Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 617
On second thoughts, I am of opinion, that besides employing our own vessels, as above proposed, every English ship arriving in our ports with goods for sale, should be obliged to give bond, before she is permitted to trade, engaging that she will carry back to Britain at least one felon for every fifty tons of her burthen. Thus we shall not only discharge sooner our debts, but furnish our old friends with the means of “better peopling,” and with more expedition, their promising new colony of Botany Bay.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S PETITION OF THE LETTER Z
From The Tatler, No. 1778
To THE WORSHIPFUL ISAAC BICKERSTAFF, ESQUIRE, Censor General.
The petition of the letter Z, commonly called Ezzard, Zed, or Izard, most humbly showeth; That your petitioner is of as high extraction, and has as good an estate as any other letter of the Alphabet; That there is therefore no reason why he should be treated as he is, with disrespect and indignity; That he is not only actually placed at the tail of the Alphabet, when he has as much right as any other to be at the head; but is by the injustice of his enemies totally excluded from the word WISE; and his place injuriously filled in by a little hissing, crooked, serpentine, venomous letter, called S, when it must be evident to your worship, and to all the world, that W, I, S, E, do not spell Wize, but Wise.
Your petitioner therefore prays, that the alphabet may by your censorial authority be reversed; and that in consideration of his long-suffering and patience he may be placed at the head of it; that s may be turned out of the word Wise; and the petitioner employed instead of him.
And your petitioner, as in duty bound, shall ever pray, &c, &c.
Mr. Bickerstaff, having examined the allegations of the above petition, judges and determines, that Z be admonished to be content with his station, forbear reflections upon his brother letters, and remember his own small usefulness, and the little occasion there is for him in the Republic of Letters, since S whom he so despises can so well serve instead of him.
Chapter Three . CLASSIC AMERICA SMILES
THE YOUNG REPUBLIC Learns Its Letters — Journalism in a Flood: The Thespian Mirror and The Ladies’ Tea-Tray — Who Reads an American Book? The Barber and the Owl — Irving, Hawthorne and Classical Humor.
THAT BENJAMIN FRANKLIN did in the way of imaginative literature, humorous or otherwise, was merely a beginning. It was notable rather for its promise than for its achievement. Nor had his colonial contemporaries produced any work of imagination beyond a certain amount of very “elegant” verse, and a few equally “elegant” narratives which people were beginning to call “novels.” These included such effusions as Wiggleworth’s Day of Doom, and such tales as The Power of Sympathy, or The Triumph of Nature, a Novel Founded on Truth and Dedicated to the Young Ladies of America. The high standard of morality and female impeccability maintained in these works disarms all criticism. Franklin’s fellow patriots of the Revolution and of the young republic only took up the pen to use it as pamphleteers, as lawyers, as the writers of state papers. Such humor as they expressed aimed rather at the form of Attic wit and classic satire than that of native fun and broad grins. Indeed there was all through this period during which American literature was struggling into existence a sort of contrast and conflict between the classicism of the schools and the native thought of the people. It was in point of culture a classic age, knowing nothing else. Science was still for the ingenious investigator, not for the student at large. The colleges lived on Latin and Greek. Patriots named their new towns as Athens and Syracuse and Troy; Carthage called to Rome; and Utica invited still its Cato. The veterans banded as Cincinnati, and correspondents to the newspapers labeled themselves Pater Familias and Marcus Brutus Junior.
Thus they struck the rock of ancient learning, but the spring failed to flow from under it. “Literature pure and simple,” says the American, the “100 per cent American,” historian McMaster, “never existed in America till Washington Irving began to write.” McMaster thinks that it “could not have been otherwise. They were too busy clearing farms, cutting woods, building towns, acquiring wealth, to have any time for literature.” It is true that when the new century got started on the rapid development that followed the peace of 1815, there was a terrific outbreak of journalism. Here began the “Magazines,” the “Repositories” and the “Mirrors” that soon flooded the country. Editors vied in originality in the titles of their publications. There was a Thespian Mirror at New York together with a Ladies’ Literary Cabinet. Baltimore had a Ladies’ Tea-Tray, and Philadelphia, among many others, a Juvenile Port Folio. Some of the magazines jumped into the new arena in the capacity of the clown. There was a journal, The Fool, by Tom Brainless, published at Salem. In New York was the Trangram or Fashionable Trifler, by Christopher Crog Esquire, his Grandmother and his Uncle. It was outdone, however, by The Luncheon, Boiled for People about Six Feet High by Simon Pure.
