted Walt Whitman at "the opening of a great career", they generalized a strong personal impression. They identified their own preference with the public taste. On the other hand, Hawthorne says truly of himself that he was long the most obscure man of letters in America. Yet he had already published the _Twice-told Tales_ and the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, the two series of stories in which the character and quality of his genius are fully disclosed. But although Longfellow hailed the publication of the first collection as the rising of a new star, the tone of his comment is not that of the discoverer of a planet shining for all, but of an individual poetic pleasure. The prescience of fame is very infrequent. The village gazes in wonder at the return of the famous man who was born on the farm under the hill, and whose latent greatness nobody suspected; while the youth who printed verses in the corner of the county paper, and drew the fascinated glances of palpitating maidens in the meetinghouse, and seemed to the farmers to have associated himself at once with Shakespeare and Tupper and the great literary or "littery folks", never emerges from the poet's department in the paper in which unconsciously and forever he has been cornered. It would be a grim Puritan jest if that department had been named from the corner of the famous dead in Westminster Abbey.

If the Boston of sixty years ago had ventured to prophesy for itself literary renown, it is easy to see upon what reputations of the time it would have rested its claims. But if the most familiar names of that time are familiar no longer, if Kettell and poems from the _United States Gazette_ seem to be cemeteries of departed reputations, the fate of the singers need not be deplored as if Fame had forgotten them. Fame never knew them. Fame does not retain the name of every minstrel who passes singing. But to say that Fame does not know them is not dispraise. They sang for the hearers of their day, as the players played. Is it nothing to please those who listen, because those who are out of hearing do not stop and applaud? If we recall the names most eminent in our literature, whether they were destined for a longer or shorter date, we shall see that they are undeniably illustrations of the survival of the fittest. Turning over the noble volumes of Stedman and Miss Hutchinson, in which, as on a vast plain, the whole line of American literature is drawn up for inspection and review, and marches past like the ghostly midnight columns of Napoleon's grand army, we cannot quarrel with the verdict of time, nor feel that injustice has been done to Thamis or to Cawdor. There are singers of a day, but not less singers because they are of a day. The insect that flashes in the sunbeam does not survive like the elephant. The splendor of the most gorgeous butterfly does not endure with the faint hue of the hills that gives Athens its Pindaric name. And there are singers who do not sing. What says Holmes, with eager sympathy and pity, in one of his most familiar and most beautiful lyrics?--

"We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet waiting singers slumber,
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy fame is proud to win them;
Alas, for those that never sing,
And die with all their music in them!"

But as he says also that the capacities of listeners at lectures differ widely, some holding a gallon, others a quart, and others only a pint or a gill, so of the singers who are not voiceless, their voices differ in volume. Some are organs that fill the air with glorious and continuous music; some are trumpets blowing a ringing peal, then sinking into silence; some are harps of melancholy but faint vibration; still others are flutes and pipes, whose sweet or shrill note has a dying fall. Some are heard as the wind or sea is heard; some like the rustle of leaves; some like the chirp of birds. Some are heard long and far away; others across the field; others hardly across the street. Fame is perhaps but the term of a longer or shorter fight with oblivion; but it is the warrior who "drinks delight of battle with his peers", and holds his own in the fray, who finally commands the eye and the heart. There were poets pleasantly singing to our grandfathers whose songs we do not hear, but the unheeded voice of the youngest songster of that time is a voice we heed to-day. Holmes wrote but two "Autocrat" papers in the _New England Magazine_--one in November, 1831, and the other in February, 1832. The year after the publication of the second paper he went to Paris, where for three years he studied medicine, not as a poet, but as a physician, and he returned in 1836 an admirably trained and highly accomplished professional man. But the Phi Beta Kappa poem of that year, like the tender lyric to Clemence upon leaving Paris, shows not only that the poet was not dead, but that he did not even sleep. The "Metrical Essay" was the serious announcement that the poet was not lost in the man of science, an announcement which was followed by the publication in the same year (1836) of his first volume of poems. This was three years before the publication of Longfellow's first volume of verses, _The Voices of the Night_.

Holmes's devotion to the two Muses of science and letters was uniform and untiring, as it was also to the two literary forms of verse and prose. But although a man of letters, like the other eminent men of letters in New England, he had no trace of the Bohemian. Willis was the only noted literary figure that ever mistook Boston for a seaport in Bohemia, and he early discovered his error. The fraternity which has given to Boston its literary primacy has been always distinguished not only for propriety of life and respectability in its true sense of worthiness and respect, but for the possession of the virtues of fidelity, industry, and good sense, which have carried so far both the influence and the renown of New England. Nowhere has the Bohemian tradition been more happily and completely shattered than in the circle to which Holmes returned from his European studies to take his place. American citizenship in its most attractive aspect has been signally illustrated in that circle, and it is not without reason that the government has so often selected from it our chief American representatives in other countries.

