MAN OF LETTERS SECOND PERIOD

There is something interesting, and in a sense pathetic, in this sudden steady diligence from the man of desultory habits, who had never written but by whim, whose finger had always been lifted to catch the lightest literary airs. Here, at last, was the firm trade wind, and the satisfaction of steady and methodical progress. The qualified success of the “Tales of a Traveler” had led him to feel that his vein was running out. The prospect of producing a solid work gave him keen pleasure. One cannot be always building castles in the air; why not try a pyramid, if only a little one? Since the world is perfectly delighted with our pretty things, very well, let us show that we can do a sublime thing. As for history “Whatever may be the use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly,” says Walter Bagehot, “it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men. Consider the position of a man of that species. He sits beside a library fire, with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital style every means of saying everything, but nothing to say. Of course he is an able man; of course he has an active intellect, besides wonderful culture: but still, one cannot always have original ideas. Every day cannot be an era; a train of new speculation very often will not be found: and how dull it is to make it your business to write, to stay by yourself in a room to write, and then to have nothing to say! It is dreary work mending seven pens, and waiting for a theory to ‘turn up.’ What a gain if something would happen! then one could describe it. Something has happened, and that something is history.”

There is no doubt that Irving’s early delicate sallies in literature represent his best. In a single department of belles-lettres he had shown mastery. During the remainder of his life he continued to work at intervals in that field with similar felicity; and, for the rest, to write amiably and respectably upon many topics foreign to his natural bent. But his greatest work was done in odd moments and at a heat; all the method in the world could not increase his real stature by a cubit.

A word may perhaps be said here of Irving as an historian and biographer. Of course he could not write dully; his histories are just as readable as Goldsmith’s, and rather more veracious. But he plainly had not the scholar’s training and methods which we now demand of the historian; nor had he the larger view of men and events in their perspective. Generalization was beyond him. Fortunately to generalize is only a part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim historic figure, and give it life and color, this power he had. And it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington had begun to loom vaguely and impersonally in the mind, a mere great man, when Irving with a touch turned him from cold bronze into flesh and blood again.

During the years of Irving’s stay abroad other American writers had come into notice. Bryant’s poetry had become well known. Cooper had produced “The Spy,” “The Pilot,” “The Pioneers,” and “The Last of the Mohicans.” In 1827 appeared the first volume of poems by Edgar Allan Poe. In this year, too, Irving’s diary records a meeting with Longfellow, who was then twenty-one, and came abroad to prepare himself for his professorship at Bowdoin. Longfellow’s recollection of the incident is worth quoting: “I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Irving in Spain, and found the author, whom I had loved, repeated in the man. The same playful humor; the same touches of sentiment; the same poetic atmosphere; and, what I admired still more, the entire absence of all literary jealousy, of all that mean avarice of fame, which counts what is given to another as so much taken from one’s self

“’And trembling, hears in every breeze
The laurels of Miltiades.’”

In the following summer the “History of Columbus” was finished, and sold to Murray. It won high praise from the reviewers, especially from Alexander H. Everett, his former diplomatic chief, and at this time editor of the “North American Review.”

Early in the following year he made his first visit to Andalusian Spain. In the course of his grubbing among the Columbus archives, he had found a good deal of interesting material about the Moorish occupancy. The beauty of the country and the grandeur of its Moorish relics took strong hold upon him. In April, 1828, he settled in Seville, and there the “Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada” were written. By this time the market price of his wares had gone up very much. There is no doubt that his historical work had increased his temporary reputation. Murray gave him 2000 guineas for the “Conquest of Granada;” he further offered him L1000 a year to edit a new literary and scientific magazine, as well as L100 an article for any contribution he might choose to make to the “London Quarterly.” He refused the first offer on the ground that he did not care to be tied in England, the second because the “Quarterly” had always been hostile to America. He continued to take an interest in affairs at home. Impatient as he was of political methods, he had opinions of his own as to candidates and measures. The election of Jackson called forth the following comment in a letter to Mr. Everett: “I was rather sorry when Mr. Adams was first raised to the presidency, but I am much more so at his being displaced; for he has made a far better president than I expected, and I am loth to see a man superseded who has filled his station worthily. These frequent changes in our administration are prejudicial to the country; we ought to be wary of using our power of changing our chief magistrate when the welfare of the country does not require it. In the present election there has, doubtless, been much honest, warm, grateful feeling toward Jackson, but I fear much pique, passion, and caprice as it respects Mr. Adams.

