Reason and Revolution Part III
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Week Eight: Reason and Revolution Part III / The Romantic, the Real and the American Indian
Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature
Washington Irving Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2003
Washington Irving (1783–1859)
R With Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne, Irving has survived all other American writers of fiction before Melville, and he still finds new readers with every passing generation. He was the first great prose stylist of American romanticism, and his familiar style was destined to outlive the formal prose of such contemporaries as Scott and Cooper, and to provide a model for the prevailing prose narra- tive of the future.
The apparent ease of his writing is not simply that of the gifted amateur; it results from his purposeful identification of his whole personality with what he wrote. He was urbane and worldly, yet humorous and gentle; a robust connoisseur, yet innately reserved; a patrician, yet sympathetic toward the people. His vast reading, following only the impulse of his own enthusiasms, resulted in a rich if random literary inheritance, revealed in all that he wrote. His response to the period of Addison, Swift, and Johnson, with its great and graceful style, and his enthusiasm for the current European romanticism, enabled him to combine these with his independent literary personality and American roots.
It is instructive to consider the number of his literary innovations. He was our first great belletrist, writing always for pleasure, and to produce pleasure; yet readers of all classes responded to him in a country in which the didactic and utilitarian had formerly prevailed. He gave an impetus both to the extravagant American humor of which Mark Twain became the classic, and to the urbane wit that has survived in writers ranging from Holmes and Lowell to the New Yorker wits of the past and present. In his Sketch Book appeared the first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature. He was among the first of the moderns to write good history and biography as literary entertainment. He introduced the familiar essay to America. On his own whimsical terms, Irving restored the waning Gothic romances which Poe soon infused with psychological subtleties. The scope of his life and his writing was international, and produced a certain breadth of view in his readers; yet his best-known stories awakened an interest in the life of American regions from the Hudson valley to the prairies of the West. His influence abroad, as writer, as visitor, and as diplomat, was that of a gifted cultural ambassador, at home on both continents, at a time when his young country badly needed such representation. He was the only American writer of his generation who could chide the British in an atmosphere of good humor.
The events of Irving’s life are characterized by the same casual approach and distinguished results. Gently born and well educated, the youngest of eleven children of a prosperous New York merchant, he began a genteel reading for the law at sixteen, but preferred a literary Bohemianism. At nineteen he published, in his brother’s newspaper, his “Jonathan Oldstyle” satires of New York life. By the age of twenty-three, when he was admitted to the New York bar, he had roamed the Hudson valley and been a literary vagabond in England, Holland, France, and Italy, reading and
The standard edition of Irving’s work has been The Works of Washington Irving, Author’s Uniform Revised Edition, 21 vols., 1860–1861, reissued in 12 vols., 1881. The Complete Works of Washington Irving, ed. Henry A. Pochmann and others, was published in 30 volumes, 1969–1989. The Journals of Washington Irving, 3 vols., 1919, were edited by W. P. Trent and G. S. Hellman, and a number of volumes of the letters have been published. Several later editions, individual volumes, are easily available; note especially Knickerbocker’s History of New York, edited by Stanley T. Williams and Tremaine McDowell, 1927; and Edwin T. Bowden, ed., A History of New York, 1964. Washington Irving: Representative Selections, edited by Henry A. Pochmann, American Writers Series, 1934, has a useful introduction and bibliography.
Pierre M. Irving published the first standard Life and Letters, 4 vols., 1862–1864; other good lives are those by Charles Dudley Warner, 1890, and G. S. Hellman, 1925. However, the definitive biographical and critical study is that by Stanley T. Williams: The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols., 1935. See also Edward Wagenknecht, Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed, 1962; William L. Hedges, Washington Irving, an American Study, 1965; Haskell Springer, Washington Irving: A Reference Guide, 1976; Andrew B. Myers, A Century of Commentary on the Works of Washington Irving, 1976; Martin Roth, Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving, 1976; Mary W. Bowden, Washington Irving, 1981; and Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving, 1988.
