Irving's sketch book

Prefatory Note

Five essays, originally included in The Sketch Book, have been omitted from this edition because, for one reason or another, they seem to lack interest for young people. The questions and comments accompanying the explanatory notes are neither exhaustive nor very systematic; the purpose of them is merely to direct attention to main essentials and thereby to awaken some appreciation of Irving's qualities as a writer. All footnotes are Irving's. The material for the biographical sketch has been drawn chiefly from The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, by his nephew, Pierre M. Irving, and from the works on Irving by Charles Dudley Warner. Acknowledgment Is due to other editions for helpful suggestions.

A. W. L.

Contents

Introduction page

I. living's Life and Works ix

II. The Sketch Book xxv

Introduction

IRVING'S LIFE AND WORKS

The first American man of letters, Washington Irving, was born in New York City on the third of April, 1783, the closing year of the American Revolution. " Washington's work is ended," the mother said, *' and the child shall be named after him." Irving's parents came from Great Britain : his father, a descendant of an old and honorable Scottish family, from the Orkney Islands; his mother from Falmouth in Cornwall. The boy grew up under favoring influences. If the father's sense of rectitude, in which there was much of the Covenanter's stern godliness, made his son feel the wickedness of all that was pleasant, it implanted also ideals of strict integrity; and the austerity of home discipline was softened by the affectionate sympathy of an intelligent mother. Moreover, the entire family, which included eight brothers and sisters, was marked for talent and intellectual Interest. This Intellectual strain in the family partly explains why Irving, growing to manhood In New York, where his father and brothers were engaged In business, was so little influenced by the strong commercial spirit that existed in the city.

Irving was a handsome and attractive boy, affectionate,

X Introduction

full of high spirits, fond of activity and adventure. His lively disposition often led him into mischievous pranks, which caused his mother some passing concern, but he always acknowledged his fault with open straightforwardness. He seems not to have been precocious: indeed, toward his studies he was somewhat indolent and neglectful, so that his formal education was brief and desultory. On the other hand, he showed early a ready ease in writing and a great fondness for reading. This reading was of the sort that appealed to his imagination — chiefly works of adventurous travel in which he discovered the fascination of the world abroad. Robinson Crusoe, Sindbad the Sailor, and not least, The World Displayed, — a collection of voyages and travels — all of which he read and read again, sometimes in bed at forbidden hours, by the light of a secreted candle, filled him with a longing to see the world. With this longing in his heart, he would wander, he tells us, about the pier heads, and, watching the ships go out to distant ports, would waft himself in imagination to the ends of the earth.

To us it might seem that this desire could be but slightly satisfied by a trip up the Hudson River, but in Irving's boyhood such a journey was a real voyage, and to his fancy the Highlands of the Hudson were a distant country, " a realm of wonder and enchantment." In 1800 he made the trip in a sailing vessel from New York to Albany. The effect produced upon his mind by these travels, recalled in the pictures of later years, should not be lightly passed over, for they are among the most formative influences of his life. '' My heart," he once wrote, " would ever revert to them with a filial feeling, and a recurrence of the joyous associations of boyhood ; and such recollections are, in fact, the true fountains of youth which keep the heart from growing old."

Irvlng's Life and Works xl

Irvlng's formal schooling was, as we have seen, somewhat slight. For a time he had intended to follow his brothers, Peter and John, to Columbia College, but, having little inclination to the drudgery of study, he abandoned this purpose, and, when he was sixteen, began the study of law. This too he soon found distasteful, and, his power of application becoming impaired by ill health, he made little progress. He read much, however, of that which suited his taste, and before long tried his hand successfully at authorship. When he was nineteen, he wrote for the New^ York Morning Chronicle, his brother Peter's paper, a series of articles in which, over the signature " Jonathan Oldstyle," he criticised the manners of the town. These papers, though some may still be read with amusement, have little significance now beyond the fact that they reveal the author's early literary tendency. But at the time they were published — a time, it must be remembered, of great literary dearth in America — they made considerable impression and enjoyed no little popularity.

