Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/3

Rh When Hawthorne prefaced his great masterpiece with the long "Custom-House" chapter, written with irritating zest, his contemporaries accepted this excrescence entirely on its own merits; deeming it, says Mr. Brownell, "a marvel quite eclipsing 'Elia,' " and never asking why, in Heaven's name, it was there. When Poe analyzed in twelve pitiless pages the mental processes which gave birth to the "Raven," dwelling explicitly upon every symptom, like an old lady tracing the rise and progress of a cold, his contemporaries devoutly believed in this "Philosophy of Composition." The essayists of the "Spectator" and the "Tatler" owed their vivacity, no less than their brevity, to the fact that they wrote for a public which resolutely refused to be bored. The early American essayists had the fatal fortune to write for a public incapable of boredom. When that good patriot, accomplished gentleman, and melancholy humorist, Mr. Francis Hopkinson, undertook to be funny, he would have drawn tears from any eyes save those of his own countrymen. Even Irving's humor, graceful, felicitous, and disciplined by unimpeachable good taste, is sometimes, as in "The Mutability of Literature," of a visibly premeditated order. Dr. Richard Garnett was perhaps right when he regretted that fate had not led Irving westward, to the newest new world, where he could have studied fresh and rough types of humanity. It is true that the "Tour of the Prairies" has little to commend it; but tours of any kind make negligible reading. We might have had from Irving's facile pen pictures of those pioneer conditions which never fail to interest because they are both adventurous and short-lived. Yet who can have the heart to wish he had exchanged his eminently enjoyable life for one of unloved harshness, simply for the sake of a background? If the England he describes seems now, and seemed before the war, as remote as Belshazzar's Babylon, and far more remote than Caesar's Rome, its verisimilitude passed muster in its day. And Irving, with admirable astuteness, wrote for his readers.