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studying what pleased him, which was a great deal, and reveling in the lively world of the theater. Back in New York, he joined with his brother, William, and James Kirke Paulding, in 1807, in producing the Salmagundi papers, Addisonian commentaries on New York society and frivolities. A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), a rollicking burlesque of a current serious history of the early Dutch settlers, has become a classic of humor, and might have launched an immediate career for its author.
A personal tragedy, however, changed his course for a time; the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman, coincided with the demands of the family cutlery firm, and in 1810 he went to Washington as representative of the business. In 1815 he again turned restlessly to his European roving, with headquarters in England during the next seventeen years, but his literary career was soon to catch up with him again. In 1818 the failure of the Irving firm, which had bountifully supported his leisure, threw family responsibilities upon him, and he loyally plunged into the authorship for which he had almost unconsciously prepared himself. The Sketch Book appeared serially in 1819–1820; in volume form shortly thereafter, it at once had an international success. Bracebridge Hall followed in 1822; then he first went to Germany in pursuit of an interest in German romanticism, which flavored the Tales of a Traveller (1824) and other later writings. Meanwhile in Paris he had met John Howard Payne, the American dramatist and actor, with whom he wrote the brilliant social comedy Charles the Second, or The Merry Monarch.
From 1826 to 1829 he was in Spain on diplomatic business, residing for a time in the Alhambra. His reading at that period, including the study of Spanish historical sources, resulted in a number of important works: A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831), a famous volume of stories and sketches––The Alhambra (1832)––and “Legends of the Conquest of Spain” (in The Crayon Miscellany, 1835).
Before The Alhambra appeared, he was on his way back to the United States after two years as secretary of the American legation in London (1829–1831). American reviewers had commented, often with irritation, on his seeming preference for Europe, but the charges were exaggerated. After seventeen years abroad he returned with the desire to portray his own country again, and although such western adventures as A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (history of Astor’s fur trade, 1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (explorations in the Rocky Mountains, 1837) are not among his best work, they broke new trails in our literature. In 1836 he made his home at Sunnyside, near Tarrytown, so lovingly described years before as “Sleepy Hollow.” He had already declined a nomination to Congress; now he declined to run for mayor of New York, or to become Van Buren’s secretary of the navy. Instead he wrote a good Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1840), and began the Life of George Washington (published 1855–1859), long a standard work. From 1842 to 1845 he served as minister to Spain, then settled at Sunnyside, which he remodeled and enlarged, while preparing the revised edition of his works, and completing his Washington. The fifth and last volume of the latter appeared just before his death in 1859.
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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature
Washington Irving Rip Van Winkle © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007
WASHINGTON IRVING
Rip Van Winkle1
A POSTHUMOUS WRITING OF DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER
By Woden,2 God of Saxons, From whence comes Wensday, that is Wodensday. Truth is a thing that ever I will keep Unto thylke day in which I creep into My sepulchre—
—CARTWRIGHT3
[The following Tale was found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knicker- bocker, an old gentleman of New York, who was very curious in the Dutch his- tory of the province, and the manners of the descendants from its primitive settlers. His historical researches, however, did not lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore, so invaluable to true history. Whenever, therefore, he happened upon a genuine Dutch family, snugly shut up in its low-roofed farmhouse, under a spreading sycamore, he looked upon it as a little clasped volume of black-letter, and studied it with the zeal of a bookworm.4
The result of all these researches was a history of the province during the reign of the Dutch governors, which he published some years since. There have been various opinions as to the literary character of his work, and, to tell the truth, it is not a whit better than it should be. Its chief merit is its scrupulous accuracy, which indeed was a little questioned on its first appearance, but has since been completely established; and it is now admitted into all historical collections, as a book of un- questionable authority.
