Chapter III: • Two Knickerbocker Romantics

I • Washington Irving

Fortunately the stolid New York of earlier days was not to pass away without bequeathing to posterity some fragments of its chronicles. In the midst of a pleasant society of smallclothes and tie-wigs, of feudalism and Federalism, appeared young Washington Irving at the precise moment when Sansculottism was beginning to make a stir in the land, and gentlemen were putting away their knee-breeches to don a republican dress--a decline in taste to which he would not easily reconcile himself. A boyish wit from the eighteenth century, a genial loiterer in the twilight of the old, he found himself out of humor with the ambitions that were making over the little city he loved. The present seemed to him not so amusing as the past, nor so picturesque. That he had any business with the world of trade and speculation he could not believe. Its concerns were not his. Its new Wall Street counted for less in his eyes than the pipe of old Diedrich Knickerbocker. Its decadent Federalism that was clinging to the wreck of its hopes, and its roistering Democracy that wore greasy clothes, spoke with an Irish accent, and was marshaled to the polls by Tammany Hall, were of less consequence to him than the black bottle that brought such curious adventures to Rip Van Winkle. The wit and romance he took pleasure in were of another sort than the kind his generation was getting drunk on--more insubstantial, less heady, picturesque rather than profitable. So Irving gently detached himself from contemporary America, and detached he remained to the end of a loitering life, untroubled by material ambitions, enjoying the abundance of good things that fell in his way, mingling with prosperous folk and liking everybody--men as diverse as John Jacob Astor and Martin Van Buren and John P. Kennedy--and unconsciously taking the color of his environment, careful to turn into limpid prose such romantic tales as he came upon and achieving thereby both reputation and profit--a pleasant blameless way of living, certainly, yet curiously unrepresentative of the America in which chance had set him and which was to claim him as its first man of letters.

An incorrigible _flâneur_, Irving’s business in life was to loaf and invite the picturesque. A confirmed rambler in pleasant places, in the many lands he visited he was a lover of the past rather than the present, seeking to recreate the golden days of the Alhambra or live over the adventurous mood of the fur trader. The immediate and the actual was an unsatisfying diet for his dreams. There was in him nothing of the calm aloofness of the intellectual that stands apart to clarify its critical estimate, and none of the reforming zeal of the Puritan that is at peace only in the thick of a moral crusade. The duty of saving the world was not laid on his untroubled soul. No man of his generation was less of a rebel than Irving, and he went his way unconcerned at things that quite upset Fenimore Cooper’s peace of mind. In his early days, to be sure, he broke with the ambitious middle class--if gently drawing away can be called breaking--because he could not bring himself to like its ways and the devastation those ways were entailing on the leisurely world he loved. Revolutions seemed to him somewhat vulgar affairs. The French Revolution had brought destruction on too many lovely things, and the industrial revolution was taking too heavy a toll of the picturesque, to please him. He thought it a pity that steam should drive the clipper ship from the seas and put an end to snug posting in the tally-ho. Progress might be bought at too dear a price. The bluff squire with his hounds, the great hall with its ancient yuletide customs, the patriarchal relations between master and man, seemed to him more worth while than the things progress was substituting for them; so he turned away from the new and gently ingratiated himself into the past in order to gather up such fragments of the picturesque as progress had not yet destroyed.

But only for a time. His dislike of capitalism rested on no more substantial basis than its substitution of vulgar trousers for gentlemanly smallclothes. It was too new to have achieved dignity or the charm of assured position. When that time should come and masters of finance should stand before the world as generous dispensers of patronage, when the development of business should have produced its new barons, Irving’s dislike would lessen and he would associate with the new capitalism on the same easy terms that he associated with the old feudalism. In the meantime he stood apart, unconcerned with praise or blame. The industrial revolution might work itself out as it would. The seventeen years he spent abroad on his great pilgrimage were black years for England. Wretchedness and poverty were all about him if he chose to see. The “condition of England” question was rising out of the factory smoke to challenge the conscience of England. But he did not choose to see and his conscience was untroubled. As he idled about the countryside or visited the hospitable manor houses, his eye was caught by the grace of medieval spires rising from parish churches rather than by the condition of the proletariat. He saw no children working in the coalpits, for he did not choose to visit the collieries. He sympathized vaguely with the new social movements then getting under way, but it was not in his nature to be partisan to a cause. He may not have been a Tory but he had lived so long with Tories and enjoyed so frankly the charm of upper-class society, that his outlook was unconsciously determined by such intimate contacts. While Secretary to the Legation at London in the reform years from 1829 to 1831, he was aware of the tremendous stir all about him, but his infrequent references to the Reform Bill in his letters turned usually on its disastrous effects on the publishing business. Only once during his long residence abroad does he seem to have felt deeply the significance of the current revolutionary unrest, and the mood that swept him away from his habitual indifference bears the marks of a sudden awakening. Writing from London on March 1, 1831, he said:

