One is tempted to ask himself, in concluding a review of this man's life and work, what it was that he peculiarly stood for; what new kind of excellence he brought into being, and how far it survived him. Oddly enough, the accident of his birthplace is made at once his chief merit, and the subtle derogation of that merit; he is the first distinguished name in American letters, and he is "the American Addison." From the outset one who wishes to study his work is hampered by the fact of place. One must be always considering solemnly, "Although he was an American, he succeeded in doing this," or, "Because he was an American, he might have done that," till one is fairly inclined to wish that his English parents had not happened to marry and settle in New York. As a matter of fact, there are few writers against whom the point of nationality may be pushed with less pertinence.

It is plain that earlier American writing interests us only in a local and guarded sense. The critical microscope discovers certain merits; but the least shifting of the eye-piece throws the object out of field. We value what these men wrote because of what they did as Americans, or stood for in American life. Of Irving and a few later writers this is not true. And our regard for them may lead us to suspect that from the literary point of view, it is better to be great than American; or at least that there is no formula to express the ratio between a writer's Americanism and his literary power. The historian esteems a flavor of nationality in literature; to the lover of pure letters, it is only a superior sort of local color. Irving's distinction is that he was the first prophet of pure letters in America. This is to speak thickly; and it will not help matters greatly to say that the mark of pure letters is style. The application of that foggy term to such a writer as Irving is likely to be particularly unfair; it has not been spared him. He has had more praise for his style than for anything else; indeed, it has been commonly suggested that there is little else to praise him for. This is, of course, a survival of the old notion that style is a sort of achievement in decorative art; that fine feathers may do much for the literary bird, at least. The style of a writer like Irving—a mere loiterer in the field of letters—is at best a creditable product of artifice. To him even so much credit has not been always allowed; the clever imitator of Addison—or, as some sager say, of Goldsmith—has not even invented a manner; he has borrowed one.

Fortunately, novelty of form is a very different thing from literary excellence. Irving wrote like a well-bred Englishman, brought up in the sound traditions of the days of good Queen Anne. Whatever local merit his work may have, belongs to theme rather than to treatment. Its delicate humor is as far as possible from what has come to be known as American humor. His only conscious Americanism in motive—to speak of him merely as an artist—was to show England that "an American could write decent English." At that time, it seems, Englishmen considered this to be a good thing for an American to do; and the poet Campbell's remark was thought to be high praise: that Washington Irving had "added clarity to the English tongue." This was a service of which the language just then stood sadly in need. There are always men ready enough to make English turbid, to wreak their ingenuity upon oddities of phrase and diction. At that moment, certainly, the anxious courtier of words was not so much needed as the easy autocrat, whose style, however cavalier, should have grace and firmness and clarity to commend it. When Irving began to express himself, there was very little straightforward simple writing being done, either in America or in England. The stuffed buckram of Johnsonese had been succeeded by the mincing hifalutin of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and her like. It is at least to Irving's credit that his taste led him back half a century to the comparative simplicity and purity of the prim Augustan style. But it is odd that it should have been for this acquired manner that the world thought it liked him while he lived, and has chiefly praised him since he died.

But after all, as was said of Milton in a different connection, Irving has worn "the garb, but not the clothes, of the ancients." His kinship to them in temper of thought and feeling was closer than his resemblance in manner. Like Addison and Goldsmith, he wins his audience through sheer charm of personality. To open one of his books is like meeting a congenial stranger. You like his looks at first glance, you feel somehow that he likes yours; and while you may be hesitating about advances, he is at your side, and there is nothing more to be said. You do not care whether he is American or English, you are not particular what he talks about, but you do not willingly part with him.

The charm of creative genius is less the charm of mind than of feeling. And it is to feeling refined and colored by temperament, that the more delicate modes of belles-lettres owe their whole power. That is, a writer in this sort is admirable as he subdues language and subordinates thought to his own temper, not as he gives elegant utterance to thought or feeling in their abstracted and general estate. Through a surface artificiality of style, which is far more marked in his earliest work, and from which at times he quite escapes, Irving's personality shines clearly. He has so employed a conventional medium as to make it serve his original purposes. He possessed, to be sure, a faculty of strong vernacular speech, which is little suggested in his to-be-published writing, or even in his private letters. The Oregon embroilment had led certain British journals into gross speech about America. Irving was much disturbed. What he wrote was, "A rancorous prejudice against us has been diligently inculcated of late years by the British press, and it is daily producing its fruits of bitterness." What he said was: "Bulwer,"—then English minister to Spain,—"I should deplore exceedingly a war with England, for depend upon it, if we must come to blows, it will be serious work for both. You might break our head at first, but by Heaven! we would break your back in the end!"

