Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group

192           Public Lectures

accomplishment of his fellow countrymen in letters. For a
collected edition of Bryant’s poems (1832) he wrote a
brief preface commending the volume to English readers,
informing them that Bryant’s descriptions of nature are
“essentially American . . . imbued with the independent
spirit and buoyant aspirations incident to a youthful, a free
and rising country, and worthy of being carefully preserved
in the common treasury of the language.” In the Sketch
Book he published a serious warning to English writers
against a condescending attitude toward American literature
and the American people, admonishing Englishmen that a
time might come when England should look to America for
friendship and succor “should these reverses overtake her
from which the proudest empires have not been exempt”—
interestingly prophetic of 1914-1918 and after. Debonair
Irving was not habituated to the mentor’s mantle, but he
loved his native country and the country from which it
sprang, earnestly desired rapprochement between them, and
could be as firm as he was genial.

His character and intellect were formed before Emer-
son’s American Scholar, a clarion call for an entirely Amer-
icanized literature :

We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.
The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to
be timid, imitative.

Long before Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas:

America has yet morally and artistically originated noth-
ing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of per-
sons, books, manners, etc., appropriate for former conditions
and European lands are but exiles and exotics here.

Before Whitman’s “barbaric yawp,” so raucous, so inspired,
had resounded over the roofs of the world. Before the
westward movement of population had created a distinctive

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