Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II.

Various

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II

There is a freshness about the fame and the character of Mr. Irving, no less than about his writings, which enables us to contemplate them with unabated delight. Few men are so identified personally with their literary productions, or have combined with admiration of their genius such a cordial, home-like welcome in the purest affections of their readers. We never become weary with the repetition of his familiar name; no caprice of fashion tempts us to enthrone a new idol in place of the ancient favorite; and even intellectual jealousies shrink back before the soft brilliancy of his reputation. In the present Number of our Magazine, we give our readers a portrait of the cherished author, with a sketch of his sunny residence, which we are sure will be a grateful memorial of one, to whom our countrymen owe such an accumulated fund of exquisite enjoyments and delicious recollections. We will not let the occasion pass without a few words of recognition, though conscious of no wish to indulge in criticisms which at this late day might appear superfluous.

The position of Mr. Irving in American literature is no less peculiar than it is enviable. With the exception of Mr. Paulding, none of our eminent living authors have been so long before the public. He commenced his career as a writer almost with the commencement of the present century. The first indications of his rich vein of humor and invention that appeared through the press, were contained in the Jonathan Oldstyle Letters, published in the Morning Chronicle in 1802, when he was in the twentieth year of his age. His health at this time having become seriously impaired, he spent a few years in European travel, and soon after his return in 1806, he wrote the sparkling papers in Salmagundi, which at once decided his position as a shrewd observer of society, a pointed and vigorous satirist, a graphic delineator of manners, and a quaint moral teacher, whose joyous humor graciously attempered the bitterness of his wit. It was not, however, till the appearance of Knickerbocker, that his unique powers, in this respect, were displayed in all their vernal bloom, giving the promise of future golden harvests, which has since been more than redeemed in the richness and beauty of the varied productions of his genius.

The lapse of years has brought no cloud over the early brightness of Mr. Irving's fame. He has sustained his reputation with an elastic vigor that shows the soundness of its elements. At the dawn of American letters, he was acknowledged to possess those enchantments of style, that betray the hand of a master. His rare genius captivated all hearts. His name was identified by our citizens with the racy chronicles of their Dutch ancestors, and soon became associated with local recollections and family traditions. Born in a quarter of the town, whose original features have passed away before the encroachments of business, he has witnessed the growth of his fame with the growth of the city. The memory of Diedrich Knickerbocker is now immortalized at the corners of the streets, and in our most crowded thoroughfares. Even the dusty haunts of Mammon are refreshed with the emblems of a man of genius who once trod their pavements.

With his successive publications, a new phase of Mr. Irving's intellectual character was displayed to the public, but with no decrease of the admiration, which from the first had stamped him as a universal favorite. The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, and Tales of a Traveler revealed a magic felicity of description, with a pathetic tenderness of sentiment, that gave a still more mellow beauty to his composition; while his elaborate historical work, The Life of Columbus, established his reputation for unrivaled skill in sustaining the continuous interest of a narrative, and in grouping its details with admirable picturesque effect. His later productions, illustrative of Indian life, and his still more recent works on the history of Mahomet and the biography of Goldsmith, are marked with the characteristic traits of the author, proving that his right hand has lost none of its cunning, nor his tongue aught of its mellifluous sweetness.

It is highly creditable to the tastes of the present generation, that Mr. Irving retains, to such a remarkable degree, his wonted ascendency. Other authors of acknowledged eminence have arisen in various departments of literature, since he won his earlier laurels, and many of them since he has ceased to be a young man, but they have not enticed the more youthful class of readers from the allegiance which was paid to him by their fathers. The monarch that knew not Joseph has not yet ascended the throne. Indeed many of the most true-hearted admirers of Mr. Irving were not born until long after the Sketch Book had made his name a household word among the tasteful readers of English literature. This enduring popularity could not spring from any accidental causes. It must proceed from those qualities in the author, which are the pledge of a permanent fame. If a foretaste of literary immortality is desirable on earth, we may congratulate Mr. Irving on the possession of one of its most significant symbols, in the unfading brilliancy of his reputation for little less than half a century.