“Since the old general was to be the man, however, I am well pleased upon the whole that he has a great majority, as it will, for the reasons you mention, produce a political calm in the country, and lull those angry passions which have been exasperated during the Adams administration, by the close contest of nearly balanced parties. As to the old general, with all his hickory characteristics, I suspect he has good stuff in him, and will make a sagacious, independent, and high-spirited president; and I doubt his making so high-handed a one as many imagine.”

The “Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada” were well treated by critics, but never very popular. The humor of the mythical Fray Antonio’s narrative was too sly and covert; the public was mystified, and had half a notion it was being made game of. But Irving was not yet done with Granada. Presently he went back, and in the course of a solitary two months in the Alhambra, got together the materials for the most characteristic work he had published since the “Tales of a Traveler” and the strongest since the “Sketch Book.” His idyllic stay in the Alhambra was one of the pleasantest episodes of his life. When it was cut short by his appointment as secretary of legation at London, he made up his mind to leave the quiet breathing-spot with real regret. One cannot help seeing from the tone of his letter to Peter that the years have given him as much as they have taken away: “My only horror is the bustle and turmoil of the world: how shall I stand it after the delicious quiet and repose of the Alhambra? I had intended, however, to quit this place before long, and, indeed, was almost reproaching myself for protracting my sojourn, having little better than sheer self-indulgence to plead for it; for the effect of the climate, the air, the serenity and sweetness of the place, is almost as seductive as that of the Castle of Indolence, and I feel at times an impossibility of working, or of doing anything but yielding to a mere voluptuousness of sensation.”

At London he found himself associated with congenial men, but tied so closely to the legation that he could not even get away to visit his sister at Birmingham. The constraint chafed him at first, but before long his letters show him reconciled, and even interested in the practical business of diplomacy. They complain, however, of his growing stout. This, indeed, he had a perfect right to do. He was now forty-seven years old, and a man of solid reputation; weighty honors were being heaped upon him. Before leaving Spain he had been made a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History; and in England he had just received a medal from the Royal Society of Literature, and the degree of LL. D. from Oxford. His leisure for literary work was not great in London, but he was making some progress with the Alhambra stories, and had begun to think seriously of the “Life of Washington,” which was to hold the main place in his thoughts for the rest of his life.

At this time England was suffering under the double discomfort of cholera and the Reform Bill. A letter from Irving to his brother shows that even in the midst of his successes the popular author was subject to moods of mental gloom, and even to business difficulties: “The restlessness and uncertainty in which I have been kept have disordered my mind and feelings too much for imaginative writing, and I now doubt whether I could get the Alhambra ready in time for Christmas.... The present state of things here completely discourages the idea of publication of any kind. There is no knowing who among the booksellers is safe. Those who have published most are worst off, for in this time of public excitement nobody reads books or buys them.”

In 1831, Van Buren was nominated as Minister to the Court of St. James, and at once took charge of his diplomatic duties. His nomination was rejected by the Senate, however; and Irving determined to take advantage of the incident to make his own escape from the service, and return at last to America.

In May, 1831, he arrived in New York. He had been a young man when he left America; he was now leaning toward the farther verge of his prime. In character he had refined and sobered greatly; and he had more than fulfilled his promise of literary excellence. He had still twenty-six years to live, and was to do much useful service in life and letters; but he could do nothing in that time to alter his reputation; he could merely confirm it. Irving had grown immensely, too, in the favor of his countrymen. He was welcomed back with extravagant effusion by his old friends and by the country at large. He had in fact come to be regarded as one of the chief glories of America; for he had been the first to make her a world-power in literature.

During those seventeen years New York had changed almost beyond recognition in size, in appearance, in the tone of its life; but Irving was delighted with everything and everybody. All that he had to regret was the ordeal of a great public dinner in his honor, at which, after a great deal of preliminary nervousness, he made the one speech of his life. It was a good speech, but he could never be prevailed upon to repeat the experiment. He was always at his worst in a large company. The sight of a great number of unknown or half-known faces confused his thoughts and clogged his tongue. His intimates knew him for a brilliant and ready talker, full of easy fun and unaffected sentiment.

