wrote. But he regarded the politics of his own country, the revolutions in France, the long struggle in Spain, without heat; and he held aloof from projects of agitation and reform, and maintained the attitude of an observer, regarding the life about him from the point of 'view of the literary artist, as he was justified in doing.

his own, and is as copious, felicitous in the choice of words, flowing, spontaneous, flexible, engaging, clear, and as little wearisome when read continuously in quantity 5 as any in the English tongue. This is saying a great deal, though it is not claiming for him the compactness, nor the robust vigor, nor the depth of thought, of many other masters in it. It is some

certainly lucid, but its simplicity is not that of Benjamin Franklin's style; it is often ornate, not seldom somewhat diffuse, and always exceedingly melodious. It is noticeable for its metaphorical felicity. But it was not in the sympathetic nature of the author, to which I just referred, to come sharply to the point. It is much to have merited the eulogy of Campbell that he had added clarity to the English tongue.' This elegance and finish of style (which seems to have been as natural to the man as his amiable manner) is sometimes made his reproach, as if it were his sole merit, and as if he had concealed under this charming form a want of substance. In literature form is vital. But his case does not rest upon that. As an illustration his Life of Washington may be put in evidence. Probably this worl lost something in incisiveness and bril liancy by being postponed till the writer old age.

Irving had the defects of his peculiar 10 times praised for its simplicity. It is genius, and these have no doubt helped to fix upon him the complimentary disparagement of genial.' He was not aggressive; in his nature he was wholly unpartizan, and full of lenient charity; and I suspect 15 that his kindly regard of the world, although returned with kindly liking, cost him something of that respect for sturdiness and force which men feel for writers who flout them as fools in the main. Like Scott, he belonged to the idealists, and not to the realists, whom our generation affects. Both writers stimulate the longing for something better. Their creed was short: 'Love God and honor the 25 King.' It is a very good one for a literary man, and might do for a Christian. The supernatural was still a reality in the age in which they wrote. Irving's faith in God and his love of humanity were 30 very simple; I do not suppose he was much disturbed by the deep problems that have set us all adrift. In every age, whatever is astir, literature, theology, all intellectual activity, takes one and the same drift, and approximates in color. The bent of Irving's spirit was fixed in his youth, and he escaped the desperate realism of this generation, which has no outcome, and is likely to produce little 4° that is noble.

But whatever this loss, it is im possible for any biography to be less pretentious in style, or less ambitious in proclamation. proclamation. The only pretension of matter is in the early chapters, in which a more than doubtful genealogy is elabo rated, and in which it is thought necessary to Washington's dignity to give a ficti tious importance to his family and his childhood, and to accept the southern estimate of the hut in which he was born as a mansion.' In much of this false estimate Irving was doubtless misled by the fables of Weems. But while he has given us a dignified portrait of Washington, it is as far as possible removed from that of the smileless sprig which has be gun to weary even the popular fancy. The man he paints is flesh and blood, presented, I believe, with substantial faith fulness to his character; with a recogni tion of the defects of his education and But 55 the deliberation of his mental operations:

I do not know how to account, on principles of culture which we recognize, for our author's style. His education was exceedingly defective, nor was his want 45 of discipline supplied by subsequent desultory application. He seems to have been born with a rare sense of literary proportion and form; into this, as into a mold, were run his apparently lazy and 50 really accurate observations of life. That he thoroughly mastered such literature as he fancied there is abundant evidence; that his style was influenced by the purest English models is also apparent. there remains a large margin for wonder how, with his want of training, he could have elaborated a style which is distinctly

with at least a hint of that want of breadth of culture and knowledge of the past, the possession of which character

5

ized many of his great associates; and with no concealment that he had a dower of passions and a temper which only vigorous self-watchfulness kept under. But he portrays, with an admiration not too highly colored, the magnificent patience, the courage to bear misconstruction, the unfailing patriotism, the practical sagacity, the level balance of judgment combined with the wisest toleration, the dig- 10 nity of mind, and the lofty moral nature which made him the great man of his epoch. Irving's grasp of this character; his lucid marshaling of the scattered, often wearisome and uninteresting details of our dragging, unpicturesque Revolutionary War; his just judgment of men; his even, almost judicial, moderation of tone; and his admirable proportion of space to events, render the discussion of 20 style in reference to this work superflu

ous.

