Literary and Social Essays Part 8

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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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, d.a.m.nation 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 c.r.a.pe. 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 a.s.sociate 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

"G.o.d 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 fis.h.i.+ng-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 pa.s.sed two years in travelling. Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor, and at war with England, and the young American, despite his pa.s.sport, 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 pa.s.s through the strait, looking for the French s.h.i.+ps; 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 Was.h.i.+ngton Allston, and almost resolved to be a painter. In Paris he saw Madame de Stael, 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. f.a.n.n.y 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 b.u.mper, 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 n.o.body, 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 c.u.mbrous 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 ill.u.s.trated. 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 c.o.c.ked 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 pa.s.sengers 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 surpa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.sociated 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 coa.r.s.e 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."

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 st.u.r.dy beggar who asked General Jackson to give him the mission to France, and finally came down to a request for an old coat, well ill.u.s.trates 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed in New York, Philadelphia, and Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.