By Prof. WALLACE BRUCE.

The record of Washington Irving rests like a ray of sunlight upon the pages of our early history. Born in 1783, at the close of the great struggle for independence, his life of seventy-six years circles a period of growth and material progress, the pages of which this centennial generation has just been turning. And perhaps it is not unfitting to consider at this time the life and services of our sweetest writer, the best representative of our earliest culture. On the other hand, I am well aware that the great mass of mankind are absorbed in business, and like the Athenian of old continually asking for something new; that the initials of our nation were long ago condensed into a plain monogram of dollars, and this our nineteenth century represented and symbolized by a large interrogation point. We question the stars, the rocks and our Darwinian ancestors; and we are thoroughly occupied in looking after our own personal interest and the prosperity of the republic; yet I may hope that this lecture will call up some pleasure in the hearts of those who read and re-read the writings of Washington Irving, and will help to renew your acquaintance with the incidents of his life, and perhaps awaken the attention of some who are asking what to read—the one question which more than any other decides their individual happiness and the education of the rising generation. It is my purpose this afternoon to consider his writings, his associations and his life; and I take up his works in the order in which they were written, as in this way we trace the natural development of the writer and the man.

“Knickerbocker,” his earliest work, written at the age of twenty-six, bears the same relation to his later work as “Pickwick,” the first heir of Dickens’ invention, to his novels that followed; and there is another point of similarity in the fact that “Knickerbocker” and “Pickwick” both outgrew the original design of the authors. Neither Dickens nor Irving had any idea of the character of the work he was proposing. The philosophical and benevolent Pickwick, you will remember, was barely rescued from being the head of a holiday hunting club; and the idea of “Knickerbocker,” at least at first, was simply to parody a small hand-book which had recently appeared under the title of “A Picture of New York.” Following this plan, a humorous description of the early governors of New York was intended merely as a preface to the customs and institutions of the city; but, like Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” the introduction became the body of the book, and all idea of a parody was early and happily abandoned. The “Rise and Fall of the Dutch Nation along the Hudson,” presented a subject of unity, and gave Irving an opportunity to depict the representative of a race whose customs were fast passing away. The serio-comic nature of the work is intensified by notices in the New York Post calling attention to the mysterious disappearance of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Never was any volume more happily introduced. Before we turn a single page we have an idea of the veritable writer. The description of Knickerbocker makes him rise before us; we become interested in the mystery that surrounds him. In fact, the charm of the book is in the simple reality or assumed personality of Diedrich Knickerbocker. The portrait of Don Quixote starting out to redress the wrongs of the world is not more clearly drawn than that of the historian of New Amsterdam, with his silver shoe buckles and cocked hat and quaint costume. But there is this difference in the mind of the reader: in the great satire of Cervantes there is an element of sadness. We see a crazed old man wandering out in quest of adventure, exciting our pity, almost excusing the paradox of Lord Byron: the saddest of all tales, and more sad still because it makes us laugh. Here there is only a mild sort of insanity about the old gentleman, with his books and papers and various employments, which touches our humor, without exciting our sympathy. By the way, the books of humor which we have here associated with each other belong to the same form, are second cousins of one another, and ought to stand upon the same shelf of our libraries.

Some of the Holland families are reported to have taken the work in high dudgeon, as a rash innovation of the domain of history; and I believe one of the gentler sex, who perhaps had no lover to fight a duel or no brother to take her part, proposed herself with her own hands to horsewhip the offensive writer for his bold attempt at spelling and printing for the first time some of the old family names. From to-day’s standpoint these things seem ludicrous and uncalled for in reference to a work abounding in kindly humor everywhere, accepted as the finest blending of the classic and the comic in all literature; and were it not that these early enemies soon became his warmest friends, I should pass it over in silence. The transition was so sudden and severe that it is one of the pleasantest in his history. In later years Irving thus refers to “Knickerbocker”: “When I find, after the lapse of forty years this haphazard production of my youth cherished among the descendants of the Dutch worthies; when I find its very name become a household word, and used to give the home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptance; when I see rising around me Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, omnibuses, steamboats, bread, ice, wagons; and when I find New Yorkers of Dutch descent priding themselves upon being genuine Knickerbocker stock, I please myself with the persuasion that I have struck the right chord, that my dealings with the good old Dutch times and customs derived from them are right in harmony with the beliefs and humors of our townsmen, that I have opened up a vein of pleasing associations equally characteristic and peculiar to my native place, and which its inhabitants will not willingly suffer to pass away; and that although other histories of New York may appear of higher claim to learned acceptance, and may take their appropriate and dignified rank in the family library, Knickerbocker’s history will still be received with good-humored intelligence.” It was, indeed, wide from the sober aim of history; but no volume ever gave such rose-tinted colors to the early annals of any country, and New York instead of being covered with ridicule, is to-day the only city of this Union whose early history is associated with the golden age of poetry, with antiquity extending back into the regions of doubt and fable; and it is safe to say that the streams of Scotland are no more indebted to the genius of Robert Burns and Walter Scott than the Hudson and the Catskills to the pen of Washington Irving. [Applause.]

