The World of Washington Irving

by VAN WYCK BROOKS

19

IN 1822,¹ James Fenimore Cooper settled in New York, in order to be near bis publisher, and he presently founded a little club, called the Bread and Cheese, at which he and his friends might lunch together. Among the older members were William Dunlap and Chancellor Kent., who was soon to edit his Commentaries on American law, and others were James De Kay, the naturalist, the painters Jarvis, Durand, and Morse, and the poet FitzGreene Halleck, the author of Fanny. Morse had returned from England and, setting up as a portrait painter, had painted President Monroe for the city of Charleston, while Durand, who engraved for the annuals later, searched Philip Hone’s collection for subjects and the gallery of Joseph Bonaparte at Borden town. The engraving of Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence” bad established Durand’s reputation. Another member of the club was Gulian C. Verplanck, a writer on law and theology and an editor of Shakespeare. In Verplanck’s old family house at Fishkill the Society of the Cincinnati had been formed at the close of the Revolution, and he was himself a lover of literature, history, and art and the intellectual spokesman of the New York Dutch. He had been one of those who grieved over Irving’s History of New York as a coarse and painful travesty of the manners of his forebears, and he was especially noted for lus public discourses. In these he praised Las Casas, Roger Williams, and William Penn as well as De Witt and Grotius and the Dutch

Republic. A friend of every liberal mind, Verplanck impersonated well the fading Dutch spirit of the town.

In this little group of Illuminati, the rising “commercial emporium” was by way of becoming a focus for things of the mind. New York was replacing Philadelphia as the literary center,² although most of the writers regarded their work as a pastime: they usually had one foot at least in politics, business, or law, into which they relapsed altogether at the slightest pressure. There were still a few old landed families who held trade in low esteem, and Cooper was one who shared this prejudice, but the merchants ruled the little city — the “queen of business” certainly, though not vet of the world. Brisk and youthful, New York still had a country look, and the scavenger hogs ran wild through the half-built streets. The pavements were atrocious, the corner-lamps were dim, and marble mansions were flanked by wooden shanties. It was a “hobbledehoy metropolis, a rag fair sort of place,” as Cooper liked to annoy the citizens by saying, but everybody marveled at the brilliant New York air, the neatness of many of the houses, and the freshness of the paint.

There were miles of low brick dwellings with a bloodred coating and white lines setting off the bricks, and even these humbler houses, with their French clocks and Brussels carpets, Italian alabaster and curtains from Lyons, were proofs of the far-flung enterprise of the New York merchants. The statelier aristocratic houses were stiffly furnished with high buffets, high-backed, hairbottomed chairs and family port raits, and silver trays with cordials for morning callers, while some of the more recent mansions were as sumptuous as the Hudson steamboats, adorned with carvings, gilt, and bird’s-eye maple.

The older families still maintained their taste for English modes, and the authority of England was scarcely questioned either in the sphere of literature or the sphere of religion; but in other circles and other matters, since the War of 1812, this taste had yielded to a passion for everything French.³ Every ship that came into port turned the bon ton topsy-turvy, creating in one week, as a writer observed, a French Revolution among hats, gowns, and scarves. Parisian chefs were much in vogue, and there were many French boarding-houses and French cafés with marble-topped tables where one played chess and dominoes under pictures of Paris, Meanwhile, the bogus count and baron were already a part of the picture, drawn by the gayety and grace of the New York girls and the dollars that rose in fountains from their gullible fathers. Such was the famous Baron von Hoffmann, who serenaded the young ladies under their Broadway windows with Tyrolese airs. But the fountains of dollars that rose one day too often vanished overnight; and Fitz-Greene Halleck’s Fanny, which appeared in 1819, was the story of the rise and fall of a fountain and a belle.

For New York was accustomed to sudden changes of fortune. It was the home of the speculator and the nouveau riche, especially when, with the Erie Canal, the market-town of the Hudson valley became the leading port and metropolis of the country. It was “Clinton s ditch,” indeed, that made New York the “ Empire State,” as it procured for the city the commerce of the northern West; and a hundred hamlets, Buffalo and Rochester among them, were to owe their rapid grow th to the canal. All thanks to the imagination of De Witt Clinton. For Governor Clinton spent fourteen years preparing and planning for the canal, which was opened in 1825, when the waters of Lake Erie were mingled into those of the Hudson and the products of the vast farms of the interior of the country began to flow through the port of New York.

Of mixed Irish and Dutch descent, the Presbyterian Clinton had long since been a friend of Thomas Paine, and, like Jefferson, whom he followed, he was always at home with artists, writers, scholars, pathfinders, and dreamers. As mayor, he had virtually founded the New York public-school system, and in 1825 he published the Letters, signed “Hibernicus,” that described his explorations for the canal. He had followed its future route with the zest of a naturalist born, pausing to examine old fortifications while he studied the birds and the flowers along the way, the orchards and poultry farms, the cornfields and gristmills. He tried the rafters of Fort Niagara, with its memories of the “old French war,” and at Crooked Lane he picked up tales of Jemima Wilkinson and her coach, inscribed with her initials and a star. In the luxuriant Mohawk valley he watched the Indians spearing fish, while the Indian girls made wampum, and he delighted in the cataracts, the picturesque lakes and growing spas, exulting in the limitless destiny of the people and the country.

20

NEW YORK was a curious mixture of the countrified and the cosmopolitan. Many of the merchants had come to town from farms. Their rural habits clung to them, and there were still farms on Broadway, while the villages of Greenwich, Chelsea, Yorkville, Bloomingdale, and Harlem were all but innocent as yet of the encroachments of the town. One could shoot snipe in the marshes and meadows of Chelsea, where Clement C. Moore, who wrote ’Twas the Sight Before Christmas, presently laid out streets on his family farm. Moore, whose father had been bishop of New York, presented a large square of land to the General Theological Seminary, Where Verplanck was one of the lecturers and he himself was professor of Hebrew and Greek.