We have already alluded to the use made by Mr. Irving of the historical legends of our country. Nor is this his only claim on the American heart. He is peculiarly a national writer. He has sought his inspirations from the woods and streams, the lakes and prairies of his native land. No poet has been more successful in throwing the spell of romance around our familiar scenery. Under his creative pen the lordly heights of the Hudson have become classic ground. The beings of his weird fancy have peopled their forest dells, and obtained a "local habitation" as permanent as the river and the mountains. His love of country is a genial passion, inspired by the reminiscences of his youth, and quickened by the studies of his manhood. He is proud of his birthright in a land of freedom. His protracted residence abroad has never seduced him from the ardor of his first attachment to the American soil. His favorite writings are pervaded with this spirit. Yet he betrays none of the prejudices of national pride. His patriotism is free from all tincture of bigotry. He scorns the narrowness of exclusive partialities. With genuine cosmopolitan tastes, he gathers up all that is precious and beautiful in the traditions, or manners, or institutions of other lands, finding materials for his gorgeous pictures in the ancestral glories of English castles, and the splendid ruins of the Alhambra, as well as in the quaint legends of Manhattan, and the adventures of trapper life in the Far West. This singular universality has given him the freedom of the whole literary world. As he every where finds himself at home, his fame is not the monopoly of any nation. He has his circle of admirers around the hearth-stones of every cultivated people. Even the English, who are slow to recognize a melody in their own language when spoken by a transatlantic tongue, have vied with his countrymen in rendering homage to his genius. His evident mastery, even in those departments of composition which have been the favorite sphere of the most popular English writers, has softened the asperity of criticism, and won a genial admiration from the worshipers of Addison, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie. In this respect Mr. Irving stands alone among American writers. Cherished with a glow of affectionate enthusiasm by his own countrymen, he has secured a no less beautiful fame among myriads of readers, with whom his sole intellectual tie is the spontaneous attraction of his genius.

His universality is displayed with equal strength in the influence which he exerts over all classes of minds. He has never been raised to a factitious eminence by the applauses of a clique. His fame is as natural and as healthy as his character, owing none of its lustre to the gloss of flattery, or the glare of fashion. His themes have been taken, to a great extent from common life. He has derived the coloring of his pictures from the universal sentiments of humanity. He is equally free from cold, prosaic, common-place hardness of feeling and from sickly and mawkish effeminacy. He loves to deal with matters of fact, but always surrounds them with the light of his radiant imagination. He exalts and glorifies the actual, without losing it in the clouds of a vaporous ideal. Refined and fastidious in feeling, he retains his sympathy with the most homely realities of life, chuckles over the luscious comforts of a Dutch ménage, and professes no philosophical indifference to the savor of smoking venison in an Indian lodge. With the curious felicity of his style, he uses no strange and far-fetched words. Its charm depends on the beauty of its combinations, not on the rarity of its language. He employs terms that are in the mouths of the people, but weaves them up into those expressive and picturesque forms that never cease to haunt the memory of the reader. Accordingly, he is cherished with equal delight by persons of every variety of culture. His fascinating volumes always formed a part of the traveling equipage of one of the most celebrated New-England judges, and they may be found with no less certainty among the household goods of the emigrant, and the resources for a rainy day on the frugal shelves of the Yankee farmer. They still detain the old man from his pillow, and the schoolboy from his studies. Under their potent charm, the merchant forgets his Wall-street engagements; the preacher lingers over their seductive sentences till the Sunday becomes an astonishment; the statesman is beguiled into oblivion of the salvation of his country; and the advocate is absorbed in the fortunes of some "roystering varlet," till his own forlorn client loses all chance of recovering his character.