[At this point the lecturer gave some illustrations of Irving’s style; his rendering of them being, as usual, all that could be desired.]

In this his first volume we would naturally look for his characteristics as a writer, and we find a rich fund of humor and invention; but here and there are gentle touches and the promise of other qualities, to which Walter Scott refers in a letter to one of his friends. He says: “I have never read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift, as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I think, too, there are some passages which indicate that the author possesses powers of a different kind, and he has some touches which remind me of Sterne.”

The prophecy of Scott waited ten years for its fulfillment, but it came at last in the most charming collection of essays in our language, the “Sketch-Book,” which I divide into essays of character and sentiment, English pictures and American legends. The “Broken Heart” is perhaps the greatest favorite of his character sketches, and at the same time a transcript of his early experience. In the short space of six pages he portrays the qualities of woman’s nature, and illustrates it with the touching story of Curran’s daughter, whose heart was buried in the coffin of Robert Emmet. This essay was suggested by a friend who had met the heroine at a masquerade. The name and the time of its writing were closely associated with Moore’s familiar poem:

In the whole range of English literature I know of no pen except Irving’s which could have written an essay like this in plain and simple prose. We find the same tender sentiment in Burns’ “Highland Mary,” and Poe’s “Annabel Lee;” but poetry is the natural language of passion and sorrow. Irving has often been likened to Addison, but in this particular they have nothing in common. Edward Everett has well said: One chord in the human heart, the pathetic, for whose weird music Addison had no ear, Irving touched with the hand of a master. He learned that in the school of early disappointment; and in the following passages we seem to hear its sad but sweet vibration, still responding through years of sorrow to the memory of her whose hopes were entwined with his: “There are some strokes of calamity, which scathe and scorch the soul, which penetrate to the vital seat of happiness, and blast it never to put forth bud and blossom; and let those tell her agony who have had the portals of the tomb suddenly closed between them and the being they most loved on earth, who have sat at its threshold as one shut out in the cold and lonely world, whence all that was most lovely and loving had departed.”

It is said that when Lord Byron was dying at Missolonghi, he required an attendant to read to him the “Broken Heart,” and while the attendant was reading one of the most tender portions the poet’s eyes moistened, and he said: “Irving never wrote that story without weeping, and I can not hear it without tears.” He added: “I have not wept much in this world, for trouble never brings tears to my eyes; but I always had tears for the ‘Broken Heart.’”

Kindred to this, I select “The Wife” as a true picture of woman’s power in adversity. As the story goes, his friend Leslie had married a beautiful and accomplished girl, and having an ample fortune, it was his ambition that her life should be a fairy tale. Having embarked in speculation, his riches took to themselves wings and flew away, leaving him in bankruptcy. For a time he kept his situation to himself, but every look revealed his story; and at last he told all to his wife. We see her rising from a state of childish dependence, and becoming the support and comfort of her husband in his misfortune. Following them from a mansion to a cottage, we feel that the last state of that man is better than the first; in the knowledge and possession of such a heart he had truer riches than diamonds can symbolize. [Applause.] To the credit of our better nature, the words of Irving are true: “There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and blazes in the dark hour of adversity. No man knows what the wife of his bosom is, what a ministering angel she is, until he has gone with her through the fiery trials of this world.” Outside the dramas of Shakspere and the pages of Walter Scott, I know of no such pictures of graceful womanhood as we find in these sketches.

