Complete Fictional Works of Washington Irving (Illustrated) (490 page)

It was at the same resort of fashion and disease that Irving observed a phenomenon upon which Brevoort had commented as beginning to be noticeable in America.

“Your account [he writes of the brevity of the old lady’s nether garments] distresses me.... I cannot help observing that this fashion of short skirts must have been invented by the French ladies as a complete trick upon John Bull’s ‘woman-folk.’ It was introduced just at the time the English flocked in such crowds to Paris. The French women, you know, are remarkable for pretty feet and ankles, and can display them in perfect security. The English are remarkable for the contrary. Seeing the proneness of the English women to follow French fashions, they therefore led them into this disastrous one, and sent them home with their petticoats up to their knees, exhibiting such a variety of sturdy little legs as would have afforded Hogarth an ample choice to match one of his assemblages of queer heads. It is really a great source of curiosity and amusement on the promenade of a watering-place to observe the little sturdy English women, trudging about in their stout leather shoes, and to study the various ‘understandings’ betrayed to view by this mischievous fashion.”

The years passed rather wearily in England. Peter continued to be an invalid, and Washington himself, never robust, felt the pressure more and more of the irksome and unprosperous business affairs. Of his own want of health, however, he never complains; he maintains a patient spirit in the ill turns of fortune, and his impatience in the business complications is that of a man hindered from his proper career. The times were depressing.

“In America [he writes to Brevoort] you have financial difficulties, the embarrassments of trade, the distress of merchants, but here you have what is far worse, the distress of the poor — not merely mental sufferings, but the absolute miseries of nature: hunger, nakedness, wretchedness of all kinds that the laboring people in this country are liable to. In the best of times they do but subsist, but in adverse times they starve. How the country is to extricate itself from its present embarrassment, how it is to escape from the poverty that seems to be overwhelming it, and how the government is to quiet the multitudes that are already turbulent and clamorous, and are yet but in the beginning of their real miseries, I cannot conceive.”

The embarrassments of the agricultural and laboring classes and of the government were as serious in 1816 as they have again become in 1881.

During 1817 Irving was mostly in the depths of gloom, a prey to the monotony of life and torpidity of intellect. Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds occasionally. The Van Wart household at Birmingham was a frequent refuge for him, and we have pretty pictures of the domestic life there; glimpses of Old Parr, whose reputation as a gourmand was only second to his fame as a Grecian, and of that delightful genius, the Rev. Rann Kennedy, who might have been famous if he had ever committed to paper the long poems that he carried about in his head, and the engaging sight of Irving playing the flute for the little Van Warts to dance. During the holidays Irving paid another visit to the haunts of Isaac Walton, and his description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party on the banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was still sensitive to the allurements of life; and liable to wander over the “dead-line” of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day in Elysium. “When we had descended from the last precipice,” he says, “and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant meadow — then — fancy me, oh, thou ‘sweetest of poets,’ wandering by the course of this romantic stream — a lovely girl hanging on my arm, pointing out the beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating in the most dulcet voice tracts of heaven-born poetry. If a strawberry smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it must feel as I felt at that moment.” Indeed, the letters of this doleful year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be attributed to the author of the “Sketch-Book.”

The death of Irving’s mother in the spring of 1817 determined him to remain another year abroad. Business did not improve. His brother-in-law Van Wart called a meeting of his creditors, the Irving brothers floundered on into greater depths of embarrassment, and Washington, who could not think of returning home to face poverty in New York, began to revolve a plan that would give him a scanty but sufficient support. The idea of the “Sketch-Book” was in his mind. He had as yet made few literary acquaintances in England. It is an illustration of the warping effect of friendship upon the critical faculty that his opinion of Moore at this time was totally changed by subsequent intimacy. At a later date the two authors became warm friends and mutual admirers of each other’s productions. In June, 1817, “Lalla Rookh” was just from the press, and Irving writes to Brevoort: “Moore’s new poem is just out. I have not sent it to you, for it is dear and worthless. It is written in the most effeminate taste, and fit only to delight boarding-school girls and lads of nineteen just in their first loves. Moore should have kept to songs and epigrammatic conceits. His stream of intellect is too small to bear expansion — it spreads into mere surface.” Too much cream for the strawberry!

