Chapter VII: Part 7

Again the good old times were apparently very much like the good new times. Thirty-nine years after Irving's discomfiture in trying to get a public office, Hawthorne was turned out of one that he held, and wrote to a friend: "It seems to me that an inoffensive man of letters, having obtained a pitiful little office on no other plea than his pitiful little literature, ought not to be left at the mercy of these thick-skulled and no-hearted ruffians." The language is strong, but the epithets are singularly well-chosen. The distinctive qualities of the ringleaders, whether of high or low degree, in the degradation of public trusts into private and party spoils, have never been more accurately or effectively described than by the words "thick-skulled" and "no-hearted".

The story of the sturdy beggar who asked General Jackson to give him the mission to France, and finally came down to a request for an old coat, well illustrates a system which regards public office not as a public trust, but as private alms. The service of the State, whether military or civil, is an object of high and generous ambition, because it involves the leadership of men. But if Irving and Hawthorne thought that what is called office-seeking is disgusting, it was not because the public service is not noble and dignified, but because we choose to allow it to be so often dependent, not upon fitness and character, but upon the personal or political favor of the "thick-skulled" and "no-hearted".

But the problem of a career was soon solved. In the year 1810 Irving formed a business connection with two of his brothers, and the next five years were passed in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, forming various literary plans, looking out for his business interests, sparkling in society; and when war with England began, serving upon the governor's military staff as Colonel Washington Irving. In the spring of 1815 he sailed to roam again through Europe, but the illness of his brother compelled him to remain in England in charge of the business. "London," as a shrewd and celebrated American recently said, "was then as it is now, the social centre of the world." Irving saw famous men and women, and his charming sweetness and humor opened all doors and hearts. But the business fell into distress, then into disaster, and in the beginning of 1818 the house failed. He was now thrown wholly upon his literary resources, which did _not_ fail, and in the spring of 1819, when he was thirty-six years old, the first number of the _Sketch Book_ was issued in New York.

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."

It was an incalculable service which Irving rendered in renewing a common feeling between England and America. It was involuntary, because in writing he had no such purpose. He was only following the bent of his own taste, and his works reflected only his individual sympathies. But it was this very fact--it was the English instinct in the American, the appreciation native in the heart of the Western stranger of the true poetic charm of England--which was the spell of the magician. Irving had the same imaginative enthusiasm for traditional and poetic England that Burke had for political England. Indeed, it is an England which never actually existed except in the English and American imagination. The coarse, mercenary, material England which Lecky photographs in his history of the eighteenth century was the same England in which Burke lived, and which his glowing imagination exalted into the magnificent image of constitutional liberty before which he bowed his great head. So with the old England that Irving drew. He saw with poetic fancy a rural Arcadia, and reproduced the vision with airy grace and called it England. No wonder that John Bull was delighted with an artist who could paint so fascinating a picture, and write under it John Bull's portrait.

To change a word in Marvell's noble lines, when Irving was in England

"He nothing common saw or mean
Upon that memorable scene."

Only an American could have seen England as he described it, and invested it with an enchantment which the mass of Englishmen had neither suspected nor perceived. Irving's instinct was that of Hawthorne afterwards, who called England "Our Old Home". There is a foolish American habit growing patriotically out of our old contentions with England, and politically out of our desire to conciliate the Irish vote in this country, of branding as servile and un-American the natural susceptibility of people of English descent, but natives of another land, to the charm of their ancestral country. But the American is greatly to be pitied who thinks to prove the purity of his patriotism by flouting the land in which he has a legitimate right, the land of Alfred and Runnymede, of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, of Hampden and Cromwell, of Newton and Bunyan, of Somers and Chatham and Edmund Burke, the cradle of constitutional liberty and parliamentary government. If the great body of the literature of our language in which we delight, if the sources of our law and politics, if the great exploits of contemporary scholarship and science, are largely beyond our boundaries, yet are legitimately ours as well as all that we have ourselves achieved, why should we spurn any of our just and hereditary share in the great English traditions of civilization and freedom?

Irving returned to America in 1832, and here he afterwards remained, except during his absence as minister in Spain. In an earlier visit to that country he had felt the spell of its romantic history, and had written the _Life of Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, and the _Chronicles of the Alhambra_. During all his later years he was busy with his pen, and, while the modest author had risen to the chief place in American literature, its later constellation was rising into the heavens.