Dr. Holmes, as he was now called, and has continued to be called, practised his profession in Boston; but whether because of some lurking popular doubt of a poet's probable skill as a physician, or from some lack of taste on his part for the details of professional practice, like his kinsman, Wendell Phillips, and innumerable other young beginners, he sometimes awaited a professional call longer than was agreeable. But he wrote medical papers, and was summoned to lecture to the medical school at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and later at Pittsfield in Massachusetts, while his unfailing charm as an occasional poet gave him a distinctive name. Holmes's felicity in occasional poems is extraordinary. The "Metrical Essay" was the first and chief of the long series of such verses, among which the songs of '29, the poems addressed year after year to his college classmates of that year, have a delightful and endless grace, tenderness, wit, and point. Pegasus draws well in harness the triumphant chariot of '29, in which the lucky classmates of the poet move to a unique and happy renown.

As a reader, Holmes was the permanent challenge of Mrs. Browning's sighing regret that poets never read their own verses to their worth. Park Benjamin, who heard the Phi Beta Kappa poem, said of its delivery: "A brilliant, airy, and _spirituelle_ manner varied with striking flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem, now deeply impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up into almost an actual flight of rhapsody, rendered the delivery of this poem a rich, nearly a dramatic entertainment." This was no less true in later years when he read some of his poems in New York at Bishop Potter's, then rector of Grace Church, or of the reading of the poem at the doctors' dinner given to him by the physicians of New York a little later.

Holmes's readings were like improvisations. The poems were expressed and interpreted by the whole personality of the poet. The most subtle touch of thought, the melody of fond regret, the brilliant passage of description, the culmination of latent fun exploding in a keen and resistless jest, all these were vivified in the sensitive play of manner and modulation of tone of the reader, so that a poem by Holmes at the Harvard Commencement dinner was one of the anticipated delights which never failed. This temperament implied an oratorical power which naturally drew the poet into the lecture lyceum when it was in its prime, in the decade between 1850 and 1860. During that time the popular lecture was a distinct and effective public force, and not the least of its services was its part in instructing and training the public conscience for the great contest of the Civil War.

The year 1831, in which Holmes's literary activity began, was also the year on whose first day the first number of Garrison's _Liberator_ appeared, and the final period of the slavery controversy opened. But neither this storm of agitation nor the transcendental mist that a few years later overhung intellectual New England greatly affected the poet.

In the first number of the "Autocrat" there is a passage upon puns, which, crackling with fun, shows his sensitive scepticism. The "Autocrat" says: "In a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking when charity was like a top. It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, 'When it begins to hum.' There are temperaments of a refined suspiciousness to which, when the plea of reform is urged, the claims of suffering humanity at once begin to hum. The very word reform irritates a peculiar kind of sensibility, as a red flag stirs the fury of a bull. A noted party leader said, with inexpressible scorn, 'When Dr. Johnson defined the word patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he had not learned the infinite possibilities of the word refa-a-r-m.'"

The acridity of this jest is wholly unknown to the "Autocrat", who has moved always with reform, if not always with reformers, and whose protest against bigotry is as searching as it is sparkling. Not only has his ear been quick to detect the hum of Mr. Honeythunder's loud appeal, but his eye to catch the often ludicrous aspect of honest whimsey. During all the early years of his literary career he flew his flashing darts at all the "isms", and he fell under the doubt and censure of those earnest children of the time whom the gay and clever sceptics derided as apostles of the newness. When Holmes appeared upon the lecture platform it was to discourse of literature or science, or to treat some text of social manners or morals with a crisp Poor Richard sense and mother wit, and a brilliancy of illustration, epigram, and humor that fascinated the most obdurate "come-outer". Holmes's lectures on the English poets at the Lowell Institute were among the most noted of that distinguished platform, and everywhere the poet was one of the most popular of "attractions". There were not wanting those who maintained that his use of the platform was the correct one, and that the orators who, often by happy but incisive indirection, fought the good fight of the hour abused their opportunity.

It was while Holmes was still a professor, but still also touching the lyre and writing scientific essays and charming the great audiences of the lecture lyceum, that in the first number of the _Atlantic Monthly_, in November, 1857, the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" remarked, "I was just going to say, when I was interrupted," and resumed the colloquies of the _New England Magazine_. He had been interrupted twenty-two years before. But as he began again it was plain that it was the same voice, yet fuller, stronger, richer, and that we were listening to one of the wisest of wits and sharpest of observers. Emerson warns us that superlatives are to be avoided. But it will not be denied that the "Autocrat" belongs in the highest rank of modern magazine or periodical literature, of which the essays of "Elia" are the type. The form of the "Autocrat"--a semi-dramatic, conversational, descriptive monologue--is not peculiar to Holmes's work, but the treatment of it is absolutely original. The manner is as individual and unmistakable as that of Elia himself. It would be everywhere recognized as the Autocrat's. During the intermission of the papers the more noted Macaulay flowers of literature, as the Autocrat calls them, had bloomed; Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_ and reviews, Christopher North's _Noctes_ (now fallen into ancient night), Thackeray's _Roundabout Papers_, Lowell's _Hosea Biglow_--a whole library of magazine and periodical literature of the first importance had appeared. But the Autocrat began again, after a quarter of a century, musical with so rich a chorus, and his voice was clear, penetrating, masterful, and distinctively his own.

