Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group

188           Public Lectures

wholesomeness, ready wit, won him welcome from Ballston
Spa to Baltimore, not excepting Washington, where glorious
Dolly Madison had him for guest in the Executive Mansion,
and the President himself would relax to listen to the easeful
talk., salted with worldly wisdom, from this darling of
society. Irving’s young manhood fell in the age of the
dandies, and in a graceful way he was one of them. He who
aspired to be chief of the dandies, George IV, as everyone
else, was attracted to Irving, and seems to have put forward
only whatever little good was in him in Irving’s society.

George S. Hellman in a comparatively recent biography
of Irving makes two palpable points: First, that Irving
differs from the New England group in total lack of the
Puritan strain. His father was a Scotch Presbyterian but
Irving shared his mother’s Episcopalian bent. Of course,
some Episcopalians are Puritan, but Irving was not of the
type. He was not deeply religious by instinct, more like
those described by Wordsworth

Who do Thy work and know it not.

Singularly unselfconscious, except when he had to make a
public speech, he was Unawaredly good. Hellman’s second
point is that in his latter years Irving was aloof from the
political and social problems which were raking America.

He himself wrote “I am not a politician.” Notwithstand-
ing a long career in diplomacy he was unagitated by the polit-
ical conditions which were leading inevitably to war. He ig-
nored the Wilmot Proviso, the tariff controversies (though
earlier he had to adjudicate some tariff problems which dis-
turbed Spain) ; as diplomat he had conducted correspondence
with Daniel Webster when Webster was secretary of state,
but I find no record of approval or disapproval of Webster’s
seventh of March speech, that magnificent failure to com-

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