The writings of Mr. Irving are no less distinguished by the truthfulness and purity of their moral tone, than by their delightful humor, and their apt delineations of nature and society. It is small praise to say that he never panders to a vicious sentiment, that he makes no appeal to a morbid imagination, and has written nothing to encourage a false and effeminate view of life. His merits, in this respect, are of a positive character. No one can be familiar with his productions, without receiving a kindly and generous influence. His goodness of heart communicates a benignant contagion to his readers. His mild and beautiful charity, his spirit of wise tolerance, the considerateness and candor of his judgments, the placable gentleness of his temper, and the just appreciation of the infinite varieties of character and life are adapted to mitigate the harshness of the cynic, and even to quell the wild furies of the bigot. His sharpest satire never degenerates into personal abuse. It seems the efflorescence of a rich nature, susceptible to every shade of the ludicrous, rather than the overflow of a poisonous fountain, spreading blight and mildew in its course. If he laughs at the follies of the world, it is not that he has any less love for the good souls who commit them, but that with his exuberant good-nature he has no heart to use a more destructive weapon than his lambent irony. With his fine moral influence, he never affects the sternness of a reformer. He is utterly free from all didactic pedantry. We know nothing that he has written with a view to ethical effect. He reveals his own nature in the sweet flow of his delicate musings, and if he does good it is with delightful unconsciousness. He would blush to find that he had been useful when he aimed only to give pleasure, or rather to relieve his own mind of its "thick coming fancies."

In describing the position of Mr. Irving in the field of American literature, we have incidentally touched upon the characteristics of his genius, to which he is indebted for his high and enviable fame. We need not expand our rapid sketch into a labored analysis. Indeed every just criticism of his writings would only repeat the verdict that has so often been pronounced by the universal voice.

Nor is it exclusively as a writer that Mr. Irving has won such a distinguished place in the admiration of his countrymen. While proud of his successes in the walks of literature, they have regarded his personal character with affectionate delight, and lavished the heartfelt sympathies on the man which are never paid to the mere author. The purity of this offering is the more transparent, as Mr. Irving has never courted the favor of the public, nor been placed in those relations with his fellow-men, that are usually the conditions of general popularity. He has wisely kept himself apart from the excitements of the day; with decided political opinions, he has abstained from every thing like partisanship; no one has been able to count on his advocacy of any special interests; and with his singular fluency and grace of expression in written composition, he has never affected the arts of popular oratory. His habits have been those of the well-educated gentleman – neither cherishing the retirement of the secluded student, nor seeking a prominence in public affairs – throwing a charm over the social circles which he frequented by the brilliancy of his intellect, the amenity of his manners, and the ease of his colloquial intercourse – but never surrounded by the prestige of factitious distinction by which so many inferior men obtain an ephemeral notoriety. His appointment as Minister to Spain has been his sole official honor; and this was rather a tribute to his literary eminence than the reward of political services. On his return from Europe in 1832, after an absence of nearly twenty years, he was received with a spontaneous welcome by his fellow-citizens, such as has been seldom enjoyed by the most successful claimants of popular favor; and from that time to the present, no one has shown a more undisputed title to the character of the favorite son of Manhattan. In his beautiful retreat at Sunnyside, "as quiet and sheltered a nook as the heart of man could desire in which to take refuge from the cares and troubles of this world," he listens to the echoes of his fame, cheered by the benedictions of troops of friends, and enjoying the autumn maturity of life with no mists of envy and bitterness to cloud the purple splendors of his declining sun.

It is understood that Mr. Irving is now engaged in completing the Life of Washington, a work of which he commenced the preparation before his residence in Europe as Minister to the Spanish Court. We are informed that it will probably be given to the public in the course of another season. It can not fail to prove a volume of national and household interest. The revered features of the Immortal Patriot will assume a still more benignant aspect, under the affectionate and skillful touches of the congenial Artist. With his unrivaled power of individualization, his practiced ability in historical composition, and his acute sense of the moral perspective in character, he will present the illustrious subject of his biography in a manner to increase our admiration of his virtues, and to inspire a fresh enthusiasm for the wise and beneficent principles of which his life was the sublime embodiment. There is a beautiful propriety in the still more intimate connection of the name of Washington Irving with that of the Father of his Country. It is meet that the most permanent and precious memorial of the First Chief of the American Republic should be presented by the Patriarch of American Letters. It would be a fitting close of his bright career before the public – the melodious swan-song of his historic Muse.