The cadet branch of English literature--the familiar colloquial periodical essay, a comment upon men and manners and life--is a delightful branch of the family, and traces itself back to Dick Steele and Addison. Hazlitt, who belonged to it, said that he preferred the _Tatler_ to the _Spectator_; and Thackeray, who consorted with it proudly, although he was of the elder branch, restored Sir Richard, whose habits had cost him a great deal of his reputation, to general favor. The familiar essay is susceptible, as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show, of great variety and charm of treatment. What would the Christian Hero, writing to his Prue that he would be with her in a pint of wine's time, have said to "Blakesmoor" and "Oxford in the Vacation"? Yet Lamb and Steele are both consummate masters of the essay, and Holmes, in the "Autocrat", has given it a new charm. The little realm of the Autocrat, his lieges of the table, the persons of the drama, are at once as definitely outlined as Sir Roger's club. Unconsciously and resistlessly we are drawn within the circle; we are admitted _ad eundem_, and become the targets of the wit, the irony, the shrewd and sharp epigram, the airy whim, the sparkling fancy, the curious and recondite thought, the happy allusion, the felicitous analogy, of the sovereign master of the feast.

The index of the _Autocrat_ is in itself a unique work. It reveals the whimsical discursiveness of the book; the restless hovering of that brilliant talk over every topic, fancy, feeling, fact; a humming-bird sipping the one honeyed drop from every flower; or a huma, to use its own droll and capital symbol of the lyceum lecturer, the bird that never lights. There are few books that leave more distinctly the impression of a mind teeming with riches of many kinds. It is, in the Yankee phrase, thoroughly wideawake. There is no languor, and it permits none in the reader, who must move along the page warily, lest in the gay profusion of the grove, unwittingly defrauding himself of delight, he miss some flower half hidden, some gem chance-dropped, some darting bird. Howells's _Letters_ was called a chamber-window book, a book supplying in solitude the charm of the best society. We could all name a few such in our own literature. Would any of them, or many, take precedence of the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table?_

It is in this book that the value of the scientific training to the man of letters is illustrated, not only in furnishing noble and strong analogies, but in precision of observation and accuracy of statement. In Holmes's style, the definiteness of form and the clearness of expression are graces and virtues which are due to his exact scientific study, as well as to the daylight quality of his mind.

The delicate apprehension of the finer and tenderer feelings which is disclosed in the little passages of narrative in the record of the Autocrat and of his legitimate brothers, the Professor and the Poet, at the Breakfast Table, gives a grace and a sweetness to the work which naturally flow into the music of the poems with which the diary of a conversation often ends. These traits in the Autocrat suggested that he would yet tell a distinct story, which indeed came while the trilogy of the Breakfast Table was yet proceeding. _Elsie_ _Venner_ and the _Guardian Angel_, the two novels of Holmes's, are full of the same briskness and acuteness of observation, the same effusiveness of humor and characteristic Americanism, as the _Autocrat_. Certain aspects of New England life and character are treated in these stories with incomparable vivacity and insight. Holmes's picture is of a later New England than Hawthorne's, but it is its lineal descendant. It is another facet of the Puritan diamond which flashes with different light in the genius of Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Judd in _Margaret_. For, with all his lyrical instinct and rollicking humor, Holmes is essentially a New-Englander, and one of the most faithful and shrewd interpreters of New England.

The colloquial habit of the Autocrat is not lost in the stories, and it is so marked generally in Holmes's writings as to be called distinctive. It is a fascinating gift, when it is so restrained by taste and instinctive refinement as not to become what is known as bumptiousness. Thackeray, even in his novels, is apt to drop into this vein, to talk about the persons of his drama with his reader, instead of leaving them to play out their part alone. This trait offends some of Thackeray's audience, to whom it seems like the manager's hand thrust into the box to help out the play of the puppets. They resent not "the damnable faces" of the actors, but the damnable sermonizing of the author, and exhort him to permit the play to begin. Thackeray frankly acknowledged his tendency to preach, as he called it. But it was part of the man. Without the private personal touch of the essayist in his stories they would not be his. This colloquial habit is very winning when governed by a natural delicacy and an exquisite literary instinct. It is the quality of all the authors who are distinctly beloved as persons by their readers, and it is to this class that Holmes especially belongs.