We are in the beginning of an eventful week.... However, _the great
cause of all the world_ will go on. What a stirring moment it is
to live in. I never took such intense interest in the newspapers.
It seems to me as if life were breaking out anew with me, or
that I were entering upon quite a new and almost unknown career
of existence, and I rejoice to find my sensibilities, which were
waning as to many objects of past interest, reviving with all their
freshness and vivacity at the scenes and prospects opening around
me. I trust, my dear Brevoort, we shall both be spared to see a
great part of this grand though terrible drama that is about to
be acted. There will doubtless be scenes of horror and suffering,
but what splendid triumphs must take place over these vile systems
of falsehood in every relation of human affairs, that have been
woven over the human mind, and for so long a time have held it down
in despicable thraldom. (Pierre M. Irving, _Life and Letters of
Washington Irving_, Vol. II, p. 199.)

Irving lacked a month of being forty-nine when he wrote this confession of interest in matters political. It marks the first appearance of liberalism in his thinking, and the last--somewhat vague to be sure, unduly bottomed on romantic expectations, yet significant in so placid a life and explanatory of his course, when a year later he returned to America to knit up once more the raveled threads of his interests. It was as an incipient liberal that he came back to a land then in the first flush of the Jacksonian victory, eager to discover a romantic charm in the vast changes that had come during the seventeen years he had been abroad. He plunged into the business of re-discovery with enthusiasm. He was in want of new literary materials, and as he took his bearings, his creative interest was stirred to write on American themes. He went to Washington and for three months listened to the great debate on Nullification. He talked with business men and politicians, with those who were prosperous and prominent, and he drifted easily with the tide of liberalism. To be sure he could scarcely be called a Jacksonian. Parties and causes did not greatly interest him even then. An intelligent man, indeed, could hardly be less concerned about political principles. Thirty years before, as a clever young man about town, he had gone with the dominant Federalism of the times, and had amused himself with political ambitions. His brother Peter was editor of the Lewisite paper the _Chronicle_, but Josiah Ogden Hoffman, with whose firm Irving was connected during his desultory incursion into the law and to whose daughter Matilda he was betrothed, was an old Loyalist and ardent Hamiltonian. His wife, to whom Irving was warmly attached, was a daughter of John Fenno, Hamilton’s editor. Under such tutelage it was natural for Irving to poke good-natured fun at President Jefferson’s red velvet breeches in _Salmagundi_; but his venture into practical politics proving little to his taste, he quickly gave over such ambitions. In a letter to a clever young lady of Republican sympathies, he thus announced his abandonment of political hopes:

I am as deep in mud and politics as ever a modern gentleman would
wish to be; and I drank beer with the multitude; and I talked
hand-bill fashion with the demagogues; and I shook hands with the
mob, whom my heart abhorreth.... Truly this saving one’s country
is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty
virtue,--prythee, no more of it. (_Life and Letters_, Vol. I, Chap.
XI.)

Years now separated him from that youthful experience. His long absence from his native land had completely alienated him from the fierce partisanship of contemporary America and he could view matters political with calm detachment. Inclined to make the best of any government _de facto_, he found it easy on his return to accept Jacksonianism, and he soon discovered a genuine liking for Old Hickory. “The more I see of this old cock of the woods,” he wrote from Washington, “the more I relish his game qualities” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 255). No doubt his early friend Paulding had much to do with his ready acceptance of the new order, although he had come in close contact with Martin Van Buren at the London legation and was drawn to him. “He is one of the gentlest and most amiable men I have ever met with,” he wrote to his brother, “with an affectionate disposition that attaches itself to those around him, and wins their kindness in return” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 220). Although distrustful of some of the “elbow counsellors” of the Democracy he found little cause for criticism and soon came to be regarded as one with them. The Jacksonians were eager to make political capital out of his literary reputation, and he was urged by Tammany Hall to stand for Congress and later to accept a mayoralty candidacy. In 1837, probably through the intervention of Paulding, he was offered a post in Van Buren’s cabinet. These partisan offers he had the good sense to decline, but when in 1842 he was tendered the post of Minister to Spain he gladly seized the opportunity to revisit a land he loved. His nephew is explicit in his statement that the offer came wholly unsolicited, but Fenimore Cooper was of another opinion.[423] Very likely Cooper was misinformed, but whatever the truth the appointment was a godsend to Irving. His affairs were in a bad way. The popularity of his writings was on the wane, the panic had caught him with much of his capital invested in unprofitable land speculations, and the “Roost” at Tarrytown was a heavy drain, although he wrote whimsically, “I beat all the gentlemen farmers in my neighborhood, for I can manage to raise my vegetables and fruits at very little more than twice the market price” (_Life and Letters_, Vol. II, p. 320). Only a severe nature like Cooper, sorely wounded by the angry reception of his own honest criticism, would cavil at an appointment so honorable to the government.