Not long after his return, the “Tales of the Alhambra” were published. In the somewhat florid concert of critical praises which greeted the book, a simple theme is dominant. Everybody felt that in these stories Irving had come back to his own. The material was very different from that of the “Sketch Book,” yet it yielded to similar treatment. The grace, romance, humor, of this “beautiful Spanish Sketch Book,” as the historian Prescott called it, appealed at once to an audience which had listened somewhat coldly to the less spontaneous “Tales of a Traveler,” and had given a formal approbation to the “History of Columbus,” without finding very much Irving in it.

A visit to Washington to clear up various odds and ends of his diplomatic experience resulted in an interview with President Jackson, which he reported in a letter to Peter Irving, now living alone in Paris: “I have been most kindly received by the old general, with whom I am much pleased as well as amused. As his admirers say, he is truly an old Roman to which I could add, with a little dash of the Greek; for I suspect he is as knowing as I believe he is honest. I took care to put myself promptly on a fair and independent footing with him; for, in expressing warmly and sincerely how much I had been gratified by the unsought but most seasonable mark of confidence he had shown me, when he hinted something about a disposition to place me elsewhere, I let him know emphatically that I wished for nothing more that my whole desire was to live among my countrymen, and to follow my usual pursuits. In fact, I am persuaded that my true course is to be master of myself and of my time. Official station cannot add to my happiness or respectability, and certainly would stand in the way of my literary career.” This disinclination to take office he never got over, although he was frequently approached with offers of place. In 1834, he was offered a nomination for Congress by the Jackson party; in 1838, he was offered the Tammany nomination as mayor of New York, and the secretaryship of the navy by Van Buren. And when three years later he was given a still more important post, it was only the evident spontaneity of the choice, and the feeling that in taking the office he should be representing country rather than party, which led him to accept it.

Impatient as he was of political methods, he had opinions of his own on specific questions, and a broad political platform which he once stated in a letter to his old friend Kemble:

“As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican, and attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of my country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no bitterness in my creed. I have no relish for puritans either in religion or politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme, and for overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous career. I have, therefore, felt a strong distaste for some of those loco-foco luminaries who of late have been urging strong and sweeping measures, subversive of the interests of great classes of the community. Their doctrines may be excellent in theory, but, if enforced in violent and uncompromising opposition to all our habitudes, may produce the most distressing effects. The best of remedies must be cautiously applied, and suited to the state and constitution of the patient; otherwise, what is intended to cure, may produce convulsion. The late elections have shown that the measures proposed by Government are repugnant to the feelings and habitudes or disastrous to the interests of great portions of our fellow citizens. They should not, then, be forced home with rigor. Ours is a government of compromise. We have several great and distinct interests bound up together, which, if not separately consulted and severally accommodated, may harass and impair each other. A stern, inflexible, and uniform policy may do for a small compact republic, like one of those of ancient Greece, where there is a unity of character, habits, and interests; but a more accommodating, discriminating, and variable policy must be observed in a vast republic like ours, formed of a variety of states widely differing in habits, pursuits, characters, and climes, and banded together by a few general ties.

“I always distrust the soundness of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow citizens. Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading and financial classes of our country. You yourself know, from education and experience, how important these classes are to the prosperous conduct of the complicated affairs of this immense empire. You yourself know, in spite of all the commonplace cant and obloquy that has been cast upon them by political spouters and scribblers, what general good faith and fair dealing prevails throughout these classes.”

At this time he was studying with increasing interest the shifting spectacle of American life. The openings of the West especially caught his imagination, and when the chance came to travel on what was then the frontier, the trans-Mississippi territories, he was quick to accept it. As guest of one of the members of a commission appointed to treat with several Indian tribes, he went as far as Fort Gibson on the Arkansas. The literary fruits of this journey were “A Tour on the Prairies,” and “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.”