At the same time, exiles and wanderers of many races found an asylum in New York, a retreat or a home. There were fugitives from South America, Mexico, and Cuba, which were undergoing an epoch of revolutions; and in 1819 Lorenzo da Ponte, who had first arrived in 1805, returned to his “ever-blessed city of New York.” Meanwhile in 1829, the most, famous of the Cuban poets, José María Heredia, appeared in New York. with Felix Varela, also from Cuba, and José Antonio Miralla, who published in Philadelphia his fine translation of Gray’s Elegy. For these were the years of the great revolutions that freed the Latin American countries, although Cuba remained attached to Spain, and New Yorkers remembered the Leander, when it lay in the Hudson in 1806, at the time of Miranda’s insurrection.

Henry Clay had warmly supported the Latin American states, and the speeches of Clay, translated into Spanish, were read, like Paine’s writings in earlier days, to these other revolutionary armies. Clay was filled with a passionate zeal for the South American patriots. He saw the Holy Alliance darkly plotting to restore the imperial despotism of Spain, and he longed to form a league of New World republics to oppose this odious relic of the Middle Ages.

He hoped to see the Western Hemisphere the ark of a higher and freer civilization. By 1822, his name had become a household word in many a South American village and town, while William Cullen Bryant, soon to settle in New York, was the first American poet whose mind was awake to the literature of these countries. Later Bryant visited Mexico and Cuba, and for many years to come he discussed relations with Latin America in the Evening Post, of which he was editor-in-chief. In New York, Heredia supported himself by teaching Spanish, and there he published his first collection of poems, of which Bryant translated one or two; ⁴ and thus began in North America an interest in Latin American culture that was to grow in time, though slowly indeed. For neither of the continents was culturally independent enough to be deeply concerned about the other: both still looked towards Europe in literary matters in a way that scarcely conduced to a mutual respect.

As for Lorenzo da Ponte, who had written three librettos for Mozart, — Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, — he opened a bookshop in New York and the first Italian opera-house, and he was professor of Italian at Columbia also. This romantic Venetian adventurer had led a variegated life before he arrived in America in 1805, and he saw his whole existence as a series of beneficent acts rendered to a set of ungrateful wretches and traitors. A converted Jew in the Sybaris of Goldoni’s Venice, he had been a youthful abbe there, one of those little perfumed abbes who danced minuets and improvised madrigals and spent their nights in amorous adventures and intrigues. He had become there a friend of Casanova, whom he visited years later at the castle of Dux, and, teaching rhetoric at Treviso, he was denounced by the Inquisition — he was banished from the country and sought refuge in Vienna. His talent impressed Aletastasio, the old court-poet, and he became for a while the court-poet himself and a favorite of the emperor Joseph II, and there he adapted The Marriage of Figaro and wrote his other librettos for Mozart.

Once more a victim of human perfidy, not to mention his own wiles, he was dismissed from Vienna and went to London, where he had a third career as a publisher of Italian poetry and the poet of the theater in Drury Lane. He arrived in America ruined again, pursued by malignant humanity, with a box of violin strings and Italian classics, and living in Elizabeth and later in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, he established himself for a while as a grocer and distiller. He weighed tea and measured tobacco, with his poet’s hand, for cobblers and carters, and poured out their threeeent morning dram, and he had a run of luck at Sunbury that he could not understand till he found that he was taken for Du Pont, the powder-maker.

Then his guardian angel Clement C. Moore urged him to settle in New York, where he could have no rivals as a teacher of Italian. He set up his bookshop, he was an impresario, and he built in his house a little theater where his classes acted Italian comedies. This charming, disarming old humbug enjoyed a sunny senescence at last amid scores of young ladies who read the poets with him, and he spread through all New York a taste for Italian music and letters. Late in life, he wrote the Memoirs, modeled in part on Rousseau’s Concessions, that suggested the memoirs of Cellini and were almost as amusing.

’I he poet Fitz-Greene Halleck was one of Da Ponte’s

hundreds of pupils,⁵ and Bryant, when he arrived in New York, lodged with a family of singers whom the old man drew across the ocean. These were the Garcias and their children, one of whom, Marie Félicité, soon became Madame Malibran, and Pauline, A Iadame Viardot, Turgenev’s mistress. As for Halleck and Bryant themselves, they were country young men, like many of the merchants, and, like Horace Greeley, who presently came from Vermont, they were both from the west of New England; for the Yankees of the hinterland drifted as naturally to New York as the Yankees of the eastern seaboard drifted to Boston.

