Irving and the Knickerbocker Group 193
race in what John Finley, echoed by Meredith Nicholson,
called the “Valley of Democracy,” geographically the Mis-
sissippi Valley. Before Andrew Jackson became president
and the West invaded the East. Before the vast South-
west, Northwest, and Pacific Coast had become articulate
in letters. He “commenced author” when most Americans
thought of our literature as a scion of English literature,
and Washington Irving neither conceived of nor desired
parturition.
William B. Cairns in a monograph published in 1898 On
the Development of American Literature from 1815 to
1833 analyzed the prevailing attitude of America toward
England in those years, a mixture of deference and defiance,
an inferiority complex manifested sometimes in humility,
sometimes in braggadocio, like an undergrown boy aware of
his limitations and correspondingly truculent. It chanced
that as these pages were being written The Saturday Evening
Post of December 17, 1932, carried an editorial leader from
which this is an excerpt:
There is no more convincing proof of our youthfulness as
a nation than our sensitiveness to European criticism. The
belittling of whatever is American because it is American,
and the worship of the foreign label because it is not Amer-
ican pass as evidences of personal superiority.
Huge, resourceful, enigmatic, paradoxical America is very
self-reliant; Matthew Arnold said that Emerson’s doctrine
of self-reliance was delivered to a people who of all the earth
least needed it; and yet with all its self-reliance America is
singularly solicitous not to appear gauche in the eyes of
sophisticated and sometimes cynical Europeans. Is it possibly
the case that America, so incredibly capable in big machine-
made undertakings, is still hobbledehoy in some aspects of
culture, and therefore self-conscious? The typical English-
man is serenely indifferent to what others think of him, “I am