Washington Irving by Charles Dudley Warner


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Page 1

It is time to inquire what basis this great reputation had in enduring
qualities, what portion of it was due to local and favoring
circumstances, and to make an impartial study of the author's literary
rank and achievement.

The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating
of all. The popularity of an author seems to depend quite as much upon
fashion or whim as upon a change in taste or in literary form. Not only
is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity is perpetually
revising its opinion. We are accustomed to say that the final rank of an
author is settled by the slow consensus of mankind in disregard of the
critics; but the rank is after all determined by the few best minds of
any given age, and the popular judgment has very little to do with it.
Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly valueless criterion of
merit. The settling of high rank even in the popular mind does not
necessarily give currency; the so-called best authors are not those most
widely read at any given time. Some who attain the position of classics
are subject to variations in popular and even in scholarly favor or
neglect. It happens to the princes of literature to encounter periods of
varying duration when their names are revered and their books are not
read. The growth, not to say the fluctuation, of Shakespeare's
popularity is one of the curiosities of literary history. Worshiped by
his contemporaries, apostrophized by Milton only fourteen pears after his
death as the "dear son of memory, great heir to fame,"

"So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"

he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes
of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some
that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper
entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to
the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach
of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered from all its
neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars--I do
not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text--been proportioned to his
preeminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among foreign
peoples.

There are already signs that we are not to accept as the final judgment
upon the English contemporaries of Irving the currency their writings
have now. In the case of Walter Scott, although there is already visible
a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by
this generation as he was by the last. This faint reaction is no doubt a
sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical
speculation. An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another,
and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its
direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy.
The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel, or
Schopenhauer. The humanitarian novel, the fictions of passion, of
realism, of doubt, the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of
unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting
attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age that
is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural and
the material, the ideal and the real. It would be natural if in such a
time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should be
not so much heeded as the more strident voices. Yet when the passing
fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion of another, that which is
most acceptable to the thought and feeling of the present may be without
an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be read as
Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be read.
It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction worthy
to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who have
faithfully painted the manners of their own time.

Irving has shared the neglect of the writers of his generation. It would
be strange, even in America, if this were not so. The development of
American literature (using the term in its broadest sense) in the past
forty years is greater than could have been expected in a nation which
had its ground to clear, its wealth to win, and its new governmental
experiment to adjust; if we confine our view to the last twenty years,
the national production is vast in amount and encouraging in quality.
It suffices to say of it here, in a general way, that the most vigorous
activity has been in the departments of history, of applied science, and
the discussion of social and economic problems. Although pure literature
has made considerable gains, the main achievement has been in other
directions. The audience of the literary artist has been less than that
of the reporter of affairs and discoveries and the special correspondent.
The age is too busy, too harassed, to have time for literature; and
enjoyment of writings like those of Irving depends upon leisure of mind.
The mass of readers have cared less for form than for novelty and news
and the satisfying of a recently awakened curiosity. This was inevitable
in an era of journalism, one marked by the marvelous results attained in
the fields of religion, science, and art, by the adoption of the
comparative method. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the vigor
and intellectual activity of the age than a living English writer, who
has traversed and illuminated almost every province of modern thought,
controversy, and scholarship; but who supposes that Mr. Gladstone has
added anything to permanent literature? He has been an immense force in
his own time, and his influence the next generation will still feel and
acknowledge, while it reads, not the writings of Mr. Gladstone, but,
maybe, those of the author of "Henry Esmond" and the biographer of "Rab
and His Friends." De Quincey divides literature into two sorts, the
literature of power and the literature of knowledge. The latter is of
necessity for to-day only, and must be revised to-morrow. The definition
has scarcely De Quincey's usual verbal felicity, but we can apprehend the
distinction he intended to make.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Fri 7th Feb 2025, 2:17