Halleck had come from Guilford, Connecticut, where his father kept a country store. He himself had opened there an evening school for bookkeeping, for he was a methodical man with the habits of a clerk. Arriving in New York, as early as 1811, he later became the private clerk of John Jacob Astor, meanwhile developing a graceful talent as a writer of light verse who was known as a sort of local Horace. He had the sprightly step and the jaunty air that were supposed to characterize New Yorkers; and his Fanny pleased the town with its touchand-go allusions to Weehawken, Saratoga, and the Falls of Cohoes. These spots had scarcely been celebrated in rhymes before, and even John Randolph quoted the poem, while the young student of history in Boston, William Hickling Prescott, admired and praised it. Then Halleck wrote lines on moonlight evenings, sailing up the Hudson or on the boat to New Haven that passed through the Sound. A devotee of Scott. Byron, and Campbell, he translated a psalm into Campbellese, But his most stirring poem was the well-known “Marco Bozzaris,” in honor of the hero of the Greek revolution. Of this, one might have said that, if Byron had never existed, it could have represented Byronism; but Halleck’s talent was wholly mimetic and within a few years it faded away, though it made him for a time the most popular poet in the country. By 1832, he was “broad awake with both eyes from the morning dream of poetry,” as he said, and his happiest days were those he had spent with Joseph Rodman Drake, the young poet who had died in 1820. When, in 1813, they fell in with each other, Drake was a medical student, five years the younger, and he had become a doctor with an office in the Bowery and Halleck’s inseparable friend. They spent their holidays in walks along Drake’s “bonny Bronx,” or strolling on the Battery, or sailing in the bay, often meeting at the Shakespeare Tavern or another favorite ale-house, where Charlotte Temple was once supposed to have lived. They had written together the Croakers, a poetical Salmagundi, which more or less paralleled Irving’s papers in prose, referring in their nimble verses to the lamps in front of the mayor’s house, Niblo’s, Cato’s, Burnham’s Hotel, and various milliners, tailors, and bankers.

These topical trifles amused New York; and the editor, A illiatn (Aleman, who was delighted to print them in the Fveiling Post, was all but swamped with imitations of them. Then Drake wrote “The Culprit Fay,” a pretty, musical, fanciful poem evoking a midsummer night over the Hudson. Drake had brought home from a visit to England a copy of Keats’s Endymion, and in much of his work he was influenced as largely by Keats as Halleek by Byron and Campbell.⁶ It was in his memory that the sorrowful Halleek wrote “Green be the turf above thee.”

21

THE attractive Drake had vanished before Cooper or Bryant came to New Fork — he died at twenty-five of consumption; but the chilly and limited Halleek was not the only poet there, and the best-known writer after Cooper was James Kirke Paulding. In Irving’s absence, Paulding had become a leading New York writer, casual and hasty as he was,—and light-hearted about it, — a shadow and understudy of Irving who cherished his memories of “Cockloft Hall” and continued Salmagundi, in a second series. He shared the antiquarian feeling that was strong in his old comrade, together with Irving’s conservatism in social matters, satirizing Robert Owen and ridiculing “new views” of society and poking all manner of fun at the “perfection of reason while, as a man of Dutch descent, he loved the Knickerbocker past that Irving had made merry with and laughed at. This feeling grew in him as the old Dutch houses vanished from New York one by one, and it gave birth to the best of his novels, The Dutchmans Fireside, a charming tale of the northern country in the days of the French and Indian war. The Dutch tradition was rapidly fading, but Paulding blew on its dying embers, reviving the years when Schenectady was the frontier town and Sir William Johnson reigned in the Mohawk valley, and he re-created the life and fortunes of a Dutch mansion near Albany that was built of yellow bricks brought over from Holland. W hile the picture of the household there with its Doric, heroic simplicities was based on the memoirs of Mrs. Grant of Laggan, the feeling and fancy were Paulding’s own, as the fine portrait of Johnson was and the checkered romance of young Sybrandt and his cousin Catalina. Dim as it seemed in later times beside Cooper’s Satanstoe, this liveliest of Paulding’s stories still opened a window on an otherwise irrecoverable scene of the past, while of all his other stories scarcely a trace remained in the mind save the nursery jingle “Peter Piper picked a peek of pickled peppers.”

For thirty years a prolific writer in almost every form, Paulding was memorable only in his Letters from the South and his parodies of English authors of American travels. In 1816, he sailed for Norfolk, setting out on horseback from there, carrying his “plunder” behind him in a Jersey wagon, riding to the Virginia Springs, following the Blue Bulge mountains, and returning by way of the Shenandoah and Harpers Ferry. He stopped at the houses of planters where Northerners appeared, forgot they were not at home, and remained for months, with their wives and their carriages and servants, and he passed processions of manacled slaves, sold in Maryland, marching south, half-naked, without shoes or stockings, bound with ox-chains. The children were tumbled like pigs together in carts, and the armed white drivers looked Paulding straight in the eye. He was happier among the woodsmen, in the western Virginia mountains, ready for the wildest weather in the pathless forest, ready for the North Pole, if any errand carried them there, and skillful enough to shoot out the eve of the wind. The prairie schooners charmed him, heaving in sight like ships on the sea, with the peaked ends of their canvas covers that might have been gaff-topsails. In all these regions, so diverse, and for all the scenes that saddened him, he felt, the deep ties that drew the country together, in noiseless opposition to the little local feelings that were really matters only for good-natured banter.⁷

The patriotic Paulding detested the spirit of imitation that filled the cities along the Atlantic coast, the want of national self-respect that gave such an unmanly tone to the modes, manners, and opinions of the fashionable classes. Why this toadying to Europe and especially to England -when, month after month, the British reviews, the Quarterly and Blackwood’s, decried and insulted America as a barbarous land? They carried on a bitter campaign, perhaps to discourage emigration and arouse a distrust of republicanism in the rising English masses. One might have supposed that in beggarless, crimeless New York there was nothing to be seen but drunkenness, bundling, and gouging, and the chief amusement of Charleston people, according to Blackwood’s Magazine, was to curse and beat their slaves at the dinner table.

Paulding’s John Bull in America, a sort of new Munchausen, was a mildly amusing burlesque of these books, in which an imagined Englishman surpassed the real ones in his ignorance, gullibility, and exaggerations: he was stopped by a footpad in Connecticut, and lie saw Thomas Jefferson reduced to appearing for bis bread on the boards as an actor; lie went through an earthquake three times a week and found that half of the people of Boston were black; it interested him to discover that terrapin soup was made from the fingers and toes of pickaninnies. While a little of this went a long way, †he satire was not ineffective, thanks chiefly to the sobriety and dryness of the style.⁸ Unhappily, in another book, which he called A Sketch of Old England, Paulding carried the war into the enemy’s country. He meant to turn the tables here on the English travel-w riters, but he had on his hands a theme that required a powerful hook or none at all. His poor little drops of acid were mere brackish water.