Thus was the mountain in labor and brought forth scarcely a mouse. The truth is that the Americans themselves suffered in the matter from what we now call an “inferiority complex.” The effect of classic education was to make America seem a mere uncouth wilderness, to let the story of human courage end with Thermopylae, and to let human love die with Dido. They were like people in a treasure chamber with no light to see its wealth.
Thus a certain John Bristed, a journalist of the period, could write in 1818:
Of native novels we have no great stock, and none good; our democratic institutions placing all the people on a dead level of political equality; and the pretty equal diffusion of property throughout the country affords but little room for varieties, and contrasts of character; nor is there much scope for fiction, as the country is quite new, and all that has happened from the first settlement to the present hour, respecting it, is known to every one. There is, to be sure, some traditionary romance about the Indians; but a novel describing these miserable barbarians, their squaws, and papooses, would not be very interesting to the present race of American readers.
And if the Americans had an inferiority complex in literature, their British cousins offered to them no aid to get out of it. It was the thing in polite Edinburgh and polished London to despise all things American. One recalls the sneers of the Quarterly Review and its fellows.
The States of America [wrote a London critic in the course of the Second War] can never have a native literature any more than they can have a native character. Even their wildernesses and deserts, their mountains, lakes, and forests, will produce nothing romantic or pastoral, for these remote regions are only relinquished by pagan savages to receive into their deep recesses, hordes of discontented Democrats, mad unnatural enthusiasts, and needy or desperate adventurers.
Best remembered of all, and not likely to be forgotten, is the sweeping condemnation of Republican America written in the Edinburgh Review in 1820 by the famous Sydney Smith.
In the four quarters of the globe [he writes], who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American statue or picture? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered, or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets?
Sydney Smith, who was a humorist, stopped just in time. It is lucky that he didn’t go on to say, “Who laughs at an American joke?” For the time was coming.
The Americans, for the most part, took it lying down. Attacks on their institutions they resented and repudiated. For their literature they had nothing but apologies. And then — just when all the world had agreed that America couldn’t write, it began to. There appeared Washington Irving. One recalls the ancient rhyme of the stuffed owl in the barber shop, criticized by a customer in the chair for its lack of correspondence to a live owl, the barber maintaining a discreet silence.
“That owl up there.”
Said the man in the chair,
“Is stuffed all wrong, I do declare.
See the feet — wrong size!
Wrong feathers, wrong eyes.”
And the barber kept on shaving.
And, then, when the man in the chair got through,
The owl hopped off its perch and it flew, —
And the barber kept on shaving.
With Washington Irving began the long honor roll of American writers who carried on in America the form and tradition of their British predecessors. They wrote English — the Washington Irvings and the Fenimore Coopers, the Hawthornes and the Longfellows — English, not American. Every now and then there breaks out in our literary journals the controversy as to what is American literature and whether Longfellow and such wrote it. If by American literature is meant books written by Americans in an American way, in a way that a British writer might admire but couldn’t emulate, then there was no American literature at this epoch — none till Mark Twain and O. Henry and such showed how to write it, just as there is no such thing as Canadian literature today, meaning books written by Canadians in a Canadian way.
The American writers of Irving’s time belonged with the British in a common stock. Beside and beneath the classic writers were another crowd striving for utterance in their own way. Ultimately they were to find it, and it was in the province of humor that American literature first came into its own. But for the time, humor was represented by the polished “classical” work of Washington Irving, direct descendant of Addison and Steele of the eighteenth century. Irving (1783-1859) came before the American public as early as 1809 as a newspaper contributor of odds and ends of burlesque which presently turned into “Knickerbocker’s” History of New York. But it was the London publication of his Sketch Book in 1820, the very year of Sydney Smith’s denunciation, which admitted him once and for all into the first rank of the world of letters. From the Sketch Book is taken the story of Rip Van Winkle, reproduced in the next chapter. As the old French chroniclers used to say, “Who hasn’t read that, hasn’t read anything.”
