WASHINGTON IRVING

(1783-1859)

BY EDWIN W. MORSE

WASHINGTON IRVING belongs the title of the Founder of American Literature. Born while the British troops were still in possession of his native city, New York, and overtaken by death a year before Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, he represents a span of life from Revolutionary days to a period well remembered by men now of middle age. Before his day American literature was theological and political,- the outgrowth of the great questions of Church and State which the settlement of the colonies and the rupture with the mother country gave rise to. The only considerable venture in belles-lettres had been made by Charles Brockden Brown, whose romances published in the turn of the century were highly praised in their day, but are now unread.

Irving loved literature for its own sake, and not as a means to the attainment of some social, moral, or political end; and this trait differentiates him sharply from his predecessors. When he began to write, the field of letters was unoccupied. His first book had been published eight years when Bryant's Thanatopsis' appeared in the North American Review; and it was three years later before Cooper's first novel, 'Precaution,' was published. His position in American literature is thus unique, and will always remain so.

The qualities which were most characteristic of his work were sentiment and humor; and these acquired a high literary value through the graceful, varied, and finished form in which they were cast. The source of the keen literary sense that revealed itself in him in early life, and that was highly developed even before he attained his majority, is not easily traced. It was however a powerful impulse, and persisted in shaping his character and in controlling his destiny, despite his half-hearted efforts to acquire a taste for the law, and later for commercial pursuits. To its influence moreover is attributable his aloofness from the political and other public life of his time, which seems somewhat singular in a man of his imaginative, emotional temperament, when one remembers the stormy period in which his youth and early manhood were passed. When he was beguiled

against his inclination to take some part in local politics, he spent the first day, true to his real nature, in hunting for "whim, character, and absurdity" in the crowd in which he found himself. From this early time onward, whatever was eccentric or strongly individual in human nature had a remarkable fascination for his alert, observing mind. Apparently however the politics of the day did not yield the material that he sought, nor were the associations of political life agreeable to one of his fastidious tastes. For after a brief experience he writes: "Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business; and if patriotism is such a dirty virtue - prythee, no more of it." This sentiment had its spring in no lack of loyalty to his country, but rather in his physical repugnance to the unwashed political workers" of his day and to familiar intercourse with them.

Irving's detachment from the public affairs of his time was further illustrated in a somewhat amusing manner during his first visit to Europe. When he reached France, Napoleon's conquest of Italy and his assumption of the title of Emperor were on every tongue. Contemporary greatness, however, which subsequent events were to bring to a much more striking perspective than was within the scope of his vision at this time, had no attraction for the young American traveler. His sole anxiety was to see, not Napoleon, but the tomb of Laura at Avignon; and great was his disappointment to find that the monument had been destroyed in the Revolution. "Never," he breaks out, "did the Revolution and its authors and its consequences receive a more hearty and sincere execration than at that moment. Throughout the whole of my journey I had found reason to exclaim against it, for depriving me of some valuable curiosity or celebrated monument; but this was the severest disappointment it had yet occasioned." This purely literary view of the greatest event of modern times is significant of Irving's attitude of mind towards the political and social forces which were changing the boundaries of kingdoms and revolutionizing society. He had reached his majority; but the literary associations of the Old World were of infinitely more moment to him than the overthrow of kings and the warrings of nations.

A partial, but only a partial, explanation of this literary sense which young Irving possessed can be found in his ancestry. It did not, one may be sure, come from the side of his father, who was a worthy Scotchman of good family, a native of one of the Orkney Islands. William Irving had passed his life on or near the sea, and was a petty officer on an armed packet when he met in Falmouth the girl who was to become his wife and the author's mother. Mrs. Irving was a woman of much beauty and of a lovely disposition, and she exerted a great influence upon the character of the son. The

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desire to wander far afield which pursued Irving through a large part of his life may also be traced, it seems to me, to the parent stock, which must have been saturated with the adventurous spirit of a seafaring life. This impulse made itself felt when Irving was very young; for in the account which the author of the Sketch Book' gives of himself, he admits that he "began his travels when a mere child, and made many tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of his native city, to the frequent alarm of his parents and the emolument of the town crier." As Irving was born on April 3d, 1783, his parents having been residents of New York for about twenty years, we may believe that these youthful escapades took place when the boy was perhaps six or eight years old; say a year or two after Washington began his first term as President. The lad possessed from an early age, in addition to this roving tendency, a romantic, emotional, imaginative temperament, which invested with a special interest for him every spot in or near his native town that had become celebrated through fable or by a tragedy in real life.

The New York through which the lad, brimful of gay spirits and of boundless curiosity, wandered, was a town devoted exclusively to commerce, of fewer than twenty-five thousand inhabitants. It was confined within narrow limits. An excursion from the Irving home in William Street, about half-way between Fulton and John Streets, to what is now Chambers Street, must have brought the venturesome youth into the fields and among country houses. The educational facilities of the town were meagre, and young Irving had little taste for study. Rather than go to school, he preferred to loiter around the wharves and dream of the far distant lands whence the ships with their odorous cargoes had come; while in the evening he would steal away to the theatre in company with a companion of about his own age, James K. Paulding, with whom some years later he was to make his first literary venture. He liked to read books of voyages and romances, like 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Sindbad,' much better than the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' which his father, then a deacon in the Presbyterian church, gave him for his Sunday perusal. Two of his brothers- he was the youngest of a family of eight boys-had been sent to Columbia College, but Washington was not a student. Textbooks were repugnant to him; and lacking the faculty of application and concentration, he never made much headway with routine studies, although he acquired a little knowledge of Latin in addition to the ordinary branches of learning. He was a saunterer and a dreamer," did not like to study, and had no ambition to go to college.

As the years were slipping by, and as it was plainly necessary for him to prepare himself for some work in life, young Irving entered a law office. But the dry routine of reading law proved to be very