In April, 1833, he bought the little estate of Sunnyside, near the Sleepy Hollow which he had made famous. His first name for it was “The Roost” (Dutch for “Rest"), which he changed for reasons which are not recorded; possibly the little nieces who became regular inmates may have thought the old name not dignified enough. This he regarded as his home for the rest of his life. He set to work at once to enlarge the old Dutch stone cottage which stood upon the place; and from this time on he is continually “puttering” about the estate, building a poultry-yard here, planting trees there, with the full zeal of the rural landlord. His family letters are given to accounts of little country doings: “The goose war is happily terminated: Mr. Jones’ squadron has left my waters, and my feathered navy now plows the Tappan Sea in triumph. I cannot but attribute this great victory to the valor and good conduct of the enterprising little duck, who seems to enjoy great power and popularity among both geese and ganders, and absolutely to be the master of the fleet.... I am happy to inform you that, among the many other blessings brought to the cottage by the good Mr. Lawrence is a pig of first-rate stock and lineage. It has been duly put in possession of the palace in the rear of the barn, where it is shown to every visitor with as much pride as if it was the youngest child of a family. As it is of the fair sex, and in the opinion of the best judges a pig of peerless beauty, I have named it ‘Fanny.’ I know it is a name which with Kate and you has a romantic charm, and about the cottage everything, as old Mrs. Marthing says, must be romance.” This was during the vogue of Fanny Kemble.

In this quiet retreat the next five uneventful years were passed, with occasional excursions to New York or farther, which only served to make the seclusion of the country home more inviting. Peter Irving spent his last days at the Roost; and Ebenezer Irving and his family gave up their New York house to make their home with the now famous brother. While this arrangement greatly increased Irving’s satisfaction in life, it made heavy demands upon his purse. One cannot be a country gentleman for nothing. The cottage had to be enlarged repeatedly, the grounds cared for; and the mere running expenses were a considerable matter for a man without dependable income. Irving had by this time received a great deal of money for his books, but an unfortunate “knack of hoping” had locked up most of it in unprofitable land speculations.

In 1835 the three volumes of the “Crayon Miscellanies,” were published. The “Tour on the Prairies” was especially palatable to Americans. Edward Everett said of it, in the highly colored style of the period: “We are proud of Mr. Irving’s sketches of English life, proud of the gorgeous canvas upon which he has gathered in so much of the glowing imagery of Moorish times. We behold with delight his easy and triumphant march over these beaten fields; but we glow with rapture as we see him coming back, laden with the poetical treasures of the primitive wilderness, rich with spoil from the uninhabited desert.”

The second volume, containing “Abbotsford” and “Newstead Abbey,” naturally gained special praise in England; the third, “Legends of the Conquest of Spain,” had comparatively little success.

Of “Astoria” (1836) it is hard to know what to say; on the whole, it seems the most doubtful of his works in motive and quality. John Jacob Astor, now an old man, was anxious to perpetuate the fame of his commercial exploits, and was lucky enough to subsidize for this purpose the most prominent American writer of the day. The adventures of the various expeditions sent out to found an American trading company on the Pacific coast are interesting; but one puts down Irving’s account of them with the feeling that it reflects rather more credit on Mr. Astor than on the writer. The truth is, Irving, like many less successful literary men, was constantly in need of money; and he had begun to be in some difficulty for subjects upon which to exercise his craft. The “Adventures of Captain Bonneville” (1837) was also a piece of skillful book-making rather than an original creative work; and after that nearly two years passed without his writing anything.

At last, toward the close of 1838, he hit upon a subject which attracted him greatly a “History of the Conquest of Mexico.” He began at once upon preliminary studies, and had made considerable progress when he learned by chance that Prescott, who had recently made a name for himself by his “Ferdinand and Isabella,” was at work upon the same subject. Irving immediately retired from the field, and conveyed a courteous assurance to Prescott of his satisfaction in leaving the theme to such hands. He felt this sacrifice keenly, however; the project had appealed to him peculiarly, and he had no other in mind to take its place. For lack of other literary work, therefore, he presently engaged to write a monthly article for the New York “Knickerbocker,” at a salary of $2000 a year. The arrangement was just not too irksome to continue for two years.

It is easy to see, then, that at fifty-five Irving was pretty well written out. In the twenty years that remained to him he produced nothing of account except the “Life of Washington,” which, like his other works in biography and history, may be regarded as a tour de force rather than a spontaneous outcome of his genius.