The old gentleman died shortly after the publication of his work, and now that he is dead and gone, it cannot do much harm to his memory to say that his time
1. This famous tale (ending the first installment of The Sketch Book) has been regarded as the first American short story. Within ten years (1829) it began in Philadelphia its long stage career. This in- volved adaptations and inheritance by many authors and actors, until it was stabilized in the version acted by the third Joseph Jefferson (1829–1905). 2. Sometimes Wodan or Odin; in Norse and Teutonic mythology, the god of war and wisdom—also “the Thunderer.” 3. William Cartwright (1611–1643), short-lived prodigy of the “Tribe of Ben,” of whom Jonson said, “My son Cartwright writes all like a man.” 4. Thus, in The Sketch Book, Irving continued to use the fictitious Dutch historian, Knickerbocker, from his earlier History of New York. But in a footnote at the end of “Rip Van Winkle” he gave a clue to the German source of the folk tale by denying that Knickerbocker had based it on a “superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart.” This led to the identification of a probable source, “Peter Klaus the Goatherd,” in a collection of German legends that Irving had read (see H. A. Pochmann, “Irv- ing’s German Sources in The Sketch Book,” Studies in Philology, XXVII, July 1930, 477–507).
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might have been much better employed in weightier labors. He, however, was apt to ride his hobby his own way; and though it did now and then kick up the dust a little in the eyes of his neighbors, and grieve the spirit of some friends, for whom he felt the truest deference and affection; yet his errors and follies are remembered “more in sorrow than in anger,”5 and it begins to be suspected, that he never in- tended to injure or offend. But however his memory may be appreciated by critics, it is still held dear by many folk, whose good opinion is well worth having; partic- ularly by certain biscuit-bakers, who have gone so far as to imprint his likeness on their new-year cakes; and have thus given him a chance for immortality, almost equal to the being stamped on a Waterloo Medal,6 or a Queen Anne’s Farthing.7]
Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.
At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village, of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant, (may he rest in peace!) and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weathercocks.
In that same village, and in one of these very houses (which, to tell the precise truth, was sadly time-worn and weather-beaten), there lived many years since, while the country was yet a province of Great Britain, a simple good-natured fellow, of the name of Rip Van Winkle. He was a descendant of the Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of Peter Stuyvesant, and accompanied him to the siege of Fort Christina.8 He inherited, however, but little of the martial character of his ancestors. I have observed that he was a simple good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor, and an obedient hen-pecked husband. Indeed, to the
5. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I, ii, 231–232. 6. A silver medal presented by the British crown to all participants in the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815) or in the engagements of the two previous days. 7. In the reign of Queen Anne (1702–1714) farthings (bronze coins worth a quarter of a penny) bearing her image were minted. 8. Referring to events treated in his History of New York. Stuyvesant was the autocratic governor of New Amsterdam (1647–1664); he seized Fort Christina on the Delaware from the Swedes in 1655.
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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature
Washington Irving Rip Van Winkle © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007
latter circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity; for those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of pa- tience and long-suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.
Certain it is, that he was a great favorite among all the good wives of the vil- lage, who, as usual, with the amiable sex, took his part in all family squabbles; and never failed, whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossip- ings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children of the village, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of ghosts, witches, and Indians. Whenever he went dodging about the vil- lage, he was surrounded by a troop of them, hanging on his skirts, clambering on his back, and playing a thousand tricks on him with impunity; and not a dog would bark at him throughout the neighborhood.
The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor. It could not be from the want of assiduity or perseverance; for he would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar’s lance, and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nib- ble. He would carry a fowling-piece on his shoulder for hours together, trudging through woods and swamps, and up hill and down dale, to shoot a few squirrels or wild pigeons. He would never refuse to assist a neighbor even in the roughest toil, and was a foremost man at all country frolics for husking Indian corn, or building stone-fences; the women of the village, too, used to employ him to run their errands, and to do such little old jobs as their less obliging husbands would not do for them. In a word Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible.
In fact, he declared it was of no use to work on his farm; it was the most pesti- lent little piece of ground in the whole country; every thing about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in spite of him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cow would either go astray, or get among the cabbages; weeds were sure to grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else; the rain always made a point of set- ting in just as he had some outdoor work to do; so that though his patrimonial es- tate had dwindled away under his management, acre by acre, until there was little more left than a mere patch of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it was the worst con- ditioned farm in the neighborhood.
His children, too, were as ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother’s heels, equipped in a pair of his father’s cast-off galligaskins,9 which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her train in bad weather.
9. Knee breeches.
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