WASHINGTON IRVING was the author who first gave American literature a place in the European Washington mind. Readers in England and on the Irving, 1783-1859. Continent had heard an occasional faint echo of American theological controversies; a few students of philosophy had taken the trouble to read Jonathan Edwards; many had followed the course of transatlantic oratory and polit ical writing; and Benjamin Franklin had been received by scholars, scientists, and diplomatists as their peer, perhaps their superior. But before Irving no American writer had been read as a representative of literature, pure and simple. Irving wrote books, not theological treatises, political arguments, speeches, or scientific papers; and these books were accepted by English readers at even more than their real value. Their writer possessed the qualities which well fitted him to be a literary pioneer. He was loyal to the soil and traditions of his own country, yet quick to assimilate the customs and characteristics of other lands; he first made distinctly American themes familiar to the world of letters, and he, also, in England and Spain, collected romantic treas

ures which had escaped the eye of earlier narrators. He was influenced by a humor and pathos which were genuine, and he was deeply read in the eighteenth-century writers of England—particularly the essayists—whose style he was able to absorb or reproduce in such a way as to continue the literary traditions of preceding years. His range was wide, covering essay, fiction, history, biography, travel; now he was tenderly pathetic, now broadly humorous. His external English style was fairly entitled to be called Addisonian, and he easily surpassed Charles Lamb in evenness of execution. Behind all that he did, appeared his own serene, happy, and wellbalanced character. If we do not carry the parallel too far, we may characterize him as the George Washington of American literature.

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For these reasons Irving was long deemed the first American writer, in merit as well as in time. The renown of Hawthorne or Emerson in later overshadowed his own; and the severer critics found in Irving's stories fancy rather than imagination. It may justly be said that as a romantic historian Irving must yield to Prescott; of the philosophy of history he had little idea; and his full life of Washington and his charming biography of Goldsmith are not literature of the first class. Even in his justly-praised style there is an element of artificiality and of attitudinizing graciousness, which annoys the nineteenth-century reader, and which is hardly a mark of the large literary manner. Washington Irving is not the greatest American author, but he was a man who did our literature

a noteworthy service, whose pioneer work was admirable, and whose high renown, in his lifetime and since, was deserved. Why criticise one great writer because he has not the qualities of another? or why attempt to assign him a precise numerical rank?

Does an author create his literary surroundings, at least in part, and shape his own career, or is he created by those surroundings, and shaped by circumstance, time, and environment? Neither theory can be followed to the extreme; but of Irving it may be said that he was moulded by his birth and situation, and also formed in large measure the literary conditions which he shared. Of British parentage (his father Scotch and his mother English), he was born in New York in the year of the treaty of peace between England and the United States, after the Revolution. The first conspicuous American author was neither a Puritan nor a Southron; the local tone of his American writings is that of New York City and the Hudson. His religious element, so far as it exists, is that of placid, oldfashioned Episcopacy, undisturbed by modern thought" or any special idea of progress. The American elements of vigor, push, independence, high creative ambition, are lacking in Irving the author, as they were lacking in Irving the man. In literature and in life he was the genial conservative. Washington "blessed" his namesake in New York, when Irving was a baby; and the Washingtonian courtesy and contented reserve always characterized Irving, without the dogged and self-reliant persistency of the first President.

Irving's education was obtained neither at Harvard nor Yale; and his parents did not choose to His Early send him, perhaps against his will, to Colum

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bia, the college of his brothers,-then, as now, virtually an advanced school for New Yorkers only. He was a great reader, and duly went to school, but the culture he afterward showed so conspicuously in his writings was self-acquired as indeed all culture must be. He early began to scribble, both in prose and verse; literary precocity was then common; but his first writings were less meritorious than those of Bryant and Longfellow, both of whom were brilliant boys. Irving, like Bryant and Longfellow, thought to study law, but the unwise intention was soon abandoned. Peter Irving, his brother, was the editor of the New York Morning Chronicle, to which, in 1802, Washington contributed letters over the signature of Jonathan Oldstyle. Those were the days of newspaper pseudonymous essays; these letters by Irving were of a class familiar in London for seventy-five years. They satirized town faults and foibles, spoke a good word for manliness of character, and discussed the theatrical condition and ephemera in general. They have not been preserved in the complete editions of Irving, and merely showed his "bent," which was clearly to be that of an eighteenth-century essayist, with such wider range of labor as newer times made necessary. A sickly and apparently consumptive youth, Irving walked much in the open air, thereby developing his local patriotism, and his familiarity with New York and the Hudson region. These pedestrian

tours failed to restore his health, and at twenty-one he was sent to Europe. His tour was like that which so many English university men had been accustomed to take, ever since the days of Chaucer. France was first visited, then Italy. He was an observer rather than a student, but he was already beginning to profit by literary society and conversation with men of culture. Before he left America he had met Charles Brockden Brown, the earliest American novelist; and in Rome he walked and talked with Washington Allston, one of the earliest American painters, also, in after years, a poet and novelist. Young Irving, quitting Rome, and abandoning a whimsical idea of becoming a painter like Allston, next went to Paris, the Netherlands, and London, thence again home.

The European wanderings of a young man-even of a young author-are too common to concern the literary historian. But in Irving's case the "grand tour" was an important thing. That new creature, the American author, was getting his education; the crude Westerner was becoming a citizen of the world. To see Mrs. Siddons and Kemble; to talk with the greatest of talkers, Madame de Staël; to tread the pavement of Westminster Abbey or St. Peter's; to gaze on Vesuvius and the Coliseum,-all this was a new experience for an American, and to Irving was a great benefit. Nowadays, our Europe is everywhere; then it had to be visited if one would assimilate any part of it. He had not, as yet, visited that Spain of which he was to become so ardent an admirer in after years; but he had got breadth of