Washington Irving by Charles Dudley Warner

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"The soldier gasped out a reply from a pair of jaws which seemed to
have rusted on their hinges.

"'The royal guard of Ferdinand and Isabella.'

"'Santa Maria! Why, it is three centuries since that corps was in
service.'

"'And for three centuries have I been mounting guard. Now I trust
my tour of duty draws to a close. Dost thou desire fortune?'

"The student held up his tattered cloak in reply.

"'I understand thee. If thou hast faith and courage, follow me, and
thy fortune is made.'

"'Softly, comrade, to follow thee would require small courage in
one who has nothing to lose but life and an old guitar, neither of
much value; but my faith is of a different matter, and not to be
put in temptation. If it be any criminal act by which I am to mend
my fortune, think not my ragged cloak will make me undertake it.'

"The soldier turned on him a look of high displeasure. 'My sword,'
said he, 'has never been drawn but in the cause of the faith and
the throne. I am a _Cristiano viejo_; trust in me and fear no
evil.'

"The student followed him wondering. He observed that no one heeded
their conversation, and that the soldier made his way through the
various groups of idlers unnoticed, as if invisible.

"Crossing the bridge, the soldier led the way by a narrow and steep
path past a Moorish mill and aqueduct, and up the ravine which
separates the domains of the Generalife from those of the Alhambra.
The last ray of the sun shone upon the red battlements of the
latter, which beetled far above; and the convent-bells were
proclaiming the festival of the ensuing day. The ravine was
overshadowed by fig-trees, vines, and myrtles, and the outer towers
and walls of the fortress. It was dark and lonely, and the
twilight-loving bats began to flit about. At length the soldier
halted at a remote and ruined tower apparently intended to guard a
Moorish aqueduct. He struck the foundation with the butt-end of his
spear. A rumbling sound was heard, and the solid stones yawned
apart, leaving an opening as wide as a door.

"'Enter in the name of the Holy Trinity', said the soldier, 'and
fear nothing.' The student's heart quaked, but he made the sign of
the cross, muttered his Ave Maria, and followed his mysterious
guide into a deep vault cut out of the solid rock under the tower,
and covered with Arabic inscriptions. The soldier pointed to a
stone seat hewn along one side of the vault. 'Behold,' said he, 'my
couch for three hundred years.' The bewildered student tried to
force a joke. 'By the blessed St. Anthony,' said he, 'but you must
have slept soundly, considering the hardness of your couch.'

"'On the contrary, sleep has been a stranger to these eyes;
incessant watchfulness has been my doom. Listen to my lot. I was
one of the royal guards of Ferdinand and Isabella; but was taken
prisoner by the Moors in one of their sorties, and confined a
captive in this tower. When preparations were made to surrender the
fortress to the Christian sovereigns, I was prevailed upon by an
alfaqui, a Moorish priest, to aid him in secreting some of the
treasures of Boabdil in this vault. I was justly punished for my
fault. The alfaqui was an African necromancer, and by his infernal
arts cast a spell upon me--to guard his treasures. Something must
have happened to him, for he never returned, and here have I
remained ever since, buried alive. Years and years have rolled
away; earthquakes have shaken this hill; I have heard stone by
stone of the tower above tumbling to the ground, in the natural
operation of time; but the spell-bound walls of this vault set both
time and earthquakes at defiance.

"'Once every hundred years, on the festival of St. John, the
enchantment ceases to have thorough sway; I am permitted to go
forth and post myself upon the bridge of the Darro, where you met
me, waiting until some one shall arrive who may have power to break
this magic spell. I have hitherto mounted guard there in vain. I
walk as in a cloud, concealed from mortal sight. You are the first
to accost me for now three hundred years. I behold the reason. I
see on your finger the seal-ring of Solomon the Wise, which is
proof against all enchantment. With you it remains to deliver me
from this awful dungeon, or to leave me to keep guard here for
another hundred years.'

"The student listened to this tale in mute wonderment. He had heard
many tales of treasures shut up under strong enchantment in the
vaults of the Alhambra, but had treated them as fables. He now felt
the value of the seal-ring, which had, in a manner, been given to
him by St. Cyprian. Still, though armed by so potent a talisman, it
was an awful thing to find himself _tete-a-tete_ in such a place
with an enchanted soldier, who, according to the laws of nature,
ought to have been quietly in his grave for nearly three centuries.

"A personage of this kind, however, was quite out of the ordinary
run, and not to be trifled with, and he assured him he might rely
upon his friendship and good will to do everything in his power for
his deliverance.

"'I trust to a motive more powerful than friendship,' said the
soldier.