It is not a quality which is easily analyzed, but it blends a power of sympathetic observation and appreciation both of the thing observed and the reader to whom the observation is addressed. The Autocrat, as he converses, brightens with his own clear thought, with the happy quip, the airy fancy. He is sure of your delight, not only in the thought, but in its deft expression. He in turn is delighted with your delight. He warms to the responsive mind and heart, and feels the mutual joy. The personal relation is established, and the Autocrat's audience become his friends, to whom he describes with infinite glee the effect of his remarks upon his lieges at table. No other author takes the reader into his personal confidence more closely than Holmes, and none reveals his personal temperament more clearly. This confidential relation becomes even more simple and intimate as time chastens the eagerness of youth and matures the keen brilliancy of the blossom into the softer bloom of the fruit. The colloquies of the Autocrat under the characteristic title of "Over the Tea-Cups" are full of the same shrewd sense and wise comment and tender thought. The kindly mentor takes the reader by the button or lays his hand upon his shoulder, not with the rude familiarity of the bully or the boor, but with the courtesy of Montaigne, the friendliness of John Aubrey, or the wise cheer of Selden. The reader glows with the pleasure of an individual greeting, and a wide diocese of those whom the Autocrat never saw plume themselves proudly upon his personal acquaintance.

In this discursive talk about one of the American authors who have vindicated the position of American letters in the literature of the language we have not mentioned all his works. It is the quality rather than the quantity with which we are concerned, the upright, honorable, pure quality of the poet, the wit, the scholar, for whom the most devoted reader is called to make no plea, no apology. The versatility of his power is obvious, but scarcely less so the uniformity of his work.

It is a power which was early mature. For many a year he has dwelt upon a high table-land where the air is equable and inspiring, yet, as we have hinted, ever softer and sweeter. The lyric of today glows with the same ardor as the fervent apostrophe to "Old Ironsides" or the tripping salutation to the remembered and regretted Clemence; it is only less eager. The young Autocrat who remarked that the word "scrub" dismissed from table a fellow-boarder who turned pale, now with the same smiling acuteness remarks the imprudent politeness which tries to assure him that it is no matter if he is a little older. Did anybody say so? The easy agility with which he cleared "the seven-barred gate" has carried him over the eight bars, and we are all in hot pursuit. For just sixty years since his first gay and tender note was heard, Holmes has been fulfilling the promise of his matin song. He has become a patriarch of our literature, and all his countrymen are his lovers.

WASHINGTON IRVING

Forty years ago, upon a pleasant afternoon, you might have seen tripping with an elastic step along Broadway, in New York, a figure which even then would have been called quaint. It was a man of about sixty-six or sixty-seven years old, of a rather solid frame, wearing a Talma, as a short cloak of the time was called, that hung from the shoulders, and low shoes, neatly tied, which were observable at a time when boots were generally worn. The head was slightly declined to one side, the face was smoothly shaven, and the eyes twinkled with kindly humor and shrewdness. There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in the whole appearance, an undeniable Dutch aspect, which, in the streets of New Amsterdam, irresistibly recalled Diedrich Knickerbocker. The observer might easily have supposed that he saw some later descendant of the renowned Wouter Van Twiller refined into a nineteenth-century gentleman. The occasional start of interest as the figure was recognized by some one in the passing throng, the respectful bow, and the sudden turn to scan him more closely, indicated that he was not unknown. Indeed, he was the American of his time universally known. This modest and kindly man was the creator of Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle. He was the father of our literature, and at that time its patriarch. He was Washington Irving.

At the same time you might have seen another man, of slight figure and rustic aspect, with an air of seriousness, if not severity, moving with the crowd, but with something remote and reserved in his air, as if in the city he bore with him another atmosphere, and were still secluded among solitary hills. In the bright and busy street of the city which was always cosmopolitan, and in which there lingers a tradition, constantly renewed, of good-natured banter of the losel Yankee, this figure passed like the grave genius of New England. By a little play of fancy the first figure might have seemed the smiling spirit of genial cheerfulness and humor, of kindly sympathy even with the foibles and weaknesses of poor human nature; and the other the mentor of its earnest endeavor and serious duty. For he was the first of our poets, whose "Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among the primeval forests of his native hills, and who, in his last years, sat at the door of his early home and looked across the valley of the Westfield to the little town of Plainfield upon the wooded heights beyond, whose chief distinction is that there he wrote the "Waterfowl"; for this graver figure was the poet Bryant.

If in the same walk you had passed those two figures, you would have seen not only the first of our famous prose writers and the first of our acknowledged poets, but also the representatives of the two fundamental and distinctive qualities of our American literature, as of all literature--its grave, reflective, earnest character, and its sportive, genial, and humorous genius.

