Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group

194           Public Lectures

John Bull and I do as I jolly well please.” The American on
foreign shores is sufficiently self-assertive, with money to
spend and obsequious service in return, but is it conjectural
that when he gets back home he sometimes wonders, “did I
make rather an ass of myself in Europe ?”

If the speculation is warrantable, there is this corollary,
that maybe we are undergoing “a phase,” as they say of
growing children, incident to national adolescence, that may-
be we have lost the poise of the pioneer and have not quite
attained the easeful assurance of the traditioned European.
One sometimes wonders if even Mr. Sinclair Lewis is quite
as confident of his independent Americanism as he would
have us believe. Mr. John Galsworthy is unmistakably
British, could be nothing else if he should try. But he does
not shout his Britishism. He accepts it quietly as one familiar
with centuries of British tradition. America is still in the
making. Out of the many regional literatures will come a
synthesis, out of the synthesis a voice as powerfully Amer-
ican as Whitman’s, with more savoir faire.

Our first complete artist in words, Washington Irving,
would have been less the artist had he turned his back on
England and become a propagandist for an all-American
literature. He needed models. There were few in America
when he was a young man. So he turned to England where
literature had been а-making since Chaucer, since Cynewulf.
He did not go so far back for tutelage (though there are
references to Chaucer in his writing). He reverted chiefly
to the urbane eighteenth century where was much that was
congenial to his urbane nature. He wrought well. There is
a gentle enchantment in his pages, the spirit of an artist and a
gentleman. Whether or not Irving was a great writer may
be questioned nowadays, but there is no question that he was
a great gentleman.

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