"He pointed to a ponderous iron coffer, secured by locks inscribed
with Arabic characters. 'That coffer,' said he, 'contains countless
treasure in gold and jewels and precious stones. Break the magic
spell by which I am enthralled, and one half of this treasure shall
be thine.'

"'But how am I to do it?'

"'The aid of a Christian priest and a Christian maid is necessary.
The priest to exorcise the powers of darkness; the damsel to touch
this chest with the seal of Solomon. This must be done at night.
But have a care. This is solemn work, and not to be effected by the
carnal-minded. The priest must be a _Cristiano viejo_, a model of
sanctity; and must mortify the flesh before he comes here, by a
rigorous fast of four-and-twenty hours: and as to the maiden, she
must be above reproach, and proof against temptation. Linger not in
finding such aid. In three days my furlough is at an end; if not
delivered before midnight of the third, I shall have to mount guard
for another century.'

"'Fear not,' said the student, 'I have in my eye the very priest
and damsel you describe; but how am I to regain admission to this
tower?'

"'The seal of Solomon will open the way for thee.'

"The student issued forth from the tower much more gayly than he
had entered. The wall closed behind him, and remained solid as
before.

"The next morning he repaired boldly to the mansion of the priest,
no longer a poor strolling student, thrumming his way with a
guitar; but an ambassador from the shadowy world, with enchanted
treasures to bestow. No particulars are told of his negotiation,
excepting that the zeal of the worthy priest was easily kindled at
the idea of rescuing an old soldier of the faith and a strong box
of King Chico from the very clutches of Satan; and then what alms
might be dispensed, what churches built, and how many poor
relatives enriched with the Moorish treasure!

"As to the immaculate handmaid, she was ready to lend her hand,
which was all that was required, to the pious work; and if a shy
glance now and then might be believed, the ambassador began to find
favor in her modest eyes.

"The greatest difficulty, however, was the fast to which the good
padre had to subject himself. Twice he attempted it, and twice the
flesh was too strong for the spirit. It was only on the third day
that he was enabled to withstand the temptations of the cupboard;
but it was still a question whether he would hold out until the
spell was broken.

"At a late hour of the night the party groped their way up the
ravine by the light of a lantern, and bearing a basket with
provisions for exorcising the demon of hunger so soon as the other
demons should be laid in the Red Sea.

"The seal of Solomon opened their way into the tower. They found
the soldier seated on the enchanted strong-box, awaiting their
arrival. The exorcism was performed in due style. The damsel
advanced and touched the locks of the coffer with the seal of
Solomon. The lid flew open; and such treasures of gold and jewels
and precious stones as flashed upon the eye!

"'Here's cut and come again!' cried the student, exultingly, as he
proceeded to cram his pockets.

"'Fairly and softly,' exclaimed the soldier. 'Let us get the coffer
out entire, and then divide.'

"They accordingly went to work with might and main; but it was a
difficult task; the chest was enormously heavy, and had been
imbedded there for centuries. While they were thus employed the
good dominie drew on one side and made a vigorous onslaught on the
basket, by way of exorcising the demon of hunger which was raging
in his entrails. In a little while a fat capon was devoured, and
washed down by a deep potation of Val de penas; and, by way of
grace after meat, he gave a kind-hearted kiss to the pet-lamb who
waited on him. It was quietly done in a corner, but the tell-tale
walls babbled it forth as if in triumph. Never was chaste salute
more awful in its effects. At the sound the soldier gave a great
cry of despair; the coffer, which was half raised, fell back in its
place and was locked once more. Priest, student, and damsel found
themselves outside of the tower, the wall of which closed with a
thundering jar. Alas! the good padre had broken his fast too soon!

"When recovered from his surprise, the student would have reentered
the tower, but learnt to his dismay that the damsel, in her fright,
had let fall the seal of Solomon; it remained within the vault.

"In a word, the cathedral bell tolled midnight; the spell was
renewed; the soldier was doomed to mount guard for another hundred
years, and there he and the treasure remain to this day--and all
because the kind-hearted padre kissed his handmaid. 'Ah, father!
father!' said the student, shaking his head ruefully, as they
returned down the ravine, 'I fear there was less of the saint than
the sinner in that kiss!'

* * * * *

"Thus ends the legend as far as it has been authenticated. There is
a tradition, however, that the student had brought off treasure
enough in his pocket to set him up in the world; that he prospered
in his affairs, that the worthy padre gave him the pet-lamb in
marriage, by way of amends for the blunder in the vault; that the
immaculate damsel proved a pattern for wives as she had been for
handmaids, and bore her husband a numerous progeny; that the first
was a wonder; it was born seven months after her marriage, and
though a seven-months' boy, was the sturdiest of the flock. The
rest were all born in the ordinary course of time.