But his intrinsic modesty never disappeared either from the works or the character of the benign writer. In the height of his renown there was no kind of presumption or conceit in his simple and generous breast. Some time after his return from his long absence in Europe, and before Putnam became his publisher, Irving found some disinclination upon the part of publishers to issue new editions of his books, and he expressed, with entire good humor, the belief that he had had his day.

It is doubtless true, as _Blackwood_ remarked, with what we may call _Blackwood_ courtesy, when Mr. Lowell was American minister in England, that Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and so many more "will not be replaced by Mr. Washington Irving and Mr. Lowell". But it is equally true that, since Swift, _Blackwood_ cannot find in English literature political satire more trenchant, humorous, forcible, and effective than the _Biglow Papers_, and nothing in Swift more original. It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious "derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any just sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny. The tender and imaginative play of Rip Van Winkle are wholly beyond the reach of Swift.

Irving and other American writers are not the rivals of their British associates in the literature of the English language--they are worthy comrades. Wordsworth and Byron are not Shakespeare and Milton, but they are nevertheless Wordsworth and Byron, and their place is secure. So the brows of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Longfellow, and of Lowell, of Emerson and Hawthorne do not crave the laurels of any other master. The perturbed spirit of _Blackwood_ may rest in the confident assurance that no generous and intelligent student of our literature admires Gibbon less because he enjoys Macaulay, or depreciates Bacon because he delights in Emerson, or denies the sting of Gulliver because he feels the light touch of Knickerbocker. It is with good fame as with true love:

"True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away."

In the year that Irving published the _Sketch Book_, Cooper published his first novel, and two years before Bryant's _Thanatopsis_ had been published. When, forty years afterwards, in the last year of his life, the last volume of the _Life of Washington_ was issued, Irving and Bryant and Cooper were no longer the solitary chiefs of our literature. An illustrious company had received the torch unextinguished from their hands--Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Mrs. Stowe, had all taken their places, yet all gladly and proudly acknowledged Irving as the patriarch. It is our happy fortune that these names, of which we are all proud, are not those of men of letters only, but of typical American citizens. The old traditions of the literary life, the mad roystering, the dissipation, Grub Street, the sponging-house, the bailiff, the garret, and the jail, genius that fawns for place and flatters for hire, the golden talent wrapped in a napkin, and often a dirty and ragged napkin, have vanished in our American annals of letters. Pure, upright, faithful, industrious, honorable, and honored, there is scarcely one American author of eminence who may not be counted as a good and useful citizen of the Republic of the Union, and a shining light of the Republic of Letters.

Of Washington Irving, as of so many of this noble company, it is especially true that the author was the man. The healthy fun and merry satire of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the sweet humor and quick sympathy and simple pathos of Geoffrey Crayon, were those of the modest master of Sunnyside. Every literary man of Irving's time, whether old or young, had nothing but affectionate praise of his artless urbanity and exhaustless good-nature. These qualities are delightfully reflected in Thackeray's stories of him in the _Roundabout Papers_ upon Irving and Macaulay, "the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time".

"He came to one of my lectures in Washington," Thackeray says, "and the retiring President, Mr. Fillmore, and his successor, Mr. Pierce, were present. 'Two kings of Brentford smelling at one rose,' said Irving, with his good-natured smile. In his little bower of a home at Sunnyside he was always accessible. One English newspaper man came and introduced himself, and partook of luncheon with the family, and, while the host fell into a little doze, as was his habit, the wary Englishman took a swift inventory of everything in the house, and served up the description to the British public, including the nap of his entertainer. At another time, Irving said, 'Two persons came to me, and one held me in conversation while the other miscreant took my portrait.'" Thackeray tells these little stories with admiring sympathy. His manly heart always grew tender over his fellow-authors who had no acrid drop in their humor, and Irving's was as sweet as dew.

It is late for a fresh compliment to be paid to him, but the London _Spectator_ paid it in 1883, the year of his centenary, by saying, "Since the time of Pope more than one hundred essayists have attempted to excel or to equal the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_. One alone, in a few of his best efforts, may be said to have rivalled them, and he is Washington Irving." The _Spectator_ adds that one has surpassed them, "the incomparable Elia".

