Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group



180           Public Lectures

Fowl. But politics and journalism side-tracked him, and he
became less the creator than the venerable Nestor of critics.

An elfin quality in Rodman Drake’s Culprit Fay may ac-
count for its immense popularity two generations ago, when
practically all reading Americans were familiar with it, and
some extravagantly ranked Drake with John Keats. Drake’s
alter ego was Fitz-Greene Halleck, saturated in British litera-
ture, imitator of Byron, author of
Marco Bozaris, declaimed
from most school commencement platforms when our fathers
were boys, maker of a threnody on his dead friend Drake,
which is in all the anthologies :

Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days;

None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.

Lack of time inhibits remarks on Paulding, especial friend
of Irving’s, on John Howard Payne, homeless author of
Home Sweet Home, and many minors. It is a fair generaliza-
tion that practically all of the group relied on English litera-
ture for models, among them Irving, with modifications.

Washington Irving was by genius and practice pure liter-
ary artist. He was too stout fibred to catalog under the
rubric of “art for art’s sake.” But he had an instinct to make
words do his bidding, as the painter makes pigments his
servitors. Your dog requires nothing of a cushion except
that it be soft, but when you embroider your cushion you
announce your difference from your dog, you crave comeli-
ness as well as comfort. Washington Irving was the first
American to revel in the glory of words, our first Simon-
pure man of letters.

He had a distinguished diplomatic career, secretary to
the American legation in London, minister plenipotentiary
to Spain, but his master motive was literary art. Even his



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