"The story of the enchanted soldier remains one of the popular
traditions of Granada, though told in a variety of ways; the common
people affirm that he still mounts guard on mid-summer eve, beside
the gigantic stone pomegranate on the bridge of the Darro; but
remains invisible excepting to such lucky mortal as may possess the
seal of Solomon."

These passages from the most characteristic of Irving's books, do not by
any means exhaust his variety, but they afford a fair measure of his
purely literary skill, upon which his reputation must rest. To my
apprehension this "charm" in literature is as necessary to the
amelioration and enjoyment of human life as the more solid achievements
of scholarship. That Irving should find it in the prosaic and
materialistic conditions of the New World as well as in the
tradition-laden atmosphere of the Old, is evidence that he possessed
genius of a refined and subtle quality if not of the most robust order.

CHAPTER X.

LAST YEARS: THE CHARACTER OF HIS LITERATURE.

The last years of Irving's life, although full of activity and
enjoyment,--abated only by the malady which had so long tormented
him,--offer little new in the development of his character, and need not
much longer detain us. The calls of friendship and of honor were many,
his correspondence was large, he made many excursions to scenes that
were filled with pleasant memories, going even as far south as Virginia,
and he labored assiduously at the "Life of Washington,"--attracted
however now and then by some other tempting theme. But his delight was
in the domestic circle at Sunnyside. It was not possible that his
occasional melancholy vein should not be deepened by change and death
and the lengthening shade of old age. Yet I do not know the closing days
of any other author of note that were more cheerful serene, and happy
than his. Of our author, in these latter days, Mr. George William Curtis
put recently into his "Easy Chair" papers an artistically-touched little
portrait: "Irving was as quaint a figure," he says, "as the Diedrich
Knickerbocker in the preliminary advertisement of the 'History of New
York.' Thirty years ago he might have been seen on an autumnal afternoon
tripping with an elastic step along Broadway, with 'low-quartered' shoes
neatly tied, and a Talma cloak--a short garment that hung from the
shoulders like the cape of a coat. There was a chirping, cheery,
old-school air in his appearance which was undeniably Dutch, and most
harmonious with the associations of his writing. He seemed, indeed, to
have stepped out of his own books; and the cordial grace and humor of
his address, if he stopped for a passing chat, were delightfully
characteristic. He was then our most famous man of letters, but he was
simply free from all self-consciousness and assumption and dogmatism."
Congenial occupation was one secret of Irving's cheerfulness and
contentment, no doubt. And he was called away as soon as his task was
done, very soon after the last volume of the "Washington" issued from
the press. Yet he lived long enough to receive the hearty approval of it
from the literary men whose familiarity with the Revolutionary period
made them the best judges of its merits.

He had time also to revise his works. It is perhaps worthy of note that
for several years, while he was at the height of his popularity, his
books had very little sale. From 1842 to 1848 they were out of print,
with the exception of some stray copies of a cheap Philadelphia edition,
and a Paris collection (a volume of this, at my hand, is one of a series
entitled a "Collection of Ancient and Modern _British_ Authors"), they
were not to be found. The Philadelphia publishers did not think there
was sufficient demand to warrant a new edition. Mr. Irving and his
friends judged the market more wisely, and a young New York publisher
offered to assume the responsibility. This was Mr. George P. Putnam. The
event justified his sagacity and his liberal enterprise; from July,
1848, to November, 1859, the author received on his copyright over
eighty-eight thousand dollars. And it should be added that the relations
between author and publisher, both in prosperity and in times of
business disaster, reflect the highest credit upon both. If the like
relations always obtained we should not have to say: "May the Lord pity
the authors in this world, and the publishers in the next."

I have outlined the life of Washington Irving in vain, if we have not
already come to a tolerably clear conception of the character of the man
and of his books. If I were exactly to follow his literary method I
should do nothing more. The idiosyncrasies of the man are the strength
and weakness of his works. I do not know any other author whose writings
so perfectly reproduce his character, or whose character may be more
certainly measured by his writings. His character is perfectly
transparent: his predominant traits were humor and sentiment; his
temperament was gay with a dash of melancholy; his inner life and his
mental operations were the reverse of complex, and his literary method
is simple. He _felt_ his subject, and he expressed his conception not so
much by direct statement or description as by almost imperceptible
touches and shadings here and there, by a diffused tone and color, with
very little show of analysis. Perhaps it is a sufficient definition to
say that his method was the sympathetic. In the end the reader is put in
possession of the luminous and complete idea upon which the author has
been brooding, though he may not be able to say exactly how the
impression has been conveyed to him; and I doubt if the author could
have explained his sympathetic process. He certainly would have lacked
precision in any philosophical or metaphysical theme, and when, in his
letters, he touches upon politics there is a little vagueness of
definition that indicates want of mental grip in that direction. But in
the region of feeling his genius is sufficient to his purpose; either
when that purpose is a highly creative one, as in the character and
achievements of his Dutch heroes, or merely that of portraiture, as in
the "Columbus" and the "Washington." The analysis of a nature so simple
and a character so transparent as Irving's, who lived in the sunlight
and had no envelope of mystery, has not the fascination that attaches to
Hawthorne.