At the time of which I speak another figure also was familiar in Broadway, but less generally recognized as it passed than either of the others, although, perhaps, even more widely known to fame than they. This was Cooper, who gave us so many of the heroes of our childhood's delight, but who at this time was himself the hero of innumerable lawsuits, undertaken to chastise the press for what he believed to be unjust and libelous comments upon himself. Now that the uproar of that litigation is silent, and its occasion forgotten, it seems comical that a man for whom fame had already rendered a favorable judgment should be busily seeking the opinion of local courts upon transitory newspaper opinions of him-self and his writings. It is as if Dickens, when the whole English-reading world--judges on the bench and bishops in their studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables--were all laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the _Eatanswill Gazette_ for calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits to vindicate himself, and who cares? When Cooper died there was a great commemorative meeting in New York. Daniel Webster presided, and praised the storyteller; Bryant read a discourse upon him, while Irving sat by his side. One of the triumvirate of our early literature was gone, and two remained to foresee their own future in the honors paid to him. Indeed, it was to see them, quite as much as to hear of their dead comrade, that the multitude assembled that evening; and the one who was seen with the most interest was Irving, the one in whom the city of New York naturally feels a peculiar right and pride, as the most renowned of her children.

If I say that he made personally the same impression that his works make, you can easily see the man. As you read the story of his life you feel its constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary man and a man of society--a life without events, or only the events of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In place of it there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be seventy-six years old. At twenty-six he was engaged to a beautiful girl, who died. He never married; but after his death, in a little box of which he always kept the key, was found the miniature of a lovely girl, and with it a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper on which was written the name Matilda Hoffman, with some pages upon which the writing was long since faded. That fair face Irving kept all his life in a more secret and sacred shrine. It looks out, now and then, with unchanged loveliness from some pensive passage, which he seems to write with wistful melancholy of remembrance. That fond and immortal presence constantly renewed the gentle humanity, the tenderness of feeling, the sweet healthfulness and generous sympathy which never failed in his life and writings.

He was born in the city of New York in 1783, the year in which the Revolution ended in the acknowledgment of American independence. The British army marched out of the city, and the American army, with Washington at the head, marched in. "The patriot's work is ended just as my boy is born," said the patriotic mother, "and the boy shall be named Washington". Six years later, when Washington returned to New York to be inaugurated President, he was one day going into a shop when the boy's Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate and said to him, "Please your honor, here's a bairn was named for you". The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer.

The name of no other American has been so curiously confused with Washington's as that of Irving. Many a young fellow puzzles over the connection which the name seems vaguely to imply, and in other lands the identity of the men is confounded. When Irving first went to Europe, a very young man, well-educated, courteous, with great geniality of manner and charm of conversation, he was received by Prince Torlonia, the banker, in Rome, with unusual and flattering civility. His travelling companion, who had been treated by the prince with entire indifference, was perplexed at the warmth of Irving's welcome. Irving laughingly said that it only proved the prince's remarkable discrimination. But the young travellers laughed still more when the prince unconsciously revealed the secret of his attentions by taking his guest aside, and asking him how nearly he was related to General Washington.

Many years afterwards, when he had become famous, an English lady and her daughter paused in an Italian gallery before a bust of Washington. "And who was Washington, mamma?" asked the daughter. "Why, my dear, I am surprised at your ignorance," answered the mother, "he was the author of the _Sketch Book_." Long ago in Berlin I was talking with some American friends one evening at a café, and observed a German intently listening to our conversation as if trying his ability to understand the language. Presently he said to me, politely, "You are English, no?" But when I replied "No, we are Americans"--"Americans!" he exclaimed enthusiastically, grasping my hand and shaking it warmly, "Americans, ach! we all know your great General Washington Irving."

Irving's father was a Presbyterian deacon, in whose heart the sterner traditions of the Covenanters lingered. He tried hard to teach his son to contemn amusement, and to impale his youth upon the five points of Calvinism, rather than to play ball. But it was John Knox trying to curb the tricksy Ariel. Perhaps from some bright maternal ancestor the boy had derived his sweet gayety of nature which nothing could repress. His airy spirits bubbled like a sunny fountain in that somewhat arid household. He read at ten a translation of the _Orlando Furioso_, and his father's yard, doubtless trim and well kept as beseemed a deacon's yard, became at once a field of chivalry. Candles were forbidden him in his chamber, but when he made the acquaintance of _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Sindbad the Sailor_, he secreted lights to illuminate his innocent revels with those immortal playmates.