But one need not write in the vernacular to be sincere and effective; personality may utter itself through different media, whether in different tongues or in distinct strata of the same tongue. Just now we have a bent toward colloquialism on paper; it was not the bent of Irving's day.

As far as the external features of his style are concerned, he has had praise enough, and more than enough. Clearness, ease, a certain Gallic grace it has; the ink flows readily, the thing says itself without crabbedness or constraint. On the other hand this ready writer is often conventional; a set phrase contents him, why should he labor to escape the usual formula? He knew nothing of the struggle or the reward of the artist in words, who wrestles for the exact nuance, and will not let a sentence go till he has obtained its blessing. Consequently he is never finicking in his phraseology, and seldom final. The subtle artfulness of Stevenson is beyond him; but he has a rarer quality—that subtler artlessness which has belonged in some measure to all the greater writers of sentiment. It is a quality independent of the mechanics of writing; whether the author echoes the syntax of Addison or the diction of Goldsmith is an indifferent question. All that we know is that, through his use of words or in spite of it, a new melody has come into being, a golden motif which is to ring in the world's ears nobody knows how long.

It seems idle to say of such a man that because he does not concern himself with "the mystery of existence," and "the solemn eternities," he has nothing to say. Surely the simple-souled artist may leave such matters for the philosophers and theologians to deal with. Surely his "message" is as significant as theirs. Irving is admirable not mainly because he "wrote beautifully," but because he said something which no one else could say: he uttered the most meaning of all messages—himself. And if literature is really a criticism of life, such a message from such a man has, it would seem, dignity enough.

Evidently Irving, like Goldsmith and Oliver Wendell Holmes, owed his amazing influence largely to his cheerful and wholesome this-worldliness. He was a sentimentalist, but obviously different in spirit from the two great English writers of sentiment who were most nearly his contemporaries. Thackeray is sophisticated; fortune's buffets have left him still a tender interest in life, but pity rather than hopefulness gives color to his mood. Dickens's sentiment seldom rings perfectly true; too often it is sharped to flippancy, or flatted to mawkishness. The tone of Irving, in sentiment or in humor, is the clear and even utterance of a healthy nature. It was a period of sickly sentimentalism in which he began to write; men drew tears frequently and mechanically then, as they drew corks. The sentimentalist passed easily from broad mirth to unwinking pathos. Fortunately that weakest mood of sentiment without humor came seldom to Irving; he wrote only one "History of Margaret Nicholson."

It was his nature to be achingly considerate of others, so that he was a better friend than critic; and he was as careful of their good opinion as of their comfort. Always doubtful what treatment his work would meet, and even what it deserved, he would ask his friends to say nothing about it, unless they liked it. "One condemning whisper," said one of them, "sounded louder in his ear than the plaudits of thousands." Socially, on the other hand, he never had the least doubt of himself. The tastes and manner of a gentleman did not need to be acquired; there was no question of his fitness for any society. During his whole career, thrown as he was into the choicest company of two continents, there was evidently not the least suspicion of embarrassment or awkwardness in his quiet bearing.

He was in the largest sense of the word a generous man; and even in the smaller sense his generosity has distinction and significance. Addison we know to have been a little on the hither side of open-handedness. Goldsmith was by his own satirical confession the "good-natured man," to whom giving was a conscious indulgence. Irving was simply not aware that he gave; to share his best was a natural function. And it is our sense of this, of being admitted as a matter of course to share in all that he is and has, which largely explains his delightfulness as man and author.

Citizen of the world as he was in his literary character, in practical life his Americanism was real and potent. He deplored the War of 1812 and the war with Mexico, but believed firmly that it was no man's duty to go back of the government's decision. In the conduct of his mission to Spain he showed the utmost steadiness, loyalty, and self-possession in many trying situations. He was, in short, a valuable citizen, to whom honors came unsought, and who, out of office, and not desirous of political power, was trusted by all parties, and tempted by none. The mere existence of such a figure, calm, simple, incorruptible, honored wherever he was known, and known prominently throughout Europe, was a valuable stay to the young republic in that purgatorial first half of the nineteenth century.

One fact about him will perhaps bear emphasis; that with all his gentlenesses he was strong and firm and full of spirit. He was susceptible to advice, yet nobody ever forced him to do a thing that was against his mind or conscience. That he was amiable, congenial, companionable—we do not forget these traits of his; we should remember, too, that he never faced an emergency to which he did not prove himself equal. His personal hold upon his contemporaries was plainly due to the fact that their confidence in him as a man was as perfect as their delight in him as an artist. What he did was, after all, only a little part of what he was.