When Irving was twenty-one, before he could complete his studies for the bar, his health suffered so serious a breakdown that his brothers sent him abroad to recuperate. After a voyage of six weeks, he landed in Bordeaux, and proceede^l from there through France to Genoa, Sicily, and Rome. The young traveler, his favorite wish gratified at last, was an eager observer of all that he saw, and, for a time, kept a journal, in which he recorded, sometimes with graphic detail, his impressions of persons, manners, and scenes. Nor was the journey without adventure. At Nice he was detained by the officials on the ground of a suspicious passport. While bound from Genoa to Messina, his ship was boarded by pirates, " a motley crew with rusty cutlasses in their hands and pistols and stilettos xii Introduction

in their belts." And if there was not often peril, there were often discomfort and annoyance arising from bad roads and dirty inns; but with characteristic buojancy of spirit Irving took all things as they came. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these travels, as Charles Dudley Warner notes, was the readiness with which this young man of twenty-one, born and reared in a city distinctly devoid of artistic and intellectual culture, adapted himself to the conditions of the Old World — its traditions and atmosphere, its art, its cultivated social life. During his sojourn he became acquainted with many people, some of them persons of distinction, and found an easy footing in society. At Rome he met for the first time Washington Allston, an American painter, and under the glamour of the city's artistic atmosphere and the influence of the artist's attractive personality, felt a strong but transitory desire to turn painter himself. After proceeding from Rome to Paris and thence to London, he embarked for home. An absence of a year and a half abroad had quite restored his health.

Upon his return to New York he resumed his legal studies, but, in spite of increased vigor, with hardly greater energy than before. His liking for the profession was small, and social distractions were many. He was a welcome guest, both in his own and other cities, for he was personally very attractive, and enjoyed moreover some literary reputation and what was then the rather unusual distinction of having traveled in foreign lands. At home he became one of a set of young fellows who, without being vicious, affected to be ''sad dogs," and were given to boisterous convivial gatherings at the taverns. That he finally passed his examination for the bar seems to have been due to the leniency of the examination rather than to the extent of his legal knowledge.

Irvlng's Life and Works xill

When he had acquired the title to a profession, he did not practice it. At this point of his career he might well have caused his father and his brothers some misgivings for his future. He was twenty-four years old, and so far had led a desultory, not to say rather idle life, distinguished chiefly by an aptitude for society. He had acquired, it is true, some valuable culture through reading and travel, but, on the other hand, he seemed clearly averse to the exactions of definite occupation, and he had not shown that he was capable of earning a livelihood. He made a faint effort to secure a political office, <vhich did not meet with success. Just at this point, though he could by no means bring himself to decide upon writing as a profession, he made a second excursion into literature. In conjunction with his brother Peter and James K. Paulding, he undertook the publication of Salmagundi, a series of essays satirizing the theaters and certain aspects of New York life. These papers ran for twenty numbers, from January, 1807, until January, 1808. Undertaken by the authors with hardly any other object than their own amusement, they met with instant and more than local success, and were imitated in other cities. There is danger of setting too high an estimate upon Irving's contributions to this periodical ; w hile his own estimate, that they were merely pardonable as a juvenile production, would seem too low. The amusement we derive from reading them now is due to something more than the sheer impudence of the critical assumption and the sheer youthfulness of the fun ; they contain some passages of genuine humor, in which it is not difficult to detect the author's future quality. At any rate. Salmagundi accomplished something toward further discovering and developing Irving's abilities as a writer.