Such was the literary scene of New York when the “father of American song” — as Bryant was called later — came to live there, a poet certainly far from great, but novel and surprising, so clear, pure, natural, and simple was the note of his work. He was the first American poet who was wholly sympathetic with the atmosphere and feeling of the country anil who expressed its inner moods and reflected the landscape, the woods, and the fields as if America itself were speaking through him. Save here and there for some casual poem, the earlier American rhymesters were quite without this native original tone, and Americans by general consent agreed to forget them:⁹ for of what permanent value were poems that merely echoed English models with faint hints now and then of native themes? Bryant’s models were English too, but the feeling in his verse sprang from another world and a fresh inspiration.

The grave, austere, and sensitive Bryant sincerely expressed a whole-souled joy alike in the American spirit and the American scene, and it was this that won for him the pride of his own countrypeople and the slight measure of interest he aroused in England. He was unique in this respect even among the newer poets. It was observed that Fitz-Greene Halleck rose to an unwonted pitch under the excitement and stimulus of a visit, to England, for many regarded “Alnwick Castle" ¹⁰ as by far the best of Halleck’s poems, in which for once he had broken his leading-strings. An English theme had given him the freedom as a poet which he had never achieved on American ground. There were few American writers indeed who did not lose all their American moorings when they set foot in Europe, and especially England, whereas Bryant was free as an American and as a poet, and he only felt abroad, in the course of many journeys, the absence of the wild scenes that he loved at home: —

Lone lakes — savannas where the bison roves —

Rocks rich with summer garlands — solemn streams — Skies, where the desert eagle wheels and screams — Spring bloom and autumn blaze of boundless groves.¹¹

He missed the noble sweep of forest, the broad expanse of pasture land, the towering trees that bordered shaggy streams; and his indifference to other effects — the romantic picturesqueness of Europe — bore witness to the reality of his feeling for these. He was at home with his own, like Cooper, who shared his tenacious Americanism and who celebrated in prose the mystery and grandeur of the forest and wilderness world of the poems of Bryant.

A Massachusetts man, a lawyer at Great Barrington, Bryant was thirty-one when he settled in New York, and he had already written and published some of the best of his poems — he never surpassed the work of his early youth. Destined as he was to live and write for three generations, he had begun in the heyday of John Trumbull and Dwight, and he must have encountered Philip Freneau in the circle of Gillian Yerplanck, who befriended the forgotten old “poet of the Revolution,”

For Freneau was often in New York, dressing to the end in the small-clothes, the buckled shoes, and the cocked hat of colonial days, but he had had to mend clocks and work on the roads to pay his taxes; and although he still published verses in the country papers, he had passed out of the memory of most men living. But he was loyal to New York, his birthplace, and the Knickerbocker writers were loyal to him: they liked the tolerant, frank old man, with his eighteenth-century culture, and Yerplanck especially mourned when he heard that Freneau had been caught in a blizzard and was picked up dying at the door of his New Jersey farmhouse.

Yerplanck alone praised Bryant when he was wholly unknown in New York and hail just published a few of his verses in Boston, but he did not know perhaps that Bryant’s first poem was like Freneau, though it came from the other side of the political fence. This was The Embargo, by “a youth of thirteen,” which had appeared as a pamphlet in 1808, a rhymed political invective, a bitter attack on Jefferson, such as Freneau had launched from the opposite camp. For Bryant, a Jeffersonian later, expressed the feelings of a Federalist household who were all for the secession of New England at the time of the Embargo, and neither Timothy Dwight nor Fessenden could have surpassed the virulence with which lie assailed the “wretch” in the president’s chair: —

22

WHEN Bryant began to think for himself, he found that he too was a democrat, as Philip Freneau had always been, and all that gave the incident meaning was that the verse was adroit and showed a precocious knowledge of poetical form. This, too, like the sentiment of the poem, was a fruit of the household, for the forebears of this clever boy had been writing verses for three generations and the Bryants, like so many Yankees, were scholarly in grain. When Bryant was around ten years old, his farmer grandfather set him the task of turning into rhymes the Book of Job, and gave him a ninepenny coin when he had achieved it; and, what was quite as important for him, his father ridiculed the rhymes and would not “allow this doggerel,” as he said, “to stand.” Both these two interested elders really cared for poetry, and one of them eared enough to be critical also, so that Bryant was encouraged to produce it and subjected as well to a more or less rigorous standard. Later he showed in all his work a feeling for perfection that was again without precedent in American verse, and for this no doubt he was largely indebted to his father.

Dr. Bryant, a Harvard man, a member of the legislature, known throughout Hampshire and Berkshire as a country physician, was well versed in Latin and Greek and all the classical English poets, whom he loved and often echoed in rhymes of his own. He seldom returned from one of his journeys without a book by some new poet, Henry Kirke White, perhaps, or Southey or Wordsworth, to share the shelves with Cowper, Blair, and Burns, and he cared enough about music too not only to play a violin but to fashion a bass viol with his own hands. He had been for a while a surgeon on a merchant vessel that carried him once as far as the Cape of Good Hope, and during two years that he passed in Mauritius he learned to read and speak French and followed the footsteps of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

The atmosphere of the Cummington farmhouse where Bryant spent his childhood — surrounded by the craggy hills of the Hampshire country, with its narrow, circuitous valleys and rushing streams — was all compact of the hardy culture of the old New England settlers, while the morning spirit of the young republic dwelt there. The words of the patriot fathers, so many of whom were still alive, filled the air that was breathed in church and schoolhouse, together with the Biblical precepts of the Puritan teaching, so that Bryant shared from his earliest years the fervent faith of the Revolution and remained, as if by instinct, politically-minded. Politics in later years ail but engulfed his life as a poet, while he sang the cause of the revolutionists in South America, Poland, and Greece, when the children of Leonidas rose against the Moslems.