Another writer might have made a more brilliant performance; descriptions sparkling with antitheses, characters projected into startling attitudes by the use 25 of epithets; a work more exciting and more piquant, that would have started a thousand controversies, and engaged the attention by daring conjectures and attempts to make a dramatic spectacle; a book interesting and notable, but false in philosophy and untrue in fact.

that is very rare to any writer foreign to the soil. As to America, I do not know what can be more characteristically American than the Knickerbocker, the Hudson River tales, the sketches of life and adventure in the far West. But underneath all this diversity there is one constant quality, the flavor of the author. Open by chance and read almost anywhere in his score of books,— it may be the Tour on the Prairies, the familiar dream of the Alhambra, or the narratives of the brilliant exploits of New World explorers; surrender yourself to the flowing current of his transparent style, and you are conscious of a beguilement which is the crowning excellence of all lighter literature, for which we have no word but 'charm.'

The consensus of opinion about Irving in England and America for thirty years was very remarkable. He had a universal popularity rarely enjoyed by any writer. England returned him to America medaled by the king, honored by the university which is chary of its favors, followed by the applause of the whole English people. In English households, in drawing-rooms of the metropolis, in 30 political circles no less than among the literary coteries, in the best reviews, and in the popular newspapers the opinion of him was pretty much the same. And even in the lapse of time and the change of literary fashion authors so unlike as Byron and Dickens were equally warm in admiration of him. To the English endorsement America added her own enthusiasm, which was as universal. His readers were the million, and all his readers were admirers. Even American statesmen who feed their minds on food we know not of read Irving. It is true that the uncritical opinion of New York was never exactly reëchoed in the cool recesses of Boston culture; but the magnates of the North American Review gave him their meed of cordial praise. The country at large put him on the pinnacle. If you attempt to account for the position he occupied by his character, which won the love of all men, it must be remembered that the quality which won this, whatever its value, pervades his books also.

When the Sketch-Book appeared, an English critic said it should have been first published in England, for Irving was 35 an English writer. The idea has been more than once echoed here. The truth is that while Irving was intensely American in feeling he was first of all a man of letters, and in that capacity he was cosmopolitan; he certainly was not insular. He had a rare accommodation of tone to his theme. Of England, whose traditions kindled his susceptible fancy, he wrote as Englishmen would like to 45 write about it. In Spain he was saturated with the romantic story of the people and the fascination of the clime; and he was so true an interpreter of both as to earn from the Spaniards the title of 50 'the poet Irving.' I chanced once, in an inn at Frascati, to take up The Tales of a Traveller, which I had not seen for many years. I expected to revive the somewhat faded humor and fancy of the 55 past generation. But I found not only a sprightly humor and vivacity which are modern, but a truth to Italian local color

And yet it must be said that the total impression left upon the mind by the man and his works is not that of the greatest intellectual force. I have no doubt that

upon the affirmation or the reversal of their views of life and their judgments of characters. I think the calm work of Irving will stand when much of the more 5 startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual achievement of this age has passed

this was the impression he made upon his ablest contemporaries. And this fact, when I consider the effect the man produced, makes the study of him all the more interesting. As an intellectual personality he makes no such impression, for instance, as Carlyle, or a dozen other writers now living who could be named. The incisive critical faculty was almost entirely wanting in him. He had neither 10 self to exclude from a literary estimate,

the power nor the disposition to cut his way transversely across popular opinion and prejudice that Ruskin has, not to draw around him disciples equally well

away.

And this leads me to speak of Irving's moral quality, which I cannot bring my

even in the face of the current gospel of art for art's sake. There is something that made Scott and Irving personally loved by the millions of their readers,

pleased to see him fiercely demolish to- 15 who had only the dimmest ideas of their

day what they had delighted to see him set up yesterday as eternal. He evoked neither violent partizanship nor violent opposition. He was an extremely sensitive man, and if he had been capable of creating a conflict he would only have been miserable in it. The play of his mind depended upon the sunshine of approval. And all this shows a certain want of intellectual virility.

25

personality. This was some quality perceived in what they wrote. Each one can define it for himself; there it is, and I do not see why it is not as integral a part of the authors an element in the estimate of their future position as what we term their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, their art. However you rate it, you cannot account for Irving's influ ence in the world without it. In his tender tribute to Irving, the great-hearted Thackeray, who saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere literary art in the sum total of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to Lockhart,- Be a good man, my dear.' We know well enough that the great author of The Newcomes and the great author of The Heart of Midlothian recognized the abiding value in literature. of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences; and Irving's literature, walk round it and measure it by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature.