Notwithstanding business harassments in the summer and fall of 1817 he found time for some wandering about the island; he was occasionally in London, dining at Murray’s, where he made the acquaintance of the elder D’Israeli and other men of letters (one of his notes of a dinner at Murray’s is this: “Lord Byron told Murray that he was much happier after breaking with Lady Byron — he hated this still, quiet life”); he was publishing a new edition of the “Knickerbocker,” illustrated by Leslie and Allston; and we find him at home in the friendly and brilliant society of Edinburgh; both the magazine publishers, Constable and Blackwood, were very civil to him, and Mr. Jeffrey (Mrs. Renwick was his sister) was very attentive; and he passed some days with Walter Scott, whose home life he so agreeably describes in his sketch of “Abbotsford.” He looked back longingly to the happy hours there (he writes to his brother): “Scott reading, occasionally, from ‘Prince Arthur;’ telling border stories or characteristic ancedotes; Sophy Scott singing with charming ‘naivete’ a little border song; the rest of the family disposed in listening groups, while greyhounds, spaniels, and cats bask in unbounded indulgence before the fire. Everything about Scott is perfect character and picture.”

In the beginning of 1818 the business affairs of the brothers became so irretrievably involved that Peter and Washington went through the humiliating experience of taking the bankrupt act. Washington’s connection with the concern was little more than nominal, and he felt small anxiety for himself, and was eager to escape from an occupation which had taken all the elasticity out of his mind. But on account of his brothers, in this dismal wreck of a family connection, his soul was steeped in bitterness. Pending the proceedings of the commissioners, he shut himself up day and night to the study of German, and while waiting for the examination used to walk up and down the room, conning over the German verbs.

In August he went up to London and cast himself irrevocably upon the fortune of his pen. He had accumulated some materials, and upon these he set to work. Efforts were made at home to procure for him the position of Secretary of Legation in London, which drew from him the remark, when they came to his knowledge, that he did not like to have his name hackneyed about among the office-seekers in Washington. Subsequently his brother William wrote him that Commodore Decatur was keeping open for him the office of Chief Clerk in the Navy Department. To the mortification and chagrin of his brothers, Washington declined the position. He was resolved to enter upon no duties that would interfere with his literary pursuits.

This resolution, which exhibited a modest confidence in his own powers, and the energy with which he threw himself into his career, showed the fiber of the man. Suddenly, by the reverse of fortune, he who had been regarded as merely the ornamental genius of the family became its stay and support. If he had accepted the aid of his brothers, during the experimental period of his life, in the loving spirit of confidence in which it was given, he was not less ready to reverse the relations when the time came; the delicacy with which his assistance was rendered, the scrupulous care taken to convey the feeling that his brothers were doing him a continued favor in sharing his good fortune, and their own unjealous acceptance of what they would as freely have given if circumstances had been different, form one of the pleasantest instances of brotherly concord and self-abnegation. I know nothing more admirable than the lifelong relations of this talented and sincere family.

Before the “Sketch-Book” was launched, and while Irving was casting about for the means of livelihood, Walter Scott urged him to take the editorship of an anti-Jacobin periodical in Edinburgh. This he declined because he had no taste for politics, and because he was averse to stated, routine literary work. Subsequently Mr. Murray offered him a salary of a thousand guineas to edit a periodical to be published by himself. This was declined, as also was another offer to contribute to the “London Quarterly” with the liberal pay of one hundred guineas an article. For the “Quarterly” he would not write, because, he says, “it has always been so hostile to my country, I cannot draw a pen in its service.” This is worthy of note in view of a charge made afterwards, when he was attacked for his English sympathies, that he was a frequent contributor to this anti-American review. His sole contributions to it were a gratuitous review of the book of an American author, and an explanatory article, written at the desire of his publisher, on the “Conquest of Granada.” It is not necessary to dwell upon the small scandal about Irving’s un-American’ feeling. If there was ever a man who loved his country and was proud of it; whose broad, deep, and strong patriotism did not need the saliency of ignorant partisanship, it was Washington Irving. He was, like his namesake, an American, and with the same pure loyalty and unpartisan candor.