The amusements which were permitted were of too depressing a character to be tolerated by the healthy boy, who, like the duck taking to the water from under the wing of the astonished hen, sometimes escaped from the serious house at night by dropping from a window, and with a delight that must have torn his father's heart with anguish had he known it, tasted the forbidden fruit of the theatre. It was a Presbyterian boy who tasted it then; but in the same city many years afterwards it was a Quaker boy whom I knew who was also enamoured of the play. "John," said his grieved father, "is this dreadful thing true that I hear of thee? Has thee ever been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?" "Yes, father," answered the heroic John. "I hope thee has not been more than once, John," said the afflicted father. "Yes, father," replied John, resolved to make a clean breast of his sins, "more than thirty times." It is useless to try to prevent blue-birds from flying in the spring. The blithe creatures made to soar and sing will not be restrained. The same kind Providence that made Calvin made Shakespeare. The sun is higher than the clouds, and smiles are as heaven-born as tears. In Emerson's poem the squirrel says to the mountain:

"You're not so small as I,
And not half so spry;

* * * * *

"If I cannot carry forests on my back
Neither can you crack a nut."

It was in vain to try to thwart the young Irving's genius. Yet the boy who a little later was to light with rosy cheer the air which, as Wendell Phillips said, was still black with sermons; who was to give to our literature its first distinctly humorous strain, and innocently to amuse the world, was somehow or other, as he said, "taught to feel that everything pleasant was wicked".

If that were so, what a sinner Washington Irving was! If to make life easier by making it pleasanter, if to outwit trouble by gay banter, if with satire that smiles but never stings to correct foibles and to quicken good impulses; if to deepen and strengthen human sympathy, is not to be a human benefactor, what makes one? When Dr. Johnson said of Garrick that his death eclipsed the gayety of nations, he did not mean merely that the player would no longer make men laugh, but that he could no longer make them better. "If, however," said Irving--and Willis selected the words for the motto of his second volume of verse published in 1827--"I can by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sadness; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good-humor with his fellow-beings and himself, surely, surely I shall not then have written entirely in vain."

That cannot be said to have been the spirit of any American author before Irving. Our colonial literature was mainly political and theological. You have only to return to the early New England days in the stories of Hawthorne, the magician who restores with a shuddering spell that old, sombre life, to understand the character of its reading. The books that were not treatises upon special topics all seemed to say with one of the grim bards of Calvinism:

"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead."

Literature, in its proper sense, there was none. There was no imaginative creation, no play of fancy and humor, no subtle charm of the ideal life, no grace and delight of expression, which are essential to literature. The perpetual twilight and chill of the New England Puritan world were an arctic winter in which no flower of poesy bloomed and no bird sang. One of the French players who came to this country with Rachel says, in his journal, with a startled air, as if he had remarked in Americans a universal touch of lunacy, that he was invited to take a pleasure-drive to Greenwood Cemetery. Evidently he was not familiar with Froissart's epigram nor with the annals of the Puritan fathers, or he would have known that their favorite pleasure-ground was the graveyard. Judge Sewell's Journal, the best picture of daily New England life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a portrait framed in black and hung with thick crape. It is a register of funerals--a book which seems to require a suit of sables for its proper reading.

The early Christians dwelt so often and so long in the catacombs that when they emerged, accustomed to associate life with the tomb, they doubtless regarded the whole world as a cemetery. The American Puritans inherited the disposition from their early confessors, and so powerful was the tendency that it laid its sombre spirit upon the earliest enduring poem in our literature, and the fresh and smiling nature of the new world was first depicted by our literary art as a tomb:

"The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty; and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man."

"Thanatopsis" is the swan-song of Puritanism. Indeed, when New England Puritanism could sing, as for the first time it did in the verse of Bryant, the great change was accomplished. Out of strength had come forth sweetness. I am not decrying the Puritans. They were the stern builders of the modern world, the unconscious heralds of wider liberty, and a kindlier future for mankind. But

"God works in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform,"

and never more mysteriously than when he chose as the pioneers of religious liberty in the New World those who hung Quakers, and as the founders of civil equality those who permitted only members of their own Church to vote.

Irving was not a studious boy. He did not go to college. He read some law at sixteen, but he read much more literature, and sauntered in the country about New York with his gun and fishing-rod. He sailed up the Hudson, and explored for the first time the realm that was presently to be his forever by the right of eminent domain of the imagination. New York was a snug little city in those days. At the beginning of the century it was all below the present City Hall, and the young fellow, who was born a cosmopolitan, greatly enjoyed the charms of the modest society in which the Dutch and the English circles were still somewhat separated, and in which such literary cultivation as there was was necessarily foreign. But while he enjoyed he observed, and his literary instinct began to stir.

Under the name of "Jonathan Oldstyle", the young Irving printed in his brother's newspaper essays in the style of the _Spectator_, discussing topics of the town, and the modest theatre in John Street and its chance actors, as if it had been Drury Lane with Garrick and Mrs. Siddons. The little town kindly smiled upon the lively efforts of the Presbyterian deacon's son; and its welcome of his small essays, the provincial echo of the famous Queen Anne's men in London, is a touching revelation of our scant and spare native literary talent. The essays are forgotten now, but they were enough to bring Charles Brockden Brown to find the young author, and to tempt him, but in vain, to write for _The Literary Magazine and American Register_, which the novelist was just beginning in Philadelphia, a pioneer of American literary magazines, which Brown sustained for five years.