The birthplace of Mr. Bryant, in a secluded and romantic spot among the mountains of western Massachusetts, seems to have been selected by Nature as a fit residence for the early unfolding of high poetic genius. Situated on the forest elevations above the beautiful valley of the Connecticut in the old county of Hampshire, surrounded by a rare combination of scenery, in which are impressively blended the wild and rugged with the soft and graceful, adorned in summer with the splendors of a rapid and luxuriant vegetation, in winter exposed to the fiercest storms from the northwest which bury the roads and almost the houses in gigantic snow-drifts, inhabited by a hardy and primitive population which exhibit the peculiar traits of New England character in their most salient form, the little town of Cummington has the distinction of giving birth to the greatest American poet.

It was here that he was first inspired with a sense of the glory and mystery of Nature – first learned to "hold communion with her visible forms," and to lend his ear to her "various language" – first awoke to the consciousness of the "vision and the faculty divine," which he has since displayed in such manifold forms of poetic creation. It was under the shadow of his "native hills" —

"Broad, round, and green, that in the summer skyWith garniture of waving grass and grain,Orchards, and beechen forests basking lie,While deep the sunless glens are scooped betweenWhere brawl o'er shallow beds the streams unseen" —

in the "groves which were God's first temples," where the "sacred influences"

"From the stilly twilight of the place,And from the gray old trunks, that high in heavenMingled their mossy boughs, and from the soundOf the invisible breath, that swayed at onceAll their green tops, stole over him" —

that the spirit of the boy-poet was touched with the mystic harmonies of the universe, and received those impressions of melancholy grandeur from natural objects, which pervade the most characteristic productions of his genius.

Mr. Bryant's vocation for poetry was marked at a very early age. The history of literature scarcely affords an example of such a precocious, and, at the same time, such a healthy development. His first efforts betray no symptoms of a forced, hot-bed culture, but seem the spontaneous growth of a prolific imagination. They are free from the spasmodic forces which indicate a morbid action of the intellect, and flow in the polished, graceful, self-sustaining tranquillity, which is usually the crowning attainment of a large and felicitous experience. Among his earliest productions were several translations from different Latin poets, some of which, made at ten years of age, were deemed so successful, as to induce his friends to publish them in the newspaper of a neighboring town. These were followed by a regular satirical poem, entitled "The Embargo," written during the heated political controversies concerning the policy of Mr. Jefferson, many of whose most strenuous opponents resided at Northampton (at that time the centre of political and social influence to a wide surrounding country), and from the contagion of whose intelligence and zeal, the susceptible mind of the young poet could not be expected to escape. This was published in Boston, in 1808, before the author had completed his fourteenth year. Its merits were at once acknowledged; it was noticed in the principal literary review of that day; it was read with an eagerness in proportion to the warmth of party spirit; and, indeed, so strong was the impression which it made on the most competent judges, that nothing but the explicit assertions of the friends of the writer could convince them of its genuineness. It seemed, in all respects, too mature and finished a performance to have proceeded from such a juvenile pen. This point, however, was soon decided, and if any remaining doubts lingered in their minds, they might have been removed by the production of "Thanatopsis," which was written about four years after, when the author was in the beginning of his nineteenth year.

This remarkable poem was not published until 1816, when it appeared in the North American Review, then under the charge of Mr. Dana, who has himself since attained to such a signal eminence among the poets and essayists of America, and between whom and Mr. Bryant a singular unity of intellectual tastes laid the foundation for a cordial friendship, which has been maintained with a warmth and constancy in the highest degree honorable to the character of both parties. Meanwhile, Mr. Bryant had established himself in the profession of the law, in the beautiful village of Great Barrington, exchanging the mountain wildness of his native region, for the diversified and singularly lovely scenery of the Housatonic Valley, where he composed the lines "To Green Elver," "Inscription for an entrance to a Wood," "To a Waterfowl," and several of his other smaller poems, which have since hardly been surpassed by himself, and certainly not by any other American writer.