Every herald of freedom appealed to Bryant, who was born with the ardors of ‘76 in his blood, whether the Green Mountain Boys or Francis Marion or William Tell or Bolivar, Mazzini, Louis Kossuth, or O’Connell. At the same time he shared the passion for learning that often prevailed on the loneliest New England farms. Working in the fields, hoeing, planting, haying, and reaping, between apple-parings, house-raisings, and huskingbees, he studied Latin with one of his uncles and Greek with another minister, whose fee was a dollar a week for instruction and board. At the end of two or three months he was dreaming in Greek, and the versions he made of some of the poets, Anacreon, Bion, Simonides, were remembered for years at Williams College. Too poor to remain for long there, he kept up his study of languages, German, Spanish, Provencal, Portuguese, which he learned at intervals during his life, translating poems from these and others that appeared with his own collected work. For he was writing continuously at home and in college, and he was only seventeen when he composed “ Thanatopsis,” the lines that opened an epoch in American verse.

Bryant had not yet read Wordsworth when he conceived this “view of death,” suggested by the autumnal decay of nature, so youthful in its melanc holy, so noble in its feeling, so typically an expression of the moment and the place. For its eighteenth-century rhetoric, recalling the somber Young and Blair, and its half-Calvinistic, halfstoical obsession with death reflected the older New England mind ¹²as its evocations of earth and forest, the rockribbed hills, the rivers, the meadows, and the sea revealed an American feeling of the present and the future. As a versified oration, this poem was the diploma-piece of a day when every boy was taught to declaim, while it possessed a sincerity and majesty that poetry in America had never embodied before. It was this note of sincerity, so marked in Bryant from the first, that carried the day for him later, when his diction seemed so often faded and threadbare, an element of character that somehow triumphed over the flaws which resulted from his indubitable coldness of temper.

It was enough, meanwhile, for Americans that Bryant had really discovered his country and freed it from the “faded fancies of an elder world,” and first of all in the selfsame region where Emily Dickinson later also awoke to the wonder of the flowers and the birds. Like this other and greater New England poet, Bryant was a botanist who had studied Linnaeus as closely as the Bible and Homer, and the delicate descriptive touches in his flower pieces were drawn from exact observation and definite knowledge. They had an authenticity that set them altogether apart from the vague generalities of ordinary nature-poems, and Americans recognized this at once, for everyone knew the countryside, and Linnaeus himself was almost a popular author. Bryant belonged to the world anti the moment of time that produced the drawings and writings of Audubon and Wilson. Then, while virtually all the earlier poets had clung to conventional imagery, his images were often fresh and clear, and one heard in his poems the sounds of the woods, the hum of the bee and the chirp of the wren, as one scented the stream of odors flowing by. One listened to the bobolink, which had never appeared in verse before, the sound of dropping nuts on withered leaves, the ruffed grouse drumming in the woods, the call of the crow in the treetops, the plash of the brook as it fell through the elder glen. One saw the squirrel’s raised paws, the snowbird on the beechen bough, the chipping sparrow in his coat of brown, the hawk that hovered overhead, the maples where the wood thrush sang, the clover field, the shadbush white with flowers. It somehow seemed miraculous that anyone could have caught so well the sights and the voices and the perfumes of the rural scene, the bowers of fragrant sassafras, the frail wood plants, the wastes of snow, the prodigal beauty of the flowers at the return of spring.

Then, for Bryant, on his lonely walks, the woods abounded in Indian legends, and lie liked to weave these into his poems as well — the story of the Indian maiden, for instance, that lingered round Monument Mountain, the lament of the brave at the burial place of his fathers. In the forest solitudes, scarcely broken as yet by man, he thought of the flowing of time and the flight of the ages, and he pictured with his mind’s eye the history of the wilderness and the days when the lodges of the Indians peopled the streams. He saw the coming of the white man, swinging his axe, the buckwheat sweetening the wind on its broad white acres, the cottage rising by the pond, the reapers in the field, the children laughing where once the redmen hunted. These fancies were blended in Bryant’s mind with a deep ancestral piety anti a calm religious faith in human progress. Bryant and Fenimore Cooper were closely related in many ways, and the “Forest Hymn,” for instance, — “The groves were God’s first temples,”—might almost have been uttered by Natty Bumppo. Like Bryant, the Pathfinder felt God most on a calm and solemn day in the forest where ail was fresh and beautiful as it came from his hand, and even his words recalled the lines of Bryant, “The woods are the true temple, for there the thoughts are free to mount higher even than the clouds. ‘

23

BRYANT had found himself as a poet before he arrived in New York, and his note never changed in later years. Moreover, his work was accepted at once, like the novels of Cooper and Rip Van Winkle, that earlier forest, tale. Its freshness, its veracity, its rendering of a world of nature that had never before appeared in moving verse — all this gave Bryant an immediate place that others had to struggle for, and raised him for a decade or two above all rivals. That his poems were often tame and bald, that his verse-forms were of the simplest kind, that his reflections were frequently flat and trite, was less important at the time than that his work as a whole was elevated, new, sincere, and touching. With all his diffuseness and lack of intensity, there was something noble in his air that lifted him over the heads of common poets, and in the minds of remote generations and by virtue of some of bis poems, Bryant remained the bard of the early republic. There was a touch of the seer in him and something heroic and hardy that sang in “A Forest Hymn,”“The Sowers,”and “The Tides,” and especially “To a Waterfowl,” the most intense of all his poems, in which for a moment he entered the realm of magic.

