Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of contemporary America. The sharp contrast in moods in which the two
men returned to America from their travels, the one harshly critical
of middle-class economics and frontier leveling, the other responding
naïvely to the enthusiasm for speculative expansion and eager to
exploit the romance of the westward movement, sufficiently reveals
the difference between them. The one was a dogmatic Puritan with the
dictatorial ways of the quarter-deck, the other was a play-boy of
letters temperamentally incapable of critical analysis. There was not a
grain of realism in Irving’s nature. His cheerful optimism was little
more than the optimism of the prosperous. Wholly ignorant of economics,
he never comprehended the significance of the revolutions in process
all about him, and this _naïveté_ blinded him to the motive of John
Jacob Astor in financing Astoria, as it blinded him to all the major
forces of the times. He was easily brought to see the romance of the
great struggle between rival companies for mastery of the fur trade,
but he did not comprehend how the glamour he threw about the venture
must inevitably strengthen his patron’s investment in imperialism.
Gullible as a child, he discovered nothing more significant in the
great struggle between agrarianism and capitalism for control of
government than the ungenerous suspicions and novel theories it bred.
For the outstanding liberals of New York he had scant sympathy. William
Leggett, Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, William Cullen Bryant,
influenced his views far less than did the masters of Wall Street; and
from the courageous movement of Locofocoism he drew back in distrust.
The one letter in which he elaborated such political convictions as he
had come to hold, is an interesting document that deserves quotation.
As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican,
and attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of
my country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no
bitterness in my creed. I have no relish for puritans either in
religion or politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme,
and for overturning everything that stands in the way of their own
zealous career. I have, therefore, felt a strong distaste for some
of those locofoco luminaries who of late have been urging strong
and sweeping measures, subversive of the interests of great classes
of the community. Their doctrines may be excellent in theory, but,
if enforced in violent and uncompromising opposition to all our
habitudes, may produce the most distressing effects. The best of
remedies must be cautiously applied, and suited to the taste and
constitution of the patient.... Ours is a government of compromise.
We have several great and distinct interests bound up together,
which, if not separately consulted and severally accommodated, may
harass and impair each other.... I always distrust the soundness
of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and
disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow-citizens.
Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading
and financial classes of our country. You yourself know ... how
important these classes are to the prosperous conduct of the
complicated affairs of this immense empire. You yourself know,
in spite of all the common-place cant and obloquy that has been
cast upon them by political spouters and scribblers, what general
good faith and fair dealing prevails throughout these classes.
Knaves and swindlers there are doubtless among them, as there are
among all great classes of men; but I declare that I looked with
admiration at the manner in which the great body of our commercial
and financial men have struggled on through the tremendous trials
which have of late overwhelmed them, and have endeavored, at every
pecuniary sacrifice, to fulfill their engagements. (_Life and
Letters_, Vol. II, pp. 312-313.)
This persuasive presentation of the philosophy of compromise, with its
implicit defense of capitalism, marks Irving’s drift back to the middle
class with which he had long before broken. In the six years since his
return he had watched the country react to the great panic, and he went
with it in its veering towards the Whiggery of Henry Clay. The fragile
bonds of his attachment to the Democracy were becoming tenuous; other
attachments were insensibly drawing him towards the more congenial
representatives of wealth. He had all his life associated with the
Tory classes and it was easy for him to transfer his loyalty to the
American Tories. Under such influences began a slow _rapprochement
cordial_ towards the new philosophy of progress. He was seized with
the common mania of speculation and made some unfortunate investments
in wild lands and railways that seriously hampered him later, and he
commercialized his literary reputation by such money-making ventures as
_Astoria_ and the _Adventures of Captain Bonneville_. He discovered a
new romance in the great business of exploitation, and found the hand
of God in the profits of unearned increment. In the letter above quoted
from, he justified the ways of speculation thus:
There are moral as well as physical phenomena incident to every
state of things, which may at first appear evils, but which are
devised by an all-seeing Providence for some beneficent purpose.
Such is the spirit of speculative enterprise which now and then
rises to an extravagant height, and sweeps throughout the land....
The late land speculations, so much deprecated, though ruinous to
many engaged in them, have forced agriculture and civilization
into the depths of the wilderness; have laid open the recesses of
primeval forests; made us acquainted with the most available points
of our immense interior; have cast the germs of future towns and
cities and busy marts in the heart of savage solitudes, and studded
our vast rivers and internal seas with ports that will soon give
activity to a vast internal commerce. Millions of acres which might
otherwise have remained idle and impracticable wastes, have been
brought under the dominion of the plough, and hundreds of thousands
of industrious yeomen have been carried into the rich but remote
depths of our immense empire, to multiply and spread out in every
direction, and give solidity and strength to our confederacy.
