SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY AND CLASS DISCUSSION 1. What two kinds of narrative literature after the Revolution were still almost wholly subject to English models? 2. What is the usual relation of art to the political capital of a country? 3. What is the case in America ? 4. What material changes have taken place in the last hundred years with respect to America's "magnificent isolation"? What political changes within the last generation? 5. What reasons had Americans to be disturbed by foreign criticism in the early nineteenth century? 6. What were some of the criticisms on American life and manners written by Americans? 7. The following questions may be answered from the Chronological Outlines at the close of Chapters IV and VII : a. Name as many forms of American literature written up to 1800 as you can, and give an example of each. b. What are the four American plays mentioned in the last half of the eighteenth century, and what is the title of each to distinction in the history of American literature? c. What well-known patriotic song was written and sung before 1800? CHAPTER IX WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859) SUGGESTED READINGS WASHINGTON IRVING. The Salmagundi Papers (1807-1808), Nos. I and 11; The Sketch Book (1819) (see Standard English Classics reprint, Ginn and Company): "English Writers on America," "Rural Life in England," "Little Britain," and "Rip Van Winkle.” Other passages found in the following collections: BOYNTON, P. H. Milestones in American Literature, pp. 99-129. Ginn and Company. CALHOUN, M. E., and MACALARNEY, E. L. Readings from American Literature, pp. 186-225. Ginn and Company. FOERSTER, NORMAN. The Chief American Prose Writers, pp. 38–94. Houghton Mifflin Company. See Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village," for influence on Irving's writing. What American traits were satirized in No. 11 of the "Salmagundi Papers"? What were Anglo-American relations in Irving's time? In what essay does he discuss them? What is his own attitude? What influence of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" do you find in Irving's "Rural Life"? From a reading of "Little Britain" should you say that Irving had a feeling of respect for old English customs and traditions or only a feeling of amusement at them? Read "Rip Van Winkle" with special attention to Irving's use of homely details belonging to the time and place. Read "Rip Van Winkle" with special attention to the story structure. What are the two passages of time into which most of it is brought? Try to discover for yourself the features of Irving's sentence structure and choice of words that are not common in twentieth-century essays, and then compare your observations with those in this chapter. CHAPTER OUTLINE The life of Washington Irving Boyhood and first trip abroad First period of authorship, 1807-1809 Third period of authorship and diplomatic service How it was written, published, and received General classification by types "English Writers on America" Papers on English life and custom Country life Scenes in London English good cheer Literary essays "Rip Van Winkle” "Sleepy Hollow" and "The Spectre Bridegroom" Irving's prose style Last years and the Knickerbocker School The life of Washington Irving. Many of the facts about the boyhood and youth of Washington Irving are typical of his place and his period as well as true of himself. The first is that he was born in New York City of British-American parents, his father a Scotch Presbyterian from the Orkney Islands and his mother an Englishwoman. His father's rigid. religious views ruled in the upbringing of young Irving and his six brothers and sisters. Two very natural results followed: one, that as a boy he grew to regard almost everything that was enjoyable as wicked; and the other, that as he came toward manhood he was particularly fond of the pleasures of life. A boy of his position in Boston at this time would have been more than likely to go to Harvard College, which was a controlling influence in eastern Massachusetts, but King's College (Colum bia) held no such place in New York. Irving's higher education began in a law office, and then, when his health seemed to be failing, was continued by travel abroad. Boyhood and first trip abroad. The long journey, or series of journeys, that he took from 1804 to 1806 were of the greatest importance. They were important to Irving because he was peculiarly fitted to get the greatest good from such informal education. He was an attractive young fellow, so that it was easy for him to make and to hold friends; and he was blessed with his father's moral balance, so that he did not fall into bad habits. He was so far inclined to laziness that it is doubtful if he would have achieved much if he had gone to college, but he was wide-awake and receptive, so that he absorbed information wherever he went. Furthermore, he had a mind as well as a memory, and he came back to America stocked not merely with a great lot of miscellaneous facts but with a real knowledge of human nature and of human life. First period of authorship, 1807-1809. From the day of his return to New York in 1806 to the day of his death, in 1859, Washington Irving had an international point of view and. developed steadily into an international character. His first piece of writing was that of a very young man, but a young man of promise. Like the other Americans of his day he had read a good deal of English literature written in the eighteenth century; and among the essayists of that century whom he liked one was Oliver Goldsmith. New York supplied him with his subjects and Goldsmith with his way of writing, for he wrote, in company with one of his brothers and a mutual friend, a series of amusing criticisms on the ways of his townsmen, modeling his "Salmagundi Papers" after Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World." This was at once independent and imitative. The youthful authors blithely announced in their first number that they proposed to "instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age." In the twenty-two papers that came out at odd times between January, 1807, and January, 1808, they criticized everything that struck their attention, and they had their eyes wide open. The American love of display, the tendency toward useless talk which made the country a "logocracy" (or word-ocracy) rather than a democracy, the lack of both judgment and good behavior at election times, and their social and literary fashions make just a beginning of the list of subjects held up to genial ridicule. Yet, though the criticism was fair and to the point, it was an old-fashioned kind of comment, the kind that England had been feeding on for the better part of a century, ever since Addison and Steele had made it popular in the Tatler and the Spectator. Moreover, it was done in an old-fashioned way, for in making Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, the Tripolitan, the foreign critic on American life as he saw it with a stranger's eyes they were using a device that was old even before it was employed by the Englishman from whom they borrowed it. The "Salmagundis" are interesting, however, as early representatives of a longish succession of satires on the life of New York, all pleasant and rather pleasantly superficial. Two years later Irving, this time alone, followed up this opening success with his "Knickerbocker's History of New York," not as serious a piece of work as its title at first suggests, for it was a take-off of a ponderous history on the same subject which had appeared just before. Like the "Salmagundis" it was lively and impertinent, the very clever work of a very young man. Second period of authorship, 1819-1831. Now for ten years Washington Irving wrote nothing. He was in business with his brothers and proved himself the most level-headed member of a pretty unbusinesslike combination. In 1815, in connection with one of their many ambitious failures, he went abroad, probably without the least suspicion that he would be absent from his own country for seventeen years and that he would return to it as a celebrated writer widely read on two continents. The first step toward his wider reputation came in 1819 with the publication in London of "The Sketch Book," the best known of all his works. This was followed in 1822 by "Bracebridge Hall" and in 1824 by "Tales of a Traveller," both |