If Bryant had settled in Boston, where he published his first work, his life as a poet might have been ampler and richer, for he would have gained much, no doubt, from the intellectual ferment in Boston at a time when politics absorbed him wholly in New York. There he was engaged for a while on a literary magazine before he joined William Coleman on the Evening Past, reviewing books, translating and lecturing on poetry, spending his afternoons in solitary walks. He explored the city for historical remains that most of the New Yorkers had quite forgotten: the house overlooking the Battery that had once been Wolfe’s headquarters, the little chapel in John Street where Whitefield preached in former days. In Fine Street there was the small dark room where Charles Brockden Brown had framed some of his gloomy and interesting fictions, and there was the garret in William Street where Billaud-Yarennes once lived obscurely, he who had swayed the mob of the Faubourg St. Antoine.

In Broadway stood the shop of the barber Huggins, whose fame as a wit had spread from Georgia to Maine when, having shaved Tom Aloore and Joel Barlow, he began to write squibs and satires to emulate them. His epigrams on Jefferson, Randolph, and others had long been the joy of the Federalists in the Evening Post, and all the wits and fashionables had thronged his shop in order to be able to say they had been barbered by Huggins. The jokes and lampoons of all the wags had been stuck on this Pasquin of New York, and they had even been collected in a volume of Hugginsitina, with woodcuts by Alexander Anderson and designs by Jarvis, As for John Jay’s hewn-stone dwelling, it was now a Broadway boarding-house, while the great mansion of Aaron Burr was lost in a maze of dingy streets. Richmond Hill had been dug away beneath it, and the house had been let down when the hill was leveled: it had lost its view over the Hudson and the Lispenard meadows, but there it stood in Varick Street, with its lofty portico and pilasters, recalling the days when John Adams had lived in this mansion.

On Broadway, Aaron Burr was still a well-known figure, usually walking along with his eyes on the ground or glancing under his eyelids at an approaching acquaintance to see whether or not he meant to cut him; and one met the Pomeranian alchemist, too, the plump quick-striding Lichcnstein in his Dutch black broadcloth, who had managed the finances of Prince Potemkin. Lichenstein lived in a little house in Wall Street, — already a resort, of banks and bankers, — and, as a foretaste of the future of the street, he had built in the cellar a furnace for making gold. As for Aaron Burr, friendless save for the Cyprian nymphs, distrusted and discredited in every circle, he was as lively and witty as ever when he found a sympathetic ear for his memories of “my friend Hamilton, whom I shot.” ¹³ No one could deny that Burr was a good sportsman, who never complained of his losses or his bad luck. His enjoyment of life was infectious, moreover, and one could understand why Jeremy Bcntham and Godwin had loved him in England when he fled abroad to further his Mexican plot. A courtier himself, he had been a success at three or Four courts, and he had seen something of Wieland and Goethe and much of David and Volney in Paris, where he had to borrow from Vanderlyn, whom he had befriended.¹⁴ He had been shunned by his fellow Americans, and Napoleon gave orders to have him watched, but he was received in the highest society in Sweden and Germany as well as in England, and he had studied Spanish and Swedish and even Swedish law, for he constantly worked his wits to keep thorn bright. In order to pay for his passage home he had had to sell the trinkets and ribbons that he had bought for Theodosia, and yet he brought with him several trunkfuls of books. One of these, and not the dullest, was the journal —as frank as Rousseau’s Confessions — which he wrote for the amusement of his daughter.

Bryant often passed Burr, and lie found one New Yorker, at least, who shared his taste for historical memories. Later Gulian Verplanck collaborated with him in writing the Reminiscences of New York. Meanwhile, every afternoon, Bryant escaped from the city, where his country muse wilted in the heat and the glare, seeking refuge among the groves that lined the quiet Hudson and the rocks and forested hays above Canal Street. He liked to linger about the spot, just north of Barclay Street, where Jonathan Edwards walked on the pebbly shore, when for a while he was pastor of the church in Wall Street; or he explored the Weehawken dells or took the ferry over to Brooklyn, strolling through winding lanes past old Dutch farms. years later he sometimes joined Walt Whitman there, when this young man was editing the Brooklyn Eagle. Bryant avoided the so-called respectables. He liked stage-drivers, woodsmen, and farmers and he and Whitman shared a taste for odd and humble people.

These afternoons left many traces in the poems that he continued to write, although he turned more and more to the writing of prose, especially after William Coleman, Hamilton’s old editor, died, and he became the editor of the Evening Post. This was in 1829, and for nearly fifty years Bryant remained in this position, promoting reforms and free discussion and the intellectual life of New York in a way that was wholly new in journalism. He had begun at Great Barrington the study of economics that was to make him an eminent political writer—lie had read Ricardo and Adam Smith and become an outspoken free-trader, when the manufacturers clamored for a protective tariff, and he had taken a stand, moreover, against the Missouri Compromise and broken with his Federalist connections and the rising Whigs. In short, before he came to New York he wras predisposed to the Jacksonism for which he was famous later on the Evening Post, as Cooper and Washington Irving, too, who had both grown up in Federalist circles, shared Jackson’s popular sympathies against the Whigs. Bryant remained a persistent foe of all financial and class legislation, and he was ostracized for years as a democrat and leveler. All this might well have made him a theme for other poets, for Bryant was a great citizen and a lover of his country. The only pity was that this career should have proved so uhpropitious for the poet in himself.