Side by side with Irving one places Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), his counterpart in style and training. Though with each a different cast of mind, for Hawthorne ran to mysticism, they shared something of the same beautiful detachment from sordid things, the same power of absorption in nature and the same vision of much in little. In their humor they came together. In each case it is based on the polished models of England and France. There is nothing “native” about it. Hawthorne’s “Celestial Railroad,” reproduced in the next chapter, an adaptation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to the wicked, clattering world of railways and machinery, runs closely parallel to Irving’s work.
Chapter Four . SELECTIONS FROM IRVING AND HAWTHORNE RIP VAN WINKLE
WHOEVER HAS MADE a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapours about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.
At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant (may he rest in peace!), and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weather-cocks.
In that same village, and in one of these very houses (which, to tell the precise truth, was sadly time-worn and weather-beaten), there lived many years since, while the country was yet a province of Great Britain, a simple good-natured fellow of the name of Rip Van Winkle. He was a descendant of the Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of Peter Stuyvesant, and accompanied him to the siege of Fort Christina. He inherited, however, but little of the martial character of his ancestors. I have observed that he was a simple, good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbour, and an obedient hen-pecked husband. Indeed, to the latter circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity; for those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.
Certain it is, that he was a great favourite among all the good wives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex, took his part in all family squabbles, and never failed, whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children of the village, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them to fly kites, and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of ghosts, witches, and Indians. Whenever he went dodging about the village, he was surrounded by a troop of them, hanging on his skirts, clambering on his back, and playing a thousand tricks on him with impunity; and not a dog would bark at him throughout the neighbourhood.
The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour. It could not be from the want of assiduity or perseverance; for he would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar’s lance, and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble. He would carry a fowling-piece on his shoulder for hours together, trudging through woods and swamps, and up hill and down dale, to shoot a few squirrels or wild pigeons. He would never refuse to assist a neighbour even in the roughest toil, and was a foremost man at all country frolics for husking Indian corn, or building stone fences; the women of the village, too, used to employ him to run their errands, and to do such little odd jobs as their less obliging husbands would not do for them. In a word, Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible.
In fact, he declared it was of no use to work on his farm; it was the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country; everything about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in spite of him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cow would either go astray, or get among the cabbages; weeds were sure to grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else; the rain always made a point of setting in just as he had some outdoor work to do; so that, though his patrimonial estate had dwindled away under his management, acre by acre, until there was little more left than a mere patch of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it was the worst-conditioned farm in the neighbourhood.
His children, too, were as ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, promised to inherit the habits with the old clothes of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother’s heels, equipped in a pair of his father’s cast-off galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her train in bad weather.
Rip Van Winkle, however, was one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound. If left to himself, he would have whistled life away in perfect contentment; but his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family. Morning, noon, and night, her tongue was incessantly going, and everything he said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence. Rip had one way of replying to all lectures of the kind, and that, by frequent use, had grown into a habit. He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, cast up his eyes, but said nothing. This, however, always provoked a fresh volley from his wife; so that he was fain to draw off his forces, and take to the outside of the house — the only side which, in truth, belongs to a hen-pecked husband.
Rip’s old domestic adherent was his dog Wolf, who was as much hen-pecked as his master; for Dame Van Winkle regarded them as companions in idleness, and even looked upon Wolf with an evil eye, as the cause of his master’s going so often astray. True it is, in all points of spirit befitting an honourable dog, he was as courageous an animal as ever scoured the woods — but what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman’s tongue? The moment Wolf entered the house his crest fell, his tail dropped to the ground, or curled between his legs, he sneaked about with a gallows air, casting many a sidelong glance at Dame Van Winkle, and at the least flourish of a broom-stick or ladle he would fly to the door with yelping precipitation.