The youthful Addison of New Amsterdam was a delicate lad, and when he came of age he sailed for France and the Mediterranean, and passed two years in travelling. Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor, and at war with England, and the young American, despite his passport, was everywhere believed to be an Englishman. Travelling was hard work in those days of war, but the cheery youth proved the truth of the proverb that a light heart and a whole pair of breeches go round the world. At Messina, in Sicily, he saw Nelson's fleet pass through the strait, looking for the French ships; and before the year ended the famous battle of Trafalgar had been fought, and at Greenwich in England Irving saw the body of the great sailor lying in state, wrapped in his flag of victory. At Rome he made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and almost resolved to be a painter. In Paris he saw Madame de Staël, who overwhelmed him with eager questions about his remote and unknown country, and in London he was enchanted by Mrs. Siddons. Some years afterwards, when the _Sketch Book_ had made him famous, he was presented to Mrs. Siddons, and the great actress said to him, in her deepest voice and with her stateliest manner, "You've made me weep." The modest young author was utterly abashed, and could say nothing. After the publication of his _Bracebridge_ Hall he was once more presented to her, and again with gloomy grandeur she said to him, "You've made me weep again." This time Irving received the solemn salute with more composure, and doubtless retorted with a compliment magnificent enough even for the sovereign Queen of Tragedy, who, as her niece Mrs. Fanny Kemble said of her, never laid aside her great manner, and at the dinner-table brandished her fork and stabbed the potatoes.

Irving returned from this tour with established health--a refined, agreeable, exceedingly handsome and charming gentleman; with a confirmed taste for society, and a delightful store of interesting recollection and anecdote. With a group of cultivated and lively friends of his own age he dined and supped and enjoyed the town, and a little anecdote which he was fond of telling shows that the good old times were not unlike the good new times: One morning, after a gay dinner, Irving met one of his fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way home, after draining the parting bumper, he had fallen through a grating in the sidewalk, which had been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath. It was impossible to climb out, and at first the solitude was rather dismal, he said; but several of the other guests fell in, in the course of the evening, and, on the whole, they had quite a pleasant time of it.

In the midst of this frolicking life, and growing out of it, Irving's real literary career began. With his brother William, and his friend James K. Paulding, who afterwards wrote the _Dutchman's Fireside_, and was one of the recognized American authors of fifty years ago, he issued every fortnight a periodical, which ran for twenty numbers, and stopped in the midst of its success. It was modelled upon the _Spectator_ and Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, describing and criticising the manners and morals of the town with extravagant humor and pungency, and a rollicking independence which must have been both startling and stimulating.

Perhaps, also, the town was secretly pleased to discover that it was sufficiently important to be worthy of such bright raillery and humorous reproof. _Salmagundi_ was only a lively _jeu d'esprit_, and Irving was never proud of it. "I know," said Paulding, writing to him in later life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope, belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless, Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for flight. _Salmagundi_ undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, Irving and his brother began the _History of New York_, which was originally designed to be a parody of a particular book. But the work was interrupted by the business difficulties of the brother, and at last Irving resumed it alone, recast it entirely, and as he finished it the engagement with Matilda Hoffman ended with her death, and the long arid secret romance of his life began.

Knickerbocker's _History_ was published just before Christmas, 1809, and made a merry Christmas for our grandfathers and grandmothers eighty years ago. The fun began before the book was published. In October the curiosity of the town of eighty thousand inhabitants was awakened by a series of skilful paragraphs in the _Evening Post_. The art of advertising was never more ingeniously illustrated. Mr. Fulkerson himself would have paid homage to the artist. One day the quid-nuncs found this paragraph in the paper, It was headed,

"DISTRESSING.

"Left his lodgings, some time since, and has not since been heard
of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and
cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons
for believing that he is not entirely in his right mind, and, as
great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning
him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the
office of this paper, will be thankfully received.

"P. S.--Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity
by giving an insertion to the above.

"_October 25th._"

This was followed within a fortnight by another ingenious lure:

"_To the Editor of the Evening Post:_

"Sir,--Having read in your paper of the 26th October last a paragraph
respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was
missing from his lodgings, if it would be any relief to his friends,
or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform
them that a person answering the description was seen by the passengers
of the Albany stage early in the morning, about four or five weeks ago,
resting himself by the side of the road, a little above Kingsbridge.
He had in his hands a small bundle, tied in a red bandana handkerchief.
He appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and
exhausted.

"_November 6._ A Traveller."

Ten days after came a letter signed by Seth Handaside, landlord of the Independent Handaside:

"Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street.

"Sir,--You have been kind enough to publish in your paper a paragraph
about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely from his
lodgings some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard from the
old gentleman since, but a very curious written Book has been found in
his room in his own handwriting. Now, I wish you to notice him, if he
is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill for
board and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his Book to satisfy me
for the same."