In a few months after the final issue he was busy with

XIV Introduction

another work, which of itself is sufficient to place him among the great humorists in our literature. This was the Knickerbocker History of New York. It was originally conceived by Irving and his brother Peter as a burlesque satire on the pompous pedantry displayed in Dr. Samuel Mitchell's A Picture of New York, which had just appeared; and in accordance with this purpose the authors collected a large volume of notes which they intended to exhibit in the spirit of mock learning. When the work was well under way, business compelled Pet^r to leave for Europe, and the task of finishing the book fell upon Washington alone. This was a fortunate circumstance, for Peter, who, to be sure, was not lacking in ability to write, possessed no such happy gift of humor as his brother. Washington altered the original plan, reducing the mass of learned notes and confining the historical period to the time of the Dutch governors. When the book was completed, the public was prepared for its reception by an ingenious bit of advertising. Several announcements were published, declaring that " a small, elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat, by the name of Knickerbocker " had disappeared from his lodgings, leaving behind him " a very curious kind of written book," which would be sold to pay his rent. The book appeared in December, 1809. It is amusing to imagine the amazement of those who, having expected a serious history, found only a mock-heroic satire of the early Dutch governors and of the engaging peculiarities of Dutch manners and character. Some of the descendants of these worthies were at first deeply offended, so that Irving was for a time threatened with exclusion from society. Others had the wit to see the jest at their own expense; and as for those who had no prejudices to wound, their delight was without bounds. In Europe the History found its

Irvlng's Life and Works xv

first keenly appreciative reader in Sir Walter Scott, who discovered in it humor like that of Dean Swift and Laurence Sterne. When he read it aloud to the members of his family, they laughed until their sides were sore. As a piece of pure humor, it remains Irving's masterpiece, though the style is not his best; it remains also one of America's best humorous creations.

Irving finished the History under the shadow of a great bereavement. In April, 1809, Matilda Hoffman, to whom he was engaged to be married, died in her eighteenth year. " Though not a dazzling beauty," says Irving's biographer, " she is described as lovely in person and mind, of the most gentle and engaging manners, and with a sensibility that mingled gracefully w^ith a delicate and playful humor." Whether his fidelity to an early love is the sole reason why Irving never married does not seem perfectly clear, for it is certain that he afterward became strongly attached to Emily Foster, with whom he became acquainted in Dresden in 1822. However this may be, the effect of his loss upon his sensitive spirit was deep and lasting, passing into a tender and sacred memory and imparting to his mind a cast of pensive melancholy. He could never afterward endure the mention of Miss Hoffman's name. He constantly kept by him her Bible and prayer-book; and after his death there were found among his effects a beautiful miniature, a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper, on which he had written the words, " Matilda Hoffman." The influence of this sorrow upon his writing is shown in the tender melancholy which pervades certain passages and which occasionally, as in parts of Rural Funerals and a passage in St. Mark's Eve in Bracebridge Hall, takes the form of distinct reminiscence.

As has oeen noticed, literature as a profession had so far offered little attraction to Irving, and the success of xvl Introduction

the Knickerbocker History did not immediately inspire him to further effort with his pen. Even with the leisure afforded him by his brothers, who generously offered him a virtually inactive partnership in their business, he produced little. He contributed to the Analectic Magazine of Philadelphia, — of which, for a time, he was also \ editor, — a few biographies of naval heroes and some sketches, two of which, Traits of Indian Character and Philip of Pokanoketj he afterwards incorporated in The Sketch Book, Yet he was not wholly idle in other ways. When the War of 1812 threatened trade, he went to Washington several times to look after the business interests of his brothers and other New York merchants. During the war, incensed by the vandalism of the British soldiers at Washington, he enlisted as aide and military secretary to Governor Tompkins of New York. Beyond visiting some of the camps on the frontier, he took no part in active service. He might have entered the regular army but for the close of the war.