The first number of the “Sketch-Book” was published in America in May, 1819. Irving was then thirty-six years old. The series was not completed till September, 1820. The first installment was carried mainly by two papers, “The Wife” and “Rip Van Winkle:” the one full of tender pathos that touched all hearts, because it was recognized as a genuine expression of the author’s nature; and the other a happy effort of imaginative humor, one of those strokes of genius that recreate the world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was an old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea. A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.

The “Sketch-Book” created a sensation in America, and the echo of it was not long in reaching England. The general chorus of approval and the rapid sale surprised Irving, and sent his spirits up, but success had the effect on him that it always has on a fine nature. He writes to Leslie: “Now you suppose I am all on the alert, and full of spirit and excitement. No such thing. I am just as good for nothing as ever I was; and, indeed, have been flurried and put out of my way by these pufflngs. I feel something as I suppose you did when your picture met with success, — anxious to do something better, and at a loss what to do.”

It was with much misgiving that Irving made this venture. “I feel great diffidence,” he writes Brevoort, March 3, 1819, “about this reappearance in literature. I am conscious of my imperfections, and my mind has been for a long time past so pressed upon and agitated by various cares and anxieties, that I fear it has lost much of its cheerfulness and some of its activity. I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion among our American writers at present. I have preferred addressing myself to the feelings and fancy of the reader more than to his judgment. My writings may appear, therefore, light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians. But if they possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work. I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle and Frenchhorn.” This diffidence was not assumed. All through his career, a breath of criticism ever so slight acted temporarily like a boar-frost upon his productive power. He always saw reasons to take sides with his critic. Speaking of “vanity” in a letter of March, 1820, when Scott and Lockhart and all the Reviews were in a full chorus of acclaim, he says: “I wish I did possess more of it, but it seems my curse at present to have anything but confidence in myself or pleasure in anything I have written.”

In a similar strain he had written, in September, 1819, on the news of the cordial reception of the “Sketch-Book” in America:

“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 completely overwhelmed me. They go far, far beyond my most sanguine expectations, and indeed are expressed with such peculiar warmth and kindness as to affect me in the tenderest manner. The receipt of your letter, and the reading of some of the criticisms this morning, have rendered me nervous for the whole day. I feel almost appalled by such success, and fearful that it cannot be real, or that it is not fully merited, or that I shall not act up to the expectations that may be formed. We are whimsically constituted beings. I had got out of conceit of all that I had written, and considered it very questionable stuff; and now that it is so extravagantly be praised, I begin to feel afraid that I shall not do as well again. However, we shall see as we get on. As yet I am extremely irregular and precarious in my fits of composition. The least thing puts me out of the vein, and even applause flurries me and prevents my writing, though of course it will ultimately be a stimulus.... “I have been somewhat touched by the manner in which my writings have been noticed in the ‘Evening Post.’ I had considered Coleman as cherishing an ill-will toward me, and, to tell the truth, have not always been the most courteous in my opinions concerning him. It is a painful thing either to dislike others or to fancy they dislike us, and I have felt both pleasure and self-reproach at finding myself so mistaken with respect to Mr. Coleman. I like to out with a good feeling as soon as it rises, and so I have dropt Coleman a line on the subject. “I hope you will not attribute all this sensibility to the kind reception I have met to an author’s vanity. I am sure it proceeds from very different sources. Vanity could not bring the tears into my eyes as they have been brought by the kindness of my countrymen. I have felt cast down, blighted, and broken-spirited, and these sudden rays of sunshine agitate me more than they revive me. I hope — I hope I may yet do something more worthy of the appreciation lavished on me.”