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Page 14
"Soon after this, Mr. Irving, who had again for long felt 'the
tenderest interest warm his bosom, and finally enthrall his whole
soul,' made one vigorous and valiant effort to free himself from a
hopeless and consuming attachment. My mother counseled him, I
believe, for the best, and he left Dresden on an expedition of
several weeks into a country he had long wished to see, though, in
the main, it disappointed him; and he started with young Colbourne
(son of General Colbourne) as his companion. Some of his letters on
this journey are before the public; and in the agitation and
eagerness he there described, on receiving and opening letters from
us, and the tenderness in his replies,--the longing to be once more
in the little Pavilion, to which we had moved in the beginning of
the summer,--the letters (though carefully guarded by the delicacy
of her who intrusted them to the editor, and alone retained among
many more calculated to lay bare his true feelings), even
fragmentary as they are, point out the truth.
"Here is the key to the journey to Silesia, the return to Dresden,
and, finally, to the journey from Dresden to Rotterdam in our
company, first planned so as to part at Cassel, where Mr. Irving
had intended to leave us and go down the Rhine, but subsequently
could not find in his heart to part. Hence, after a night of pale
and speechless melancholy, the gay, animated, happy countenance
with which he sprang to our coachbox to take his old seat on it,
and accompany us to Rotterdam. There even could he not part, but
joined us in the steamboat; and, after bearing us company as far as
a boat could follow us, at last tore himself away, to bury himself
in Paris, and try to work....
"It was fortunate, perhaps, that this affection was returned by the
_warmest friendship_ only, since it was destined that the
accomplishment of his wishes was impossible, for many obstacles
which lay in his way; and it is with pleasure I can truly say that
in time he schooled himself to view, also with friendship only, one
who for some time past has been the wife of another."
Upon the delicacy of this revelation the biographer does not comment,
but he says that the idea that Irving thought of marriage at that time
is utterly disproved by the following passage from the very manuscript
which he submitted to Mrs. Foster:--
"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not
long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I
became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the
world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was
too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by
matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon
my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.
I feel as if I already had a family to think and provide for."
Upon the question of attachment and depression, Mr. Pierre Irving
says:--
"While the editor does not question Mr. Irving's great enjoyment of
his intercourse with the Fosters, or his deep regret at parting
from them, he is too familiar with his occasional fits of
depression to have drawn from their recurrence on his return to
Paris any such inference as that to which the lady alludes. Indeed,
his 'memorandum book' and letters show him to have had, at this
time, sources of anxiety of quite a different nature. The allusion
to his having 'to put once more to sea' evidently refers to his
anxiety on returning to his literary pursuits, after a season of
entire idleness."
It is not for us to question the judgment of the biographer, with his
full knowledge of the circumstances and his long intimacy with his
uncle; yet it is evident that Irving was seriously impressed at Dresden,
and that he was very much unsettled until he drove away the impression
by hard work with his pen; and it would be nothing new in human nature
and experience if he had for a time yielded to the attractions of
loveliness and a most congenial companionship, and had returned again to
an exclusive devotion to the image of the early loved and lost.
That Irving intended never to marry is an inference I cannot draw either
from his fondness for the society of women, from his interest in the
matrimonial projects of his friends and the gossip which has feminine
attractions for its food, or from his letters to those who had his
confidence. In a letter written from Birmingham, England, March 15,
1816, to his dear friend Henry Brevoort, who was permitted more than
perhaps any other person to see his secret heart, he alludes, with
gratification, to the report of the engagement of James Paulding, and
then says:--
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