Another quality no less marked than his humor and pathos we see in his reverence and love for antiquity, which forms a marked feature in the English pictures. In his “Rural Life” and “Christmas Sketches” we see his love for the old English writers, and that Chaucer and Spenser were his favorite authors. “To my mind these early poets are something more than wells of English undefiled. They are rather like the lakes of the Adirondacks, separated from each other and from us by events which loom up like mountains in the world’s history; clear and cool in far off solitudes, reflecting in their bright mirrors the serenity of earth and the broad expanse of heaven, responding to the gentle glow of summer sunset, holding quiet communion with the evening stars and awakening rosy life at the first touch of morn.... The old English ballads have all the energy, the rhythm and sparkle of our mountain streams, but Chaucer and Spenser and Shakspere and Bunyan are the fountains from which flows a river, ay, the Hudson of our English language.” With this deep love for the masters of English literature, we are not surprised that Westminster Abbey, with its poets’ corner, should be the subject of one of his earliest essays; and the principal feature of this essay, that which makes it the enduring one of all that have been written upon this venerable pile, is its truth and sincerity. It is, indeed, pleasant, in these days of irreverence; when flippant writing is received for wit and mis-spelled slang accepted for originality; when popular literature is running into low levels of life and luxury and the vices and follies of mankind; when modern poets take their cue from the heathen Chinee and find rhyme and rhythm in subdued oaths and significant dashes; when even home ballads are infected with the speech, if not the morality of Jim Bludsoe; in these days of scoffing at all things temporal and spiritual; when it seems as if belief had gone out of man: we turn with satisfaction to these essays, in which we see the nobility of a loyal heart, and feel that truth and goodness and beauty, the offspring of God, are not subject to the changes which upset the invention of man. [Applause.] I make no quotation from this familiar essay; it possesses too much unity to detach a paragraph or a sentence. I can only say I read it over and over again with the same interest to-day as years ago in the deep shade of that melancholy aisle at the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots.

There is one other place in England where I took my pocket edition of the “Sketch-Book”—to Stratford-on-Avon, for, more than any other man, Irving is associated with the world’s greatest poet. Writers without number, and many of them well known to fame, have given their impressions of Stratford-on-Avon, but Irving’s description supersedes them all. In this companionship of Shakspere and Irving we see the enduring qualities of the human heart. In the deep sympathy of Irving for the olden time, we feel that he has added another charm to Stratford, and that we as a nation have a better claim to the great poet.

In Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which I take as illustrations of his “American Legends,” we see that he is one of the few writers who recognize the fact that comedy is quite as natural as tragedy. At the time this essay was written we understand that Irving had never visited the Catskill Mountains; but there is this feature about all his essays or stories: wherever he locates them, they seem at once to take root and flourish. This story is too well known, through the genius of Jefferson on the stage, and Rogers in the studio, to need delineation. The old Dutch village, with its philosophers and sages, the sorely-tried Gretchen, the shiftless, good-natured Van Winkle, the adventure on the mountains, the return—it all passes before our minds like a series of pictures; and we come to the closing scene, which the play-writer and dramatist would have done well to follow, for there is more dramatic unity in the story which Irving left us than in the drama.

I must pass over to-night “Bracebridge Hall,” the “History of Columbus,” the “History of Washington,” the “Alhambra,” and many more, which, as we think of them, rise up before us like a new vision of the “Arabian Nights” in our literature; and in order to read them and get the full beauty of Irving’s works, we must read them in connection with his “Life and Letters,” published by his nephew, Peor Irving, in which we see the whole history of the man pass before us, from the time when the boy of twenty went through the northern wilderness of New York, until the time when, a man of seventy, he again stood on the banks of the St. Lawrence, and in a letter to his niece called up the changes of fifty years.

[After referring to the changes Irving had lived to see take place, the speaker made the following allusion to Chautauqua:]

Think of Mr. Miller when he ten years ago laid out the site of the first humble cottage in this grove; and if he had slept from that time until now, he would be more than Rip Van Winkle, could he look in to-night upon this Auditorium. [Applause.]