This is very simple jesting, but at that time it was very effective in a town that enjoyed the high spirits of _Salmagundi_. Moreover, the book which was announced in this lively strain was as unprecedented as the announcement. It was a very serious time and country, and the work of the small elderly gentleman who carried a little bundle tied in a red bandana handkerchief appeared in the midst of the sober and dry effusions of our Puritan literature, and of an eager and energetic life still engrossed with the subjection of a continent and the establishment of a new nation. It was the work of a young man of twenty-six, who lived fifty years afterwards with constantly increasing fame, making many and admirable contributions to literature. But nothing that followed surpassed the joyous brilliancy and gay felicity of his first book, which was at once acknowledged as the wittiest book that America had produced.

Knickerbocker's _History_ is a prolonged and elaborate and audacious burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful light of blameless fun. To pass the vague and venerable traditions of the austere and heroic founders of the city through the alembic of a youth's hilarious creative humor, and to turn them out in forms resistlessly grotesque, but with their identity unimpaired, was a stroke as daring as it was successful. But the skill and power with which this is done can be best appreciated by those who are most familiar with the history which the gleeful genius burlesques.

Irving follows the actual story closely, and the characters that he develops faithfully, although with rollicking caricature, are historical. Indeed, the fidelity is so absolute that the fiction is welded with the fact. The days of the Dutch ascendency in New York are inextricably associated with this ludicrous narrative. It is impossible not to think of the forefathers of New Amsterdam as Knickerbocker describes them. The Wouter Van Twiller, the Wilhemus Kieft, the Peter Stuyvesant, who are familiarly and popularly known, are not themselves, but the figures drawn by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In comical despair, the historian Grahame, whose _Colonial History_ is still among the best, says of Knickerbocker: "If Sancho Panza had been a real governor, misrepresented by the wit of Cervantes, his future historian would have found it no easy matter to bespeak a grave attention to the annals of his administration."

The gayety of this blithe genius bursting in upon our staid literature is irresistible. Irving's temperament, his travels, his humor, gave him a cosmopolitan point of view; and his little native city, with its local sense of importance, and its droll aristocratic traditions springing from Dutch burgomasters and traders, impressed his merry genius like a complacent Cranford or Tarascon taking itself with a provincial seriousness, which, to his sympathetic fancy, was an exhaustless fountain of fun. Part of the fun to us, and perhaps to Irving, was the indignation with which it was received by the descendants of the Dutch families in the city and State. The excited drawing-rooms denounced it as scandalous satire and ridicule. Even Irving's friend, Gulian Verplanck, nine years afterwards, deepening the comedy of his remark by his evident unconsciousness of the drollery of his gravity, grieved that the author's exuberance of genuine humor should be wasted on a coarse caricature. Irving, who was then in Europe, saw Verplanck's strictures just as he had written _Rip Van Winkle_, and he wrote to a friend at home that he could not help laughing at Verplanck's outburst of filial feeling for his ancestors, adding, in the true Knickerbocker vein, "Remember me heartily to him, and tell him that I mean to grow wiser and better and older every day, and to lay the castigation he has given seriously to heart."

The success of Knickerbocker's _History_ was immediate, and it was the first American work of literature which arrested attention in Europe.

Sir Walter Scott, who was then the most famous of English poets, and was about to publish the first of the Waverley Novels, was delighted with a humor which he thought recalled Swift's, and a sentiment that seemed to him as tender as Sterne's. He wrote a generous acknowledgment to the American friend who had sent him the book, and in later years he welcomed Diedrich Knickerbocker at Abbotsford, and the American has given a charming and vivid picture of Scott's home and its master.

But the success of his book did not at once determine Irving's choice of a career. He was still a gilded youth who enjoyed the gay idleness of society, and who found in writing only another and pleasant recreation. He had been bred in the conservative tradition which looked upon livelihood by literature as the deliberate choice of Grub Street, and the wretchedness of Goldsmith as the necessary and natural fate of authors; but it is droll that, although he recoiled from the uncertainty of support by literary labor, he was willing to try the very doubtful chances of office-holding as a means of securing leisure for literary pursuits. He offered himself as a candidate for appointment as the clerk of a court in the city. By tradition and sympathy he was a Federalist, but he had taken no active part in politics, and his chance was slight. He went to Albany, however, and in a lively letter he paints a familiar picture of the crowd of office-hunters who, he says, "like a cloud of locusts, have descended upon the city to devour every plant and herb and every green thing." He was sick with a cold, and stifled in rooms heated by stoves, and was utterly disgusted, as he says, "by the servility and duplicity and rascality I have witnessed among the swarms of scrub politicians who crawl about the great metropolis of our State like so many vermin about the head of the body politic."