The American Spirit in Literature Part 2

CHAPTER IV. THE REVOLUTION

If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America between the pa.s.sage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of the Const.i.tution in 1787, we perceive that it is a literature of discord and pa.s.sion.

Its spirit is not that of "one united people." Washington could indeed declare in his "Farewell Address" of 1796, "With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles"; yet no one knew better than Washington upon what a slender thread this political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had been to foresee the end from the beginning.

It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action rather than reflection, of the turning of many separate currents into one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together,"

runs Franklin's well-known witticism in Independence Hall, "or, most a.s.suredly, we shall all hang separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor!

And that homely, cheery, daring sentence gives the keynote of much of the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in the state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson.

We can only glance in pa.s.sing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their new home in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national life and literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues are never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork of the road.

There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of controversy--members, in Crevecoeur's touching words, of the "secret communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace, what must I do?" asks Crevecoeur in his "Letters from an American Farmer." "I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I am no longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many watchings." Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American adventure which he described so captivatingly in his chapter ent.i.tled "What is an American"--was ending tragically in civil war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose "Journal," praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends.

The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip Freneau bear the sub-t.i.tle, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the men of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like Francis Hopkinson's "Battle of the Kegs," a Hudibrastic satire like Trumbull's "McFingal," or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's "Columbia." Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins, the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There was patriotic verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and it reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more perfectly conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political essay. The immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor British bards of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to verse-writing, but endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly.

The reader of Burton E. Stevenson's collection of "Poems of American History" can easily compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events of the Revolution with the modern verse upon the same historic themes. He will see how slenderly equipped for song were most of the later eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavorable to poetry was the tone of that hour.

Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry.

"An old college mate of mine," said James Madison--who was by tradition Freneau's roommate at Princeton in the cla.s.s of 1771--"a poet and man of literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world." When but three years out of college, the cautious Madison wrote to another friend: "Poetry wit and Criticism Romances Plays &c captivated me much: but I begin to discover that they deserve but a moderate portion of a mortal's Time and that something more substantial more durable more profitable befits our riper age." Madison was then at the ripe age of twenty-three! Professor Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes these words to ill.u.s.trate the "common sense" atmosphere of the age which proved fatal to Freneau's development. Yet the st.u.r.dy young New Yorker, of Huguenot descent, is a charming figure, and his later malevolence was shown only to his political foes. After leaving Princeton he tries teaching, the law, the newspaper, the sea; he is aflame with patriotic zeal; he writes, like most American poets, far too much for his own reputation.

As the editor of the "National Gazette" in Philadelphia, he becomes involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to the cause of the French Revolution makes him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. By and by he retires to a New Jersey farm, still toying with journalism, still composing verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in the War of 1812; but the public has now forgotten him. He lives on in poverty and seclusion, and in his eightieth year loses his way in a snowstorm and perishes miserably--this in 1832, the year of the death of the great Sir Walter Scott, who once had complimented Freneau by borrowing one of his best lines of poetry.

It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by the Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory expression of the thought and feeling of that generation. Its typical literature is civic rather than aesthetic, a sort of writing which has been incidental to the accomplishing of some political, social, or moral purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. James Otis's argument against the Writs of a.s.sistance in Ma.s.sachusetts in 1761, and Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, mark epochs in the emotional life of these communities. They were reported imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an a.s.sessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and then have perished beyond resurrection.

Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly "literary" rating because their surviving words are obviously inadequate to account for the popular effect of their speeches, it is still possible to measure the efficiency of the pamphleteer. When John Adams tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel united," we must take his word for the impression which Otis's oratory left upon his mind.

But John Adams's own writings fill ten stout volumes which invite our judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor" of his hyperboles need not blind us to his real literary excellencies, such as clearness, candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged, "difficult"

person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age, and his latest letters and journals are full of whimsical charm.

John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted, tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political pa.s.sions followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to the casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be breathing the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly obvious as a good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance of the European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions of the House of Representatives of Ma.s.sachusetts in 1765, "that there are certain essential rights of the British const.i.tution of government which are founded in the law of G.o.d and nature and are the common rights of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of the Colonists (1772) we are a.s.sured that "among the natural rights of the colonists are these, First, a right to Life; secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property....

All men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please... . When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent."

Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more fiercely demagogic.

"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting, but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in 1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of his endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his eyes," and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him as an "ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position on the "Pennsylvania Magazine." Before he had been a year on American soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our political literature, "Common Sense," which appeared in January, 1776. "A style hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Randolph.

Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt American frontiersman who was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's death. "The Crisis," a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion that the "American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington." Paine, who was now serving in the army, might have heard his own words, "These are the times that try men's souls," read aloud, by Washington's orders, to the ragged troops just before they crossed the Delaware to win the victory of Trenton. The best known productions of Paine's subsequent career, "The Rights of Man" and "The Age of Reason," were written in Europe, but they were read throughout America. The reputation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy and to shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor which transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and clear as a trumpet.

Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his literary services to the Revolution are less likely to be underestimated than Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish speech in "the Fields" of New York City in 1774 and with "The Farmer Refuted," a reply to Samuel Seabury's "Westchester Farmer." They were continued in extraordinary letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation.

Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new Const.i.tution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788.

Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles of the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the "Federalist." These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature "Publius" in two New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, 1788, owed their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than half of them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial Whig literature of England, and in political theory they have little in common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been considering.

The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but neither warmed by pa.s.sion nor colored by the individual emotions of the author. The "Federalist"

remains a cla.s.sic example of the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed as to the past, confident--but not reckless--of the future. Many Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of political thinking has been steadying and sound.

In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill, but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and reserved George Washington says of the Const.i.tution of 1787: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair; the event is in the hand of G.o.d." The whole personality of the great Virginian is back of that simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a national anthem.

One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century, pa.s.sed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act.

When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was still writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We cannot dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better than by quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in September, 1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth century, but it is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep human feeling: "If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be a.s.sured, that, so long as I retain my memory, you will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your sincere friend, George Washington."

There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary age, the author of words more widely known around the globe than any other words penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes the latest of his successors in the Presidency, "was not a man of the people, but he was a man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of generous power come from the people." On his father's side Jefferson came from sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a Virginia Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the "little mountain"--Monticello--where he built a mansion for his bride and where he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, gray-eyed, gifted boy was reputed the best shot, the best rider, the best fiddle-player in the county. He studied hard at William and Mary over his Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, but he also frequented the best society of the little capital. He learned to call himself a Deist and to theorize about ideal commonwealths. There was already in him that latent radicalism which made him strike down, as soon as he had the power, two of the fundamental principles of the society into which he was born, the principle of entailed property and that of church establishment.

Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp Act. In the ten years of pa.s.sionate discussion which followed, two things became clear: first, that there had long existed among the colonists very radical theoretical notions of political freedom; and second, that there was everywhere a spirit of practical conservatism.

Jefferson ill.u.s.trates the union of these two tendencies.

He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He was only thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of 1774, "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" which had been published in England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics.

Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the "Address of the Virginia House of Burgesses." For these reasons he was placed at the head of the Committee for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger over the familiar circ.u.mstances of its composition. Everybody knows how Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first draft, how the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which proceeded to cut out about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin tried to comfort the writhing author with his cheerful story about the sign of John Thompson the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the charge of lack of originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy Pickering and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at intervals ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned neither to book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before." O wise young man, and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that crisis, to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized facts and accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite of him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan reading and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering called a "commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two years before," into an immortal manifesto to mankind.

Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical, dealing with "self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination of stubborn facts by general principles, its decent respect to the opinions of mankind, its stately and n.o.ble utterance of national sentiments and national reasons to a "candid world."

It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during the last decades--to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase about governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Editors and congressmen and even college professors have proclaimed themselves unable to a.s.sent to these phrases of the Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors belong partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on to define them--"whose languid fibres have more a.n.a.logy with a pa.s.sive than an active state of things." Other objectors to the phrase "all men are created equal" have had an obvious personal or political motive for refusing a.s.sent to the proposition. But "no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's biographers, "has ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except intentionally."

n.o.body would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for all the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that.

It is simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free society" which no democracy can safely disregard.

Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the touch of popular forces, ill.u.s.trates the process by which the Virginia mind of 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is needless here to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his sweetness of spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of money, his love for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern men," he wrote to Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about Greek and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster before the fire-place of Monticello than he ever was in the presidential chair. His correspondence was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. In his theories of education he was fifty years ahead of his time; in his absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of it. "I am not one of those who fear the people," he declared proudly. It is because of this touching faith, this invincible and matchless ardor, that Jefferson is today remembered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in the inarticulate common people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to his name as a type and symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves," wrote Jefferson, and with the people themselves is the depository of his fame.

CHAPTER V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP

The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, was Edward Everett. Although only thirty-two he was already a distinguished speaker. In the course of his oration he apostrophized John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as venerable survivors of that momentous day, fifty years earlier, which had witnessed our Declaration of Independence.

But even as Everett was speaking, the aged author of the Declaration breathed his last at Monticello, and in the afternoon of that same day Adams died also, murmuring, it is said, with his latest breath, and as if with the whimsical obstinacy of an old man who hated to be beaten by his ancient rival, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." But Jefferson was already gone.

On the first of August, Everett commemorated the career of the two Revolutionary leaders, and on the following day a greater than Everett, Daniel Webster, p.r.o.nounced the famous eulogy in Faneuil Hall. Never were the thoughts and emotions of a whole country more adequately voiced than in this commemorative oratory. Its pulse was high with national pride over the accomplishments of half a century. "I ask," Everett declared, "whether more has not been done to extend the domain of civilization, in fifty years, since the Declaration of Independence, than would have been done in five centuries of continued colonial subjection?" Webster a.s.serted in his peroration: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of."

Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American oratory and soon to be satirized in "Martin Chuzzlewit"? Or was it prompted by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast changes that had come over American life since 1776? The external changes were familiar enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of seemingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the development of roads, ca.n.a.ls, and manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of the new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy.

But this energy was inadequately expressed by the national literature.

The more cultivated Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It was confessed by the pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded "The North American Review." British critics in "The Edinburgh" and "The Quarterly," commenting upon recent works of travel in America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil.

Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics, declared in 1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature.... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?"

Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has outlived all of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking it, London was eagerly reading Irving's "Sketch Book." In 1821 came Fenimore Cooper's Spy and Bryant's "Poems," and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in his rolling orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no more, the London and Paris booksellers were covering their stalls with Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new phase of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification of these men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a younger company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of Hawthorne, one of the number, "to write books that would be read in England." For by 1826 Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and were trying to learn to write. Ticknor, Prescott, and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were settling to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon his duties as a minister. Edgar Allan Poe, at that University of Virginia which Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising "Tamerlane and Other Poems" which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first published poem in the Newburyport "Free Press." Walt Whitman was a barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century England would be interested in American books.

The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave "Picture of New York." To read Irving's chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain New Yorkers were slow to see the joke.

Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the Revolution, of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was pleasantly idle, with a little random education, much theater-going, and plentiful rambles with a gun along the Hudson River. In 1804 he went abroad for his health, returned and helped to write the light social satire of the "Salmagundi Papers," and became, after the publication of the "Knickerbocker History," a local celebrity. Sailing for England in 1815 on business, he stayed until 1832 as a roving man of letters in England and Spain and then as Secretary of the American Legation in London. "The Sketch Book," "Bracebridge Hall," and "Tales of a Traveler"

are the best known productions of Irving's fruitful residence in England. The "Life of Columbus," the "Conquest of Granada," and "The Alhambra" represent his first sojourn in Spain. After his return to America he became fascinated with the Great West, made the travels described in his "Tour of the Prairies," and told the story of roving trappers and the fur trade in "Captain Bonneville" and "Astoria."

For four years he returned to Spain as American Minister. In his last tranquil years at Sunnyside on the Hudson, where he died in 1859, he wrote graceful lives of Goldsmith and of Washington.

Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but little of that personal quality to which he owes his significance as an interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a narrow, hard, Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter about town when New York was only a big slovenly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire and sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood and youth were pa.s.sed in that period of Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United States in some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry Adams and McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education, religion, and art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of the nascent nation toward Great Britain was intensified by the War of 1812.

The Napoleonic Wars had threatened to break the last threads of our friendship for France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era of national self-a.s.sertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon the older civilizations represented by Virginia and Ma.s.sachusetts. The self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this moment came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt that they ought to know one another better and to like one another more.

That was Irving's service as an international mediator. He diffused sweetness and light in an era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It was a triumph of character as well as of literary skill.

But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb. Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise.

It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and sound style upon fresh American material. In "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson, and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the exquisite fitness of the language to the images and ideas which Irving desired to convey. To render the Far West of that epoch this style is perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but when used as Irving uses it in describing Stratford and Westminster Abbey and an Old English Christmas, it becomes again a perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for "Our Old Home," and Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across the Atlantic and home again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said, as Englishmen would have liked to write about it. When he described the Alhambra and Granada and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie, which revealed to the world the quick American appreciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its key is sympathy.

Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during the middle of the century in his own country, for the strongest New England authors taught the public to demand more thought and pa.s.sion than were in Irving's nature. Possibly the nervous, journalistic style of the twentieth century allows too scanty leisure of mind for the full enjoyment of the Knickerbocker flavor. Yet such changes as these in literary fashion scarcely affect the permanent service of Irving to our literature. He immortalized a local type--the New York Dutchman--and local legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of the narrative essay to create something almost like the perfected short story of Poe and Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an age when charm was lacking; and, if he had no message, it should be remembered that some of the most useful amba.s.sadors have had none save to reveal, with delicacy and tact and humorous kindness, the truth that foreign persons have feelings precisely like our own.

Readers of Sir Walter Scott's "Journal" may remember his account of an evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in the height of his European reputation. "So the Scotch and American lions took the field together," wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous.

"The Last of the Mohicans," then just published, threatened to eclipse the fame of "Ivanhoe." Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger than the Wizard of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than he knew. For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula for the novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural story-tellers.

Scott had the richer mind and the more fully developed historical imagination. Both were out-of-doors men, lovers of manly adventure and of natural beauty. But the American had the good fortune to be able to utilize in his books his personal experiences of forest and sea and to reveal to Europe the real romance of the American wilderness.

That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities of this romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of Philadelphia, a disciple of the English G.o.dwin, had tried his hand at the very end of the eighteenth century upon American variations of the Gothic romance then popular in England. Brown had a keen eye for the values of the American landscape and even of the American Indian. He had a knack for pa.s.sages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs, murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove. But he had read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of the art of fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an expert in the art of eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages of his American Indian stories, "Atala" and "Rene," the mystery and enchantment of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden Brown, is feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper, like Scott, is masculine.