In 18 1 5 Irving took an important step for his career. His old desire for travel began to stir strongly within him again. Accordingly, believing that leisure was warranted by the apparently flourishing condition of his brothers' business, he set sail for Europe, " in search of novelty and excitement " and ready *' to spread his sails wheresoever any vagrant breeze might carry him." Soon after his arrival in Liverpool, he found the affairs of the firm in so serious a state, because of his brother Peter's illness, that, giving over his first purpose, he set himself to the drudgery of putting the accounts in order. For three years he devoted himself to these uncongenial tasks. Fortunately he was able to find relief in several excursions in England, Scotland, and Wales, from which he gleaned some valuable literary material. He also made

Irvlng's Life and Works xvll

the acquaintance of several English authors, and visited Scott at Abbotsford. The latter he found to be " a sterling, golden-hearted old worthy, full of the joyousness of youth." In 1818, the firm for whose interests he had been laboring was forced into bankruptcy. The relation between Irving and his brothers was now reversed. In a more prosperous time he had accepted freely what they had so generously offered ; he was as ready now to offer his own powers in their behalf. He went up to London resolved to make money with his pen ; the result was The Sketch Book. It was published in America in separate numbers during the year 1819-1820, and in England as two volumes in the latter year. In both countries it met with immense success. His reputation was firmly established ; his confidence in his literary powers, which had been somewhat shaken by unproductive years, was fully restored ; his career as a professional author was finally determined. ,

Relieved from financial anxiety, Irving soon set out again to travel. The next year he spent chiefly on the Continent, first at Paris and later in Germany. In May, 1822, he published Bracebridge Hall, a book of the same general character as The Sketch Book, though in some respects superior to it. The plan of the book, which was to bring together a number of wedding guests in an English country house, gave the author the opportunity both to exercise his art as a story-teller and to depict certain characters and phases of English life. So successfully did he portray these that in this respect Bracebridge Hall has been favorably compared with Addison's De Coverley Papers. The book still further increased the author's popularity and fame, both among men of letters and persons of high position in society. His next production. Tales of a Traveller (1824), was in the same vein as the two xvIII Introduction

which preceded it, but with the short story predominating. Though this book sustained his reputation with the general public, it was not so popular as the others, and it received some severe comment from certain critics in both England and America. The effect of these criticisms was to depress Irving's confidence in his own abilities and the constancy of public favor. He made an effort to write, but the effort was without heart, and the result unimportant. He needed the inspiration of new subjects to restore his enthusiasm for authorship.

These subjects he was to find in Spain. In 1826 he went to Madrid as a member of the American Legation. At the suggestion of Mr. Alexander Everett, the United States Minister to Spain, he set about translating Navarrete's Voyages of Columbus. Discovering, as he progressed, that this work was rather a collection of materials for a history than a history itself, he soon relinquished his original plan and determined to write a life of Columbus. Immediately he began to work on his new task, reading extensively in the libraries and writing industriously. His researches furnished him with a wealth of new themes, no less suited to his genius than those that had attracted him before — themes connected with the residence of the Moors in Spain. " These old Morisco- Spanish subjects," he declared, " have a charm that makes me content to write about them at half price. They have so much that is high-minded and Christian and quaint and picturesque and adventurous, and at times half comic about them." By his enthusiasm for this new material, he was diverted for a time from the Life of Columbus to work upon The Conquest of Granada, but this in turn he laid aside, and the Life was published in 1828. His first historical work won him great praise ; he was even called the founder of the American school of polite let-

Irving's Life and Works xlx

ters. The work, indeed, has peculiar excellence. Irving was not a trained scholar, but he had imagination, which enabled him to conceive and draw the character of the great navigator in its heroic proportions. Other books that were written or had their beginnings in this period of the author's residence in Spain are Voyages of the Companions of Columbus (1831), The Alhambra (1832), and Legends of the Conquest of Spain (1835). I" The Alhambra, as in The Sketch Book, we have a work that has laid a strong hold upon popular affection, for Irving's residence in the ancient palace of the Moorish kings of Granada, rich in reminders of departed splendor and legends of romance, was singularly stimulating to his dreamy and poetic imagination.

In 1829, Irving returned to London as Secretary of the American Legation to the Court of St. James, an appointment which postponed still further his long wished for return to his own country. New honors. came upon him. The Royal Society of Literature awarded him a gold medal, and the University of Oxford conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., — a title which he never used.