All this has in a great measure been effected by the extravagant
schemes of land speculators. I am, therefore, inclined to look upon
them with a more indulgent eye than they are considered by those
violent politicians who are prescribing violent checks and counter
measures, and seem to have something vindictive in their policy.
(_Life and Letters_, Vol. II, p. 314.)
Thus did Irving become completely domesticated in the new world that
Rip Van Winkle had found so disconcerting when he came upon it out
of the quiet colonial past. The rediscovery of America proved to be
an agreeable business, and profitable in a professional way. His
enthusiasms, which in 1831 he felt were “waning as to many objects of
past interest,” were stimulated by the vast stir of the country, and
the spirit of romance once more ran briskly in his veins. The better
part of a year he rambled widely about the country, in order, as he
said, to get at home “upon American themes.” He visited Boston and the
White Mountains, then West to Ohio and St. Louis, then with an Indian
commissioner he penetrated the southwest prairies as far as the wild
Pawnee country beyond the South Canadian River, then to New Orleans and
Charleston, finally settling down in Washington to immerse himself in
politics. From there he passed over the Potomac for an extended trip
through the Old Dominion, returning to New York where he spent some
time with Astor at Hell Gate, finally in 1835 settling at Tarrytown
which was to be his home to the last. He had definitely determined on
his new field of work. His imagination had been stirred by his visit
to the prairies; the romance of the westward expansion was beginning
to find expression in the works of Timothy Flint and James Hall; the
public interest was ripe and John Jacob Astor was at hand to encourage
him. Thus stimulated Irving proposed to make the field of western
romance his own, with the result that he published in quick succession
_A Tour of the Prairies_, _Astoria_, and _The Adventures of Captain
Bonneville_.
On the whole the new venture did not prosper. The spirit of the
West was not to be captured by one whose heart was in Spain. In
_A Tour of the Prairies_ there is a certain homely simplicity and
straightforwardness that spring from a plain recital of undramatic
experience; and in _Astoria_ there is an unembellished narrative of
appalling hardship and heroic endurance, with none of the tawdry
romantics that mar the work of Flint and Hall. Yet neither is
creatively imaginative, neither stirs one with a sense of high drama.
The atmosphere of Snake River could not be created in the quiet study
at the “Roost”; it needed the pen of a realist to capture the romance
of those bitter wanderings in mountain and sagebrush. It is journeyman
work, and on every page one is conscious of the professional man of
letters faithfully doing this day’s allotment. It is much the same
with his _Life of Washington_. In this last great undertaking Irving
no longer writes with gusto. The golden days of Diedrich Knickerbocker
and Rip Van Winkle are long since gone; the magic is departed from
his pen; and a somewhat tired old gentleman is struggling to fulfill
his contract with his publisher. It was a mistake to venture on
the work, despite the fact that he had long been planning it. His
historical equipment was inadequate. He might make a pretty story out
of Washington’s early life and his days with the army, but he was far
too ignorant of politics, too credulous in judging his materials, to
interpret justly the fierce party struggles that seethed about the
President. Quite unconsciously in this last work he returned to the
political prejudices of his youth, and wrote an account of Washington’s
administrations deeply colored by his Federalist sources.
The most distinguished of our early romantics, Irving in the end was
immolated on the altar of romanticism. The pursuit of the picturesque
lured him away into sterile wastes, and when the will-o’-the-wisp was
gone he was left empty. A born humorist, the gayety of whose spirits
overflowed the brim, he was lacking in a brooding intellectuality,
and instead of coming upon irony at the bottom of the cup--as the
greater humorists have come upon it after life has had its way with
them--he found there only sentiment and the dreamy poetic. As the
purple haze on the horizon of his mind was dissipated by a sobering
experience, he tried to substitute an adventitious glamour; as romance
faded, sentiment supplied its place. So long as youth and high spirits
endured, his inkwell was a never-failing source of gayety, but as the
sparkle subsided he over-sweetened his wine. This suffices to account
for the fact that all his better work was done early; and this explains
why the Knickerbocker _History_ remains the most genial and vital of
his volumes. The gayety of youth bubbles and effervesces in those magic
pages, defying time to do its worst. The critic may charge the later
Irving with many and heavy shortcomings, but the romantic smoke-clouds
that ascend from Wouter Van Twiller’s pipe cannot be dissipated by the
winds of criticism.
II • James Kirke Paulding
Far more native to the limitations and hardships of American life and
far more loyal to its homely aspirations was James Kirke Paulding,
whose literary reputation came to be so deeply overshadowed by that