Irving's temperament, however, was much more congenial with that of the early essayists than Charles Lamb's, and his pictures of English country life in _Bracebridge Hall_ have just the delicate, imaginative touch of the sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley. But in treating distinctively English topics, however airy and vivid his touch may be, Irving is manifestly enthralled by his admiration for the literary masters of the Anne time, and by the spirit of their writing. It is in the Knickerbocker world that he is characteristically at home. Indeed, it is his humorous and graphic fancy more than the sober veracity of history which has given popular and perpetual form to the early life of New York, and it is Irving who has enriched it with romantic tradition such as suffuses the story of no other State.

The bay, the river, the city, the Kaatskill Mountains, as Choate said of Faneuil Hall and Webster, breathe and burn of him. He has charmed the Hudson with a peculiar spell. The quaint life of its old Dutch villages, the droll legend of Sleepy Hollow, the pathetic fate of Rip Van Winkle, the drowsy wisdom of Communipaw, the marvellous municipality of New Amsterdam, and the Nose of Anthony guarding the Highlands, with the myriad sly and graphic allusions and descriptions strewn all through his books, have made the river Irving's river, and the state Irving's state, and the city Irving's city, so that the first instinctive question of every lover of Irving from beyond the state, as he enters Central Park and beholds its memorial statues, is, "Where is the statue of Irving?"

Unhappily, echo, and not the park guide-book, answers. There is, indeed, a bust, and, in a general sense, "Si monumentum" may serve for a reply. From that point of view, indeed, Westminster Abbey, as the monument of English heroes in letters and arms, in the Church and the State, would be superfluous. But the abbey is a shrine of pilgrimage because of the very fact that it is the burial-place of famous Englishmen. The Central Park, in New York, is already a Walhalla of famous men, and the statue that would first suggest itself as peculiarly fitting for the Park is of the New-Yorker who first made New York distinctively famous in literature--the New-Yorker whose kindly genius first made American literature respected by the world.

Reversing the question, "Where be the bad people buried?" the wondering pilgrim in the Park asks, "Where be Irving and Bryant and Cooper?" They were not Americans only, but, by birth or choice, New-Yorkers, and the three distinctive figures of our early literature. It was very touching to see the venerable Bryant, in the soft May sunshine, when the statue of Halleck was unveiled, standing with bare head and speaking of his old friend and comrade. But who that listened could not see, through tender mists of years, the grave and reverend form of the speaker himself, transformed to marble or bronze, sitting serene forever beneath the shadowing trees, side by side with the poet of Faust and the worshipper of Highland Mary?

But Bryant would have been the first to name Washington Irving as the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure, reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of the head and almost the twinkling eye, that brisk and jaunty air, that springing step, that modest and gentle and benign presence, all these could be suggested by the artist, and in their happy combination the pleased loiterer would perceive old Diedrich Knickerbocker and the summer dreamer of the Hudson legends, the charming biographer of Columbus and of Goldsmith, the cheerful gossip of Wolfert's Roost, and the mellow and courteous Geoffrey Crayon, who first taught incredulous Europe that beyond the sea there were men also, and that at last all the world must read an American book.

Irving was seventy-six years old when he died, late in 1859. Born in the year in which the Revolution ended, he died on the eve of the civil war. His life exactly covered the period during which the American republic was an experiment. It ended just as the invincible power of free institutions was to be finally demonstrated. His life had been one of singular happiness, both of temperament and circumstance. His nature was too simple and gentle to breed rivalries or to tolerate animosities. Through the sharpest struggles of our politics he passed without bitterness of feeling and with universal respect, and his eyes happily closed before seeing a civil war which, although the most righteous of all wars, would have broken his heart. The country was proud of him: the older authors knew in him not a rival, but a friend, the younger loved him as a father. Such love, I think, is better than fame. On the day of his burial in the ground overlooking the Hudson and the valley of Sleepy Hollow, unable to reach Tarrytown in time for the funeral, I came down the shore of the river which he loved and immortalized. As the train hastened and wound along, I saw the Catskills draped in autumnal mist, not concealing, but irradiating them with lingering and pathetic splendor. Far away towards the south the river-bank on which his home lay was Sunnyside still, for the sky was cloudless and soft with serene sunshine. I could not but remember his last words to me, more than a year before, when his book was finished and his health was failing: "I am getting ready to go; I am shutting up my doors and windows", and I could not but feel that they were all open now, and bright with the light of eternal morning.