In 1832, after an absence of seventeen years, he returned to New York. Whatever doubts he may have entertained as to the feelings of his countrymen toward him quickly disappeared. The people of his own city, and of others as well, were eager to do honor to the man who had long held so large a place in their affections and who had won such distinction for himself and his country abroad. His fame had not spoiled him, or taken the freshness from his enthusiasm, which was quickened by the clear evidences of progress during his absence.

Nor did he rest upon the reputation he had achieved. He found new stimulus for writing in the West and Southwest, where, soon after his return, he made extensive

XX

Introduction travels. The first and most direct result of these travels was J Tour on the Prairies, published in 1835, as the first volume of The Crayon Miscellany. This was a record of an expedition through the Pawnee hunting grounds, filled with pictures of western life and manner*. Soon afterward John Jacob Astor desired Irving to write an acount of the trading settlement at the mouth of the Columbia River, and offered to furnish him the materials, in the form of letters and journals. This book, Astoria (in part the work of his nephew, Pierre M. Irving), was published in 1836. In it the author applied his own knowledge of the West and his imaginative gift as a story-teller to such good purpose that he succeeded in producing a uniquely interesting volume. A similar handling of documents is to be found in The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), which Irving wrote from manuscripts he had purchased from an officer in the American army. In addition to being occupied with these works and with the revision of his earlier writings, he published Abbotsfqrd and Neivstead Abbey, Legends of the Conquest of Spain (forming the second and third volumes of The Crayon Miscellany) , a Biography of GoldsTuith, and The Life of Margaret Davidson. He had also made considerable progress on The Conquest of Mexico, when, learning that Prescott the historian was considering the same subject, he unhesitatingly abandoned all claim to it, though it had delighted his imagination ever since he was a boy.

It was during this period that Irving at last realized his long cherished desire for a permanent home. In 1835 he purchased a small estate on the Hudson, in the neighborhood of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow. This property, once the home of the Van Tassels, was called *'Wolfert's Roost" (I.e., Wolfert's Rest) by the owner

Irving's Life and Works xxl

who preceded Irving, but Irving renamed it " Sunnyside." He renovated and enlarged the original house, an old Dutch cottage, added new acres to his lands, and transformed the whole into a beautiful domain, a fitting place of retirement and labor for an author in his later years. He did not desire this pleasant retreat solely for himself; it was to be the home of his remaining brothers and his nieces also. Here he lived for the rest of his life, except for a few years' absence In Spain, surrounded by family affection, visited by many acquaintances and friends, loved and honored above any other writer in his country.

Irving's dislike of political office had been apparently incurable. He refused to be nominated for Congress and again as Mayor of New York, and declined an appointment as Secretary of the Navy. But when, in 1842, he was appointed Minister to Spain, he accepted the position, despite his reluctance to separate himself from home and friends again. Certainly, as Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, wrote to Irving, no person of more merit and higher qualifications could have been selected, for in addition to his personal distinction and some diplomatic experience, he possessed an unusual acquaintance and sympathy with the Spanish people. Upon arriving in Madrid, he found the country in a state of political turmoil: a child queen, Isabella II, who occupied the throne under the protection of a regent, was the center of violent plots and intrigues. Stirring times followed ; but Irving's diplomatic skill, which was a matter of good Intentions and frank and open conduct, was sufficient to discharge with credit the demands made upon It. The exactions of office left no time for literary work. A Life of Washington, which he had begun many years before and for which he had hoped to have leisure In Spain, xxii Introduction

made no progress. He welcomed his release, therefore, when in 1846 he was permitted to return to America.

Irving was now sixty-three; the thirteen years of life which still remained to him were to be happy years, filled with productive labor. With powers still fresh, despite ill health and advancing years, he revised his complete works for republication and published new ones. The less important of these WTre Oliver Goldsmith (1849), an enlargement of the earlier sketch; Mahomet and His Successors (1850) ; and W olf erf s Roost ( 1855), a volume of tales and sketches. The great work of this time was the Life of Washington. As the volumes were successively issued from the press, they won the praise of the author's contemporaries for his true and human picture of the great soldier and statesman. The last volume was published in 1859. Ir^ the same year, on November 28, Irving's life closed, at Sunnyside.

