the beautiful and accomplished —— —— , into their career of fashionable dissipation. Now Eugenie is upon a throne, and a voluntary recluse in a convent of one of the most rigorous orders! Poor —— ! Perhaps, however, her fate may ultimately be the happiest of the two. ‘The storm’ with her ‘is o’er, and she’s at rest;’ but the other is launched upon a returnless shore, on a dangerous sea, infamous for its tremendous shipwrecks. Am I to live to see the catastrophe of her career, and the end of this suddenly conjured-up empire, which seems to ‘be of such stuff as dreams are made of’?”
As we have seen, the large sums Irving earned by his pen were not spent in selfish indulgence. His habits and tastes were simple, and little would have sufficed for his individual needs. He cared not much for money, and seemed to want it only to increase the happiness of those who were confided to his care. A man less warm-hearted and more selfish, in his circumstances, would have settled down to a life of more ease and less responsibility.
To go back to the period of his return to America. He was now past middle life, having returned to New York in his fiftieth year. But he was in the full flow of literary productiveness. I have noted the dates of his achievements, because his development was somewhat tardy compared that of many of his contemporaries; but he had the “staying” qualities. The first crop of his mind was of course the most original; time and experience had toned down his exuberant humor; but the spring of his fancy was as free, his vigor was not abated, and his art was more refined. Some of his best work was yet to be done.
And it is worthy of passing mention, in regard to his later productions, that his admirable sense of literary proportion, which is wanting in many good writers, characterized his work to the end.
High as his position as a man of letters was at this time, the consideration in which he was held was much broader than that, — it was that of one of the first citizens of the Republic. His friends, readers, and admirers were not merely the literary class and the general public, but included nearly all the prominent statesmen of the time. Almost any career in public life would have been open to him if he had lent an ear to their solicitations. But political life was not to his taste, and it would have been fatal to his sensitive spirit. It did not require much self-denial, perhaps, to decline the candidacy for mayor of New York, or the honor of standing for Congress; but he put aside also the distinction of a seat in Mr. Van Buren’s cabinet as Secretary of the Navy. His main reason for declining it, aside from a diffidence in his own judgment in public matters, was his dislike of the turmoil of political life in Washington, and his sensitiveness to personal attacks which beset the occupants of high offices. But also he had come to a political divergence with Mr. Van Buren. He liked the man, — he liked almost everybody, — and esteemed him as a friend, but he apprehended trouble from the new direction of the party in power. Irving was almost devoid of party prejudice, and he never seemed to have strongly marked political opinions. Perhaps his nearest confession to a creed is contained in a letter he wrote to a member of the House of Representatives, Gouverneur Kemble, a little time before the offer of a position in the cabinet, in which he said that he did not relish some points of Van Buren’s policy, nor believe in the honesty of some of his elbow counselors. I quote a passage from it:
“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…. 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.”
During the ten years preceding his mission to Spain, Irving kept fagging away at the pen, doing a good deal of miscellaneous and ephemeral work. Among his other engagements was that of regular contributor to the “Knickerbocker Magazine,” for a salary of two thousand dollars. He wrote the editor that he had observed that man, as he advances in life, is subject to a plethora of the mind, occasioned by an accumulation of wisdom upon the brain, and that he becomes fond of telling long stories and doling out advice, to the annoyance of his friends. To avoid becoming the bore of the domestic circle, he proposed to ease off this surcharge of the intellect by inflicting his tediousness on the public through the pages of the periodical. The arrangement brought reputation to the magazine (which was published in the days when the honor of being in print was supposed by the publisher to be ample compensation to the scribe), but little profit to Mr. Irving. During this period he interested himself in an international copyright, as a means of fostering our young literature. He found that a work of merit, written by an American who had not established a commanding name in the market, met very cavalier treatment from our publishers, who frankly said that they need not trouble themselves about native works, when they could pick up every day successful books from the British press, for which they had to pay no copyright. Irving’s advocacy of the proposed law was entirely unselfish, for his own market was secure.
His chief works in these ten years were, “A Tour on the Prairies,” “Recollections of Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey,” “The Legends of the Conquest of Spain,” “Astoria” (the heavy part of the work of it was done by his nephew Pierre), “Captain Bonneville,” and a number of graceful occasional papers, collected afterwards under the title of “Wolfert’s Roost.” Two other books may properly be mentioned here, although they did not appear until after his return from his absence of four years and a half at the court of Madrid; these are the “Biography of Goldsmith” and “Mahomet and his Successors.” At the age of sixty-six he laid aside the “Life of Washington,” on which he was engaged, and rapidly threw off these two books. The “Goldsmith” was enlarged from a sketch he had made twenty-five years before. It is an exquisite, sympathetic piece of work, without pretension or any subtle verbal analysis, but on the whole an excellent interpretation of the character. Author and subject had much in common: Irving had at least a kindly sympathy for the vagabondish inclinations of his predecessor, and with his humorous and cheerful regard of the world; perhaps it is significant of a deeper unity in character that both, at times, fancied they could please an intolerant world by attempting to play the flute. The “Mahomet” is a popular narrative, which throws no new light on the subject; it is pervaded by the author’s charm of style and equity of judgment, but it lacks the virility of Gibbon’s masterly picture of the Arabian prophet and the Saracenic onset.
We need not dwell longer upon this period. One incident of it, however, cannot be passed in silence — that was the abandonment of his lifelong project of writing the History of the Conquest of Mexico to Mr. William H. Prescott. It had been a scheme of his boyhood; he had made collections of materials for it during his first residence in Spain; and he was actually and absorbedly engaged in the composition of the first chapters, when he was sounded by Mr. Cogswell, of the Astor Library, in behalf of Mr. Prescott. Some conversation showed that Mr. Prescott was contemplating the subject upon which Mr. Irving was engaged, and the latter instantly authorized Mr. Cogswell to say that he abandoned it. Although our author was somewhat far advanced, and Mr. Prescott had not yet collected his materials, Irving renounced the glorious theme in such a manner that Prescott never suspected the pain and loss it cost him, nor the full extent of his own obligation. Some years afterwards Irving wrote to his nephew that in giving it up he in a manner gave up his bread, as he had no other subject to supply its place: “I was,” he wrote, “dismounted from my cheval de bataille, and have never been completely mounted since.” But he added that he was not sorry for the warm impulse that induced him to abandon the subject, and that Mr. Prescott’s treatment of it had justified his opinion of him. Notwithstanding Prescott’s very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico. His method, as he outlined it, would have been the natural one. Instead of partially satisfying the reader’s curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the Aztec civilization