Although the direction of his work as a man of letters was largely
determined by his early surroundings,--that is, by his birth in a land
void of traditions, and into a society without much literary life, so
that his intellectual food was of necessity a foreign literature that
was at the moment becoming a little antiquated in the land of its birth,
and his warm imagination was forced to revert to the past for that
nourishment which his crude environment did not offer,--yet he was by
nature a retrospective man. His face was set towards the past, not
towards the future. He never caught the restlessness of this century,
nor the prophetic light that shone in the faces of Coleridge, Shelley,
and Keats; if he apprehended the stir of the new spirit he still, by
mental affiliation, belonged rather to the age of Addison than to that
of Macaulay. And his placid, retrospective, optimistic strain pleased a
public that were excited and harrowed by the mocking and lamenting of
Lord Byron, and, singularly enough, pleased even the great pessimist
himself.

His writings induce to reflection, to quiet musing, to tenderness for
tradition; they amuse, they entertain, they call a check to the
feverishness of modern life; but they are rarely stimulating or
suggestive. They are better adapted, it must be owned, to please the
many than the critical few, who demand more incisive treatment and a
deeper consideration of the problems of life. And it is very fortunate
that a writer who can reach the great public and entertain it can also
elevate and refine its tastes, set before it high ideas, instruct it
agreeably, and all this in a style that belongs to the best literature.
It is a safe model for young readers; and for young readers there is
very little in the overwhelming flood of to-day that is comparable to
Irving's books, and, especially, it seems to me, because they were not
written for children.

Irving's position in American literature, or in that of the English
tongue, will only be determined by the slow settling of opinion, which
no critic can foretell, and the operation of which no criticism seems
able to explain. I venture to believe, however, that the verdict will
not be in accord with much of the present prevalent criticism. The
service that he rendered to American letters no critic disputes; nor is
there any question of our national indebtedness to him for investing a
crude and new land with the enduring charms of romance and tradition. In
this respect, our obligation to him is that of Scotland to Scott and
Burns; and it is an obligation due only, in all history, to here and
there a fortunate creator to whose genius opportunity is kind. The
Knickerbocker Legend and the romance with which Irving has invested the
Hudson are a priceless legacy; and this would remain an imperishable
possession in popular tradition if the literature creating it were
destroyed. This sort of creation is unique in modern times. New York is
the Knickerbocker city; its whole social life remains colored by his
fiction; and the romantic background it owes to him in some measure
supplies to it what great age has given to European cities. This
creation is sufficient to secure for him an immortality, a length of
earthly remembrance that all the rest of his writings together might
not give.

Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the
idiosyncrasies, of his small genus. I mean that he regarded life not
from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic,
the metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the
literary point of view. He belongs to that small class of which Johnson
and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America has
added very few. The literary point of view is taken by few in any
generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the
pressure of all the complex interests of life, and it may even seem
trivial amid the tremendous energies applied to immediate affairs; but
it is the point of view that endures; if its creations do not mould
human life, like the Roman law, they remain to charm and civilize, like
the poems of Horace. You must not ask more of them than that. This
attitude toward life is defensible on the highest grounds. A man with
Irving's gifts has the right to take the position of an observer and
describer, and not to be called on for a more active participation in
affairs than he chooses to take. He is doing the world the highest
service of which he is capable, and the most enduring it can receive
from any man. It is not a question whether the work of the literary man
is higher than that of the reformer or the statesman; it is a distinct
work, and is justified by the result, even when the work is that of the
humorist only. We recognize this in the ease of the poet. Although
Goethe has been reproached for his lack of sympathy with the
liberalizing movement of his day (as if his novels were quieting social
influences), it is felt by this generation that the author of "Faust"
needs no apology that he did not spend his energies in the effervescing
politics of the German states. I mean, that while we may like or dislike
the man for his sympathy or want of sympathy, we concede to the author
the right of his attitude; if Goethe had not assumed freedom from moral
responsibility, I suppose that criticism of his aloofness would long ago
have ceased. Irving did not lack sympathy with humanity in the concrete;
it colored whatever he 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.

Irving had the defects of his peculiar 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 unpartisan, and full of
lenient charity; and I suspect 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 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 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 that is noble.

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