The total impression given by Irving's portraits, taken at different periods of his life, from youth to age, is of a man attractive in appearance and of a refined and genial nature, in which kindly humor and the habit of quiet contemplation are blended. This impression is confirmed in several contemporary descriptions. " He had dark gray eyes," a relative writes of him in his later years, " a handsome straight nose, which might perhaps be called large; a broad, high, full forehead, and a small mouth. I should call him of medium height, about five feet eight and one-half to nine inches, and inclined to be a trifle stout. There was no peculiarity about his voice, but it was pleasant, and had a good intonation. His smile was exceedingly genial, lightening up his whole face, and rendering it very attractive; while if he were about to say anything humorous, it would beam forth from his eyes even before the words were spoken. As a young man, his face

Irvlng's Life and Works xxiii

was exceedingly handsome, and his head well covered with dark hair; but from my earliest recollections of him, he wore neither whiskers nor moustache, but a dark brown wig, which, although it made him look younger, concealed a beautifully shaped head." Of his character and personality, Mrs. Fuller (the Emily Foster already mentioned) wrote the following description: "He was thoroughly a gentleman, not merely externally in manners and look, but in the innermost fibers and core of his heart. Sweet-tempered, gentle, fastidious, sensitive, and gifted with the warmest affections, the most delightful and invariably interesting companion, gay and full of humor, even in spite of occasional fits of melancholy, which he was however seldom subject to when with those he liked — a gift of conversation that flowed like a full river in sunshine, bright, easy, and abundant." One hardly feels inclined to add anything to this sympathetic portrait, beyond a further emphasis on his ardent loyalty to family and country, and his chivalrous generosity. If in his early life he was perhaps indolent and irresolute in the matter of distasteful tasks, he redeemed the fault by years of unflagging industry.

Thackeray, in A^/7 Nisi Bonum, calls him " the dear and good Washington Irving," and there is no better summary of his character in a single phrase. " Was Irving not good," says Thackeray, " and of his works, was not his life the best part? In his family, gentle, generous, good-humored, affectionate, self-denying; in society, a delightful example of complete gentlemanhood ; quite unspoiled by prosperity; never obsequious to the great (or, worse still, to the base or mean, as some public men are forced to be in his and other countries) ; eager to acknowledge every contemporary's merit; always kind and affable to the younger members of his calling; in his professional barxxlv Introduction

gains and mercantile dealings delicately honest and grateful; one of the most charming masters of our lighter language ; the constant friend to us and our nation ; to men of letters doubly dear, not for his wit and genius merely, but as an exemplar of goodness, probity, and pure life."

Irving's life, which began almost with the beginning of the Republic and ended almost on the eve of the Civil War, is contemporaneous with a period of immense change and growth, political, social, and literary. But, although he was a keenly interested observer of what was passing in his own and foreign lands, his writings give little suggestion of this interest. On the contrary, one of their most striking qualities is their detachment from the contemporary life of America and, on the whole, from all modern conditions. That which made the strongest appeal to his imagination was the life of the past still evident in the present' — " the traditionary customs of golden-hearted antiquity." This appeal he might find in the slight legendary associations which had begun to grow up about the raw newness of his own country, or in the gentle aspects of English custom, refined into picturesqueness by long and kindly use, or in the heroic and poetic romance of Moorish Spain ; but, wherever found, it was essentially the same. His style also belonged to a past generation, possessing the distinct character of the best eighteenth century prose of the type of Addison's and Goldsmith's. His historical work, though not most characteristic of him, is of a high order. He was painstaking in the study of his sources, and his histories are substantially accurate. His chief power lies in his ability to organize a mass of material into an artistic whole and in his gift of imaginative portraiture.