The

A recent anonymous writer has said that most of the writing of our day is characterized by an intellectual strain. I have no doubt that this will appear to be the case to the next generation. It is a 30 strain to say something new even at the risk of paradox, or to say something in a new way at the risk of obscurity. From this Irving was entirely free. There is no visible straining to attract attention. 35 His mood is calm and unexaggerated. Even in some of his pathos, which is open to the suspicion of being 'literary,' there is no literary exaggeration. He seems always writing from an internal calm, 40 author loved good women and little chilwhich is the necessary condition of his production. If he wins at all by his style, by his humor, by his portraiture of scenes or of character, it is by a gentle force, like that of the sun in spring. There are 45 many men now living, or recently dead, intellectual prodigies, who have stimulated thought, upset opinions, created mental eras, to whom Irving stands hardly in as fair a relation as Goldsmith to Johnson. 50 What verdict the next generation will put upon their achievements I do not know; but it is safe to say that their position and that of Irving as well will depend largely

55

dren and a pure life; he had faith in his fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any subservience to the highest; he retained a belief in the possibility of chivalrous actions, and did not care to envelop them in a cynical suspicion; he was an author still capable of an enthusiasm. His books are wholesome, full of sweetness and charm, of humor without any sting, of amusement without any stain; and their more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry nor pretension.

From Washington Irving, 1881.

One does not read long in the Nature studies of John Burroughs without realizing that their author was country born, a farmer's boy, who learned in the fields and woods those secrets of nature which only the country-reared may know. Roxbury, New York, was his birthplace. The usual farm round of work in the summer, a little schooling in the winter, a year or two of academy courses after he was seventeen, marriage at twenty, school teaching for a period, Treasury Department work at Washington for nine years, inspector of national banks for eleven years more, and then, in 1884, retirement to his native region and uninterrupted literary work, these are the external facts of his biography. For his real biography, however, one must go to his books. He was thirty when he put forth his salutatory, his literary declaration of independence, Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, and it was four years later, 1871, when he issued his first distinctive book, Wake-Robin, so named from the early, homely, native blossom which all country people know. The papers had been written spontaneously out of the heart of the writer. A countryman, shut up in the city the whole year long, he dreamed of the scenes and the birds and the wild life of the woods and fields, and he wrote with an idealizing pen, and yet with the accuracy of the farmer's boy that he He followed the book with Winter Sunshine, 1875, Birds and Poets, 1877, Locusts and Wild Honey, 1879, and Pepacton, 1881, books which take one into the very heart of nature. The author is a most delightful companion for he takes his reader at once into his confidence, points out a thousand things he never would have seen had he been alone, gossips delightfully of the happenings in woods and meadow, tells story after story of the tragedies and the comedies of the fields, and then perhaps, leads him into his rural study and chats just as entertainingly about books and men and the various bearings of philosophy.

was.

Of the eighteen books in the standard set of Burroughs, the eight earlier ones deal prevailingly with Nature study. The later ones are more distinctly scientific and critical. It is in the earlier part that his distinctive work is to be found. He is an out-of-doors classic, the leader, after Thoreau, of the whole out-of-doors school of writers. Thoreau was fundamentally a poet, a transcendentalist, a mystic who went to Nature for eternal truths and for the mystic meanings of nature: Burroughs is a scientist who sees with sharp eyes and who is able to make others see. Moreover, he is able to throw over his writings at their best the golden light of memory, that mellow atmosphere that transforms them from bare science into distinctive literature.

LEAVES OF GRASS

moral elements and qualities that exist in man in a conscious state, exist, says the great German philosopher, in manifold material Nature, and all her products, in 5 an unconscious state. Powerful and susceptible men in other words, poets, naturally so have an affiliation and identity with the material Nature in its entirety and parts, that the majority of peo

STANDARD OF THE NATURAL UNIVERSAL What is the reason that the inexorable and perhaps deciding standard by which poems, and other productions of art, must be tried, after the application of all minor tests, is the standard of absolute Nature? The question can hardly be answered, but the answer may be hinted at. The stand-ple ard of form, for instance, is presented by Nature, out of the prevailing shapes of her growths, and appears to perfection in the human body. All the forms in art, sculpture, architecture, etc., follow it. Of 15 course the same in colors; and, in fact, the same even in music, though more human and carried higher.

But a nearer hint still. The same

(including most especially intellectual persons) cannot begin to understand; so passionate is it, and so convertible seems to be the essence of the demonstrative human spirit, with the undemonstrative spirit of the hill and wood, the river, field, and sky.

I know that, at first sight, certain works of art, in some branches, do not exhibit this identity and controvertibility. But

15 'Not for an embroiderer;