The "Thanatopsis," viewed without reference to the age at which it was produced, is one of the most precious gems of didactic verse in the whole compass of English poetry, but when considered as the composition of a youth of eighteen, it partakes of the character of the marvelous. It is, however, unjust to its rich and solemn beauty to contemplate it in the light of a prodigy. Nor are we often tempted to revert to the singularity of its origin, when we yield our minds to the influence of its grand and impressive images. It seems like one of those majestic products of nature, to which we assign no date, and which suggest no emotion but that of admiration at their glorious harmony.

The objection has been made to the "Thanatopsis," that its consolations in view of death are not drawn directly from the doctrines of religion, and that it in fact makes no express allusion to the Divine Providence, nor to the immortality of the soul. These ideas are so associated in most minds with the subject matter of the poem, that their omission causes a painful sense of incongruity. But the writer was not composing a homily, nor a theological treatise. His imagination was absorbed with the soothing influences of nature under the anticipation of the "last bitter hour." In order to make the contrast more forcible, the poem opens with a cold and dreary picture of the common destiny. Earth claims the body which she has nourished; man is doomed to renounce his individual being and mingle with the elements; kindred with the sluggish clod, his mould is pierced by the roots of the spreading oak. The sun shall no more see him in his daily course, nor shall any traces of his image remain on earth or ocean.

But the universality of this fate relieves the desolation of the prospect. Nature imparts a solace to her favorite child, glides into his darker musings with mild and healing sympathy, and gently counsels him not to look with dread on the mysterious realm, which is the final goal of humanity. No one retires alone to his eternal resting-place. No couch more magnificent could be desired than the mighty sepulchre in which kings and patriarchs have laid down to their last repose. Every thing grand and lovely in nature contributes to the decoration of the great tomb of man. The dead are every where. The sun, the planets, the infinite host of heaven, have shone on the abodes of death through the lapse of ages. The living, who now witness the departure of their companions without heed, will share their destiny. With these kindly admonitions, Nature speaks to the spirit when it shudders at the thought of the stern agony and the narrow house.

The stately movement of the versification, the accumulated grandeur of the imagery, the vein of tender and solemn pathos, and the spirit of cheerful trust at the close, which mark this extraordinary poem, render it more effective, in an ethical point of view, than volumes of exhortation; while, regarded as a work of art, the unity of purpose with which its leading thought is presented under a variety of aspects, gives it a completeness and symmetry which remove the force of the objection to which we have alluded.

In a similar style of majestic thought is the "Forest Hymn," from which we can not refrain from quoting an inimitable passage, descriptive of the alternation between Life and Death in the Universe, which seems to us to open the heart of the mystery with a truthfulness of insight that has found expression in language of unsurpassable energy.

"My heart is awed within me, when I thinkOf the great miracle that still goes onIn silence, round me – the perpetual workOf thy creation, finish'd, yet renew'dForever. Written on thy works, I readThe lesson of thy own eternity.Lo! all grow old and die – but see, again,How on the faltering footsteps of decayYouth presses – ever gay and beautiful youth,In all its beautiful forms. These lofty treesWave not less proudly that their ancestorsMoulder beneath them. O, there is not lostOne of earth's charms: upon her bosom yet,After the flight of untold centuries,The freshness of her far beginning lies,And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle hateOf his arch-enemy, Death – yea, seats himselfUpon the tyrant's throne – the sepulchre,And of the triumphs of his ghastly foeMakes his own nourishment. For he came forthFrom thine own bosom, and shall have no end."

The soft and exquisite beauty of the lines entitled "To a Waterfowl" is appreciated by every reader of taste. They belong to that rare class of poems which, once read, haunt the imagination with a perpetual charm. A more natural expression of true religious feeling than that contained in the closing stanzas, is nowhere to be met with.