24

IN 1826 Washington Irving set out for his visit to Spain, and Cooper too stopped in England during this same year, the first, of seven that he was to spend abroad. Irving’s Spanish journey was a sort of second birth for him, depressed and more or less idle as he was in Paris, turning into a hack-writer, with no compelling themes in mind, and tired of wandering aimlessly from country to country. As a boy he had delighted in stories of Spain and the Moors, and recently he had been studying Spanish in Paris, and he was deep in Calderon and racing through histories of Spain when he received an appointment at the legation. A book on Columbus had appeared, the great work of Navarrete, assembling a mass of documents about the explorer, and the American minister, who knew it would interest the public at home, begged Irving to come and make a translation of it.

Thus began a stable, calm, productive time for him that led to a whole cycle of new books. He lived in Madrid with Obadiah Rich, the Massachusetts bibliophile and consul, who owned the largest existing collection of works on Hispano-America and whose house brimmed over with manuscripts and the rarest books. With letters of Cortes and unpublished plays of Lope de Vega, this house was all but unique, even in Spain, and Irving, who was a bookman born and always loved to rummage in libraries, turning over worm-eaten papers, was at home there at once. Near-by was the Jesuit College of San Isidro, where he passed many of his mornings, exploring the galleries, lined with books that were bound in parchment, dealing with the days of the Moors in Spain. Even the writing of history was not new to Irving, and his Knickerbocker, burlesque as it was, had shown his erudition, while serving as a cause of historical writing in others; for this work in its way had provided the Hudson with a past, and it stirred actual historians to undertake the task of editing the archives of the province. But now, with all his forces focused, he was attempting the real tiling, and his gifts as a story-teller were brought into play; for he found that the work of Navarrete was rather a budget of materials than a life of Columbus and he set it aside to write a life of his own. He wove together the various chronicles, enlivening those that were dull, while he softened the extravagances of others, reducing the whole composition to a unity of tone. The book, with its admirable structure, was a triumph of literary art, a masterpiece of narrative style and color.

He had fallen completely under the spell of the literature of old Spain, the luxuriance and vigor of its chronicles, romances, and plays, abounding in generous sentiments and Oriental flavor; and before he finished his life of Columbus he was at work on another book, sometimes writing from dawn till dusk or midnight. This was The Conquest of Granada, a lively and skillful reproduction of the style of the medieval story-tellers, in which he introduced an imaginary chronicler in order to heighten the illusion. The pious and garrulous monk, Fray Antonio Agapida, related the tale with his own ejaculations and comments, quickening what might have been a far too monotonous series of battles, sieges, ambushes. and marches.

Later, in The Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus, Irving returned to the first of his Spanish themes, recounting the adventures of the admiral’s disciples who in various ways fulfilled his intentions and hopes. Among these were Balboa and Ponce de Leon, who were stirred by the zeal of Columbus and set out to conclude the enterprise he had begun. While Irving’s own imagination never rose to great intensity, it played with zest over the thoughts of his heroes, in the most ferociously cruel of whom he always found redeeming traits, for they were full of daring, resolution, and pluck. They were, moreover, one and all, devoted to a cause that was greater than the advancement of their own fortunes, while they climbed magical mountains and sailed fabulous seas in quest of golden temples and fountains of youth. They were seeking the most splendid prizes that had ever dazzled the mind of man, beside which the dreams of the alchemists were paltry; and Irving re-created this vision of the Western Hemisphere as it hung before the eyes of the conquistadors.

25

BETWEENWHILES, he visited many parts of Spain, traveling sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, among them Wilkie, the Scottish painter, whom the publisher Murray commissioned to paint a portrait of Irving for a frontispiece. With Wilkie he set out for Seville, which still seemed Oriental, and they searched obscure churches and convents for wonderful bits of Spanish art of the unappreciated masters earlier than Murillo. Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, the American naval officer, had appeared before this in Madrid, collecting the impressions he published in A Year in Spain, and he and Irving were intimate friends already.

Mackenzie too had long loved everything Spanish. As a boy, shut up with other sailors, leading a monastic life, he had read Gonzalve de Cordone over and over,— Florian’s old French romance of the conquest of Granada, — abandoning his fancy to its pictures of romantic love and the Vega, the silver Genii, and the golden Daro. He dreamed of knights and lady-loves, musing at the masthead, with nothing before his eyes but the dreary sea. and he had always longed for a glimpse of Granada, the last refuge of the Saracen greatness in Spain. He knew Cervantes by heart, and Gil Blas too. He had spent a year in France before be began his Spanish tour, and had smuggled over the border some books of Voltaire, including the forbidden Henriade, and, living for a few months in Madrid, in the Huerta del Sol. he observed the splendid pageantry and the misery of Spain.

A threadbare Cordovan gentleman, jaunty under his pea-green frock, gave Mackenzie lessons in Castilian, while flocks of sheep and droves of swine and mules laden with charcoal or straw passed all day through the square. The costumes of all the provinces were visible from his windows. In order to keep the cold wind out, he rolled himself up in a cloak till he looked like John Gilpin or one of the black-robed brigands whom he met on the road, for his own coach was robbed and the driver was murdered. an everyday experience in those years in Spain. The country was torn with revolutions and counter-revolutions, and in 1826 the diligence was robbed ten times between Madrid and Barcelona. Sometimes on donkeyback. Mackenzie traveled all over the country, and his book was so constantly entertaining that it would not have been forgotten if so many writers of genius had not visited Spain.¹⁵ Before he left Madrid, he read Irving’s manuscript, especially the parts that dealt with the route of Columbus, and he gave Irving some nautical information.

Then Irving rode off to Granada on horseback with another friend he had made in Madrid, the youthful Russian attache, Prince Dolgourouki. He visited Andalusia and the Moorish ruins there, fortresses, castles, and towns, stopping at inns that recalled the days of Don Quixote, where one had to supply one’s own provisions and spread one’s own mattress on the floor; and he traveled through lonely defiles of a chaos of mountains where bandits and contrabandistas roamed at large. At Palos, the port where Columbus embarked, a wretched hamlet on a beach, he found the descendants of the Pinzons, anti he settled down for work near Cadiz, at Puerto de Santa Maria. There, in an old country-house, w ith olive groves and ancient walls, he finished The Conquest of Granada, writing on a balcony that overlooked the plain where Roderick the Goth met defeat. This was a foretaste of the enchanted summer that Irving passed in the Alhambra in the following year, when all Granada was buried in a wilderness of roses, among which the nightingales sang even by day.

He felt, as he looked back on this dreamy sojourn, as if he had lived in the midst of an Arabian tale; and, what with the perfume of the flow’ers and the murmur of the fountains, the softness of the air, the serenity, the silence, he could scarcely work at first in the ruined old palace. The Alhambra had not yet undergone any restoration, and the roses and the weeds grew wild on the terraces and gates, while the fires of beggars smoked the Moorish arches and criminals hid in the grottoes and in holes of the walls.

A ragged brood of peasants ad invalid soldiers inhabited the corridors and courts, and whenever a tower fell into decay it was seized upon by tatterdemalions who became joint tenants there with the owls and the bats. They hung their rags in the gilded halls and out of the windows and loopholes, while gypsies strayed in from caverns of the neighboring hills, and foxes and wildcats roamed about at night, mingling their cries with the shouts of the maniac in one of the chambers below. Water-carriers swarmed about the cisterns, and at the Moorish well inside the palace a kind of perpetual club was kept up all day. There old women, vagrants, and curious do-nothing folk sat on the stone benches and dawdled and gossiped, while loitering housewives listened to the endless tattle. Idle maidservants with pitchers on their heads questioned new arrivals for news of the town.

There was one little old woman who lived in a closet under a staircase and who sat in the cool corridor plying her needle, singing from morning till night. She had as many tales as Scheherazade, and she made every hall and tower and vault the scene of some marvelous tradit ion. She might have been truly an Oriental, like the other woolgathering wits of the desolate fortress, all of whom shared her passion for story-telling: they listened with insatiable delight to miraculous legends of saints, perilous adventures of travelers, and exploits of robbers. Many l t heir stories of the Alhambra dealt with buried Moorish treasures and ghosts of Moors in towers and caves where gold was supposed to be hidden; and Irving heard many a tale of talismans, charms, and magic spells and jewels guarded by monsters and fiery dragons. Sometimes it was a henchman of Boabdil, in armor, sword in hand, who maintained a sleepless watch for ages. These tales were marked by a mixture of the Arabic and the Gothic, and they were improvisations, occasionally in verse. One evening a young girl in an Andalusian dress appeared with a guitar in the Court of Lions. She poured forth couplets and, excited by her theme, extemporized wonderful descriptions of events of the past.

Sometimes Irving dined there, under the arcades, when the fountains cooled the air, amid the fragrance of flowers. The rills ran along the channels in the marble pavement. Sometimes his meals were served in one of the Moorish halls. For a while, at the governor’s invitation, he occupied a royal apartment; then he moved into rooms that opened on one of the courtyards. From the balcony he looked across to the stern mountains above Granada, where he watched the shepherds driving their flocks on the slopes. The muleteers urged their animals along the mountain roads, while the convent bells rang over the valley. On moonlight nights he sat for hours inhaling the sweetness of the garden, musing on the gav chivalry of Moorish Granada, or he explored the ruined towers, stealing from chamber to chamber, much to the alarm of the family who cared for his want’s.

He even made discoveries in the Alhambra. He had found in some old chronicle the story of the door through which Boabdil had finally left the palace, asking that it might never be used again. The door had been bricked up and long forgotten, and Irving, searching the walls, traced it out. Sometimes, with an assiduous guide, he left the palace for a walk to one of the romantic retreats in the valley or the mountains, nut he passed the greater part of his days reading and writing in one of the courts, assembling the tales that later appeared in his book. He put them together from scraps and hints that he had picked up in the palace, or perhaps in Rich’s library months before, or elsewhere in the course of his perambulations. He mingled history and fiction together, gathering the scattered members of popular traditions and skillfully working them into shape and form.

Then he set out in a covered cart, drawn by a mule, on his way to London, for he had received an appointment at the legation there. He carried with him a trunkful of manuscripts, miscellaneous notes and fragments for other books on Spain to be written later, among them plans for a series of writings on the Arab domination, to be introduced by a life of Mahomet. This latter, after several revisions, was ultimately published, together with another collection of legends of Spain; but even The Alhambra did not appear in print until after his return to America in 1832. In the absence of the American minister, Irving was chargé d’affaires in London, where the new minister to Russia, John Randolph, appeared, insisting on being presented at court in black small-clothes and white stockings. with silver knee-buckles and a sword. People stared at this Virginian who did not know that times had changed and who flaunted his antiquated costume, —for he was still living in the days of the Peace of Ghent, — though his old-school manner and turn of thought charmed others who met him in England, eager as they were for anything original and odd. Presently, Martin Van Buren turned up, as minister to England, the tavern-keeper’s son from Kinderhook who had risen with the fortunes of Andrew Jackson, and, setting out on a tour with Irving for a taste of country life, he shared in the festivities of an English Christmas. At the Red Horse Inn at Stratford, the landlady was much excited when the author of The Sketch Book appeared again. She showed him the room he had slept in before, where his portrait now hung on the wall; and he found his name engraved on Geoffrey Crayon’s scepter, the poker he had used to stir the fire.

(To be continued)

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