A friendly nature, Irving discovered friendliness wherever he went. His own generosity appealed to the generosity of others, and he found it easy in consequence to take a kindly view of men and parties. He was harassed by none of Cooper’s quick suspicions and rigid principles, and it must be added he had none of Cooper’s intuitive penetration into the secret springs of human action that made the latter so acute a critic of contemporary America. The sharp contrast in moods in which the two men returned to America from their travels, the one harshly critical of middle-class economics and frontier leveling, the other responding naïvely to the enthusiasm for speculative expansion and eager to exploit the romance of the westward movement, sufficiently reveals the difference between them. The one was a dogmatic Puritan with the dictatorial ways of the quarter-deck, the other was a play-boy of letters temperamentally incapable of critical analysis. There was not a grain of realism in Irving’s nature. His cheerful optimism was little more than the optimism of the prosperous. Wholly ignorant of economics, he never comprehended the significance of the revolutions in process all about him, and this _naïveté_ blinded him to the motive of John Jacob Astor in financing Astoria, as it blinded him to all the major forces of the times. He was easily brought to see the romance of the great struggle between rival companies for mastery of the fur trade, but he did not comprehend how the glamour he threw about the venture must inevitably strengthen his patron’s investment in imperialism. Gullible as a child, he discovered nothing more significant in the great struggle between agrarianism and capitalism for control of government than the ungenerous suspicions and novel theories it bred. For the outstanding liberals of New York he had scant sympathy. William Leggett, Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, William Cullen Bryant, influenced his views far less than did the masters of Wall Street; and from the courageous movement of Locofocoism he drew back in distrust. The one letter in which he elaborated such political convictions as he had come to hold, is an interesting document that deserves quotation.

As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican,
and attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of
my country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no
bitterness in my creed. I have no relish for puritans either in
religion or politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme,
and for overturning everything that stands in the way of their own
zealous career. I have, therefore, felt a strong distaste for some
of those locofoco luminaries who of late have been urging strong
and sweeping measures, subversive of the interests of great classes
of the community. Their doctrines may be excellent in theory, but,
if enforced in violent and uncompromising opposition to all our
habitudes, may produce the most distressing effects. The best of
remedies must be cautiously applied, and suited to the taste and
constitution of the patient.... Ours is a government of compromise.
We have several great and distinct interests bound up together,
which, if not separately consulted and severally accommodated, may
harass and impair each other.... I always distrust the soundness
of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and
disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow-citizens.
Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading
and financial classes of our country. You yourself know ... how
important these classes are to the prosperous conduct of the
complicated affairs of this immense empire. You yourself know,
in spite of all the common-place cant and obloquy that has been
cast upon them by political spouters and scribblers, what general
good faith and fair dealing prevails throughout these classes.
Knaves and swindlers there are doubtless among them, as there are
among all great classes of men; but I declare that I looked with
admiration at the manner in which the great body of our commercial
and financial men have struggled on through the tremendous trials
which have of late overwhelmed them, and have endeavored, at every
pecuniary sacrifice, to fulfill their engagements. (_Life and
Letters_, Vol. II, pp. 312-313.)

This persuasive presentation of the philosophy of compromise, with its implicit defense of capitalism, marks Irving’s drift back to the middle class with which he had long before broken. In the six years since his return he had watched the country react to the great panic, and he went with it in its veering towards the Whiggery of Henry Clay. The fragile bonds of his attachment to the Democracy were becoming tenuous; other attachments were insensibly drawing him towards the more congenial representatives of wealth. He had all his life associated with the Tory classes and it was easy for him to transfer his loyalty to the American Tories. Under such influences began a slow _rapprochement cordial_ towards the new philosophy of progress. He was seized with the common mania of speculation and made some unfortunate investments in wild lands and railways that seriously hampered him later, and he commercialized his literary reputation by such money-making ventures as _Astoria_ and the _Adventures of Captain Bonneville_. He discovered a new romance in the great business of exploitation, and found the hand of God in the profits of unearned increment. In the letter above quoted from, he justified the ways of speculation thus:

There are moral as well as physical phenomena incident to every
state of things, which may at first appear evils, but which are
devised by an all-seeing Providence for some beneficent purpose.
Such is the spirit of speculative enterprise which now and then
rises to an extravagant height, and sweeps throughout the land....
The late land speculations, so much deprecated, though ruinous to
many engaged in them, have forced agriculture and civilization
into the depths of the wilderness; have laid open the recesses of
primeval forests; made us acquainted with the most available points
of our immense interior; have cast the germs of future towns and
cities and busy marts in the heart of savage solitudes, and studded
our vast rivers and internal seas with ports that will soon give
activity to a vast internal commerce. Millions of acres which might
otherwise have remained idle and impracticable wastes, have been
brought under the dominion of the plough, and hundreds of thousands
of industrious yeomen have been carried into the rich but remote
depths of our immense empire, to multiply and spread out in every
direction, and give solidity and strength to our confederacy.
All this has in a great measure been effected by the extravagant
schemes of land speculators. I am, therefore, inclined to look upon
them with a more indulgent eye than they are considered by those
violent politicians who are prescribing violent checks and counter
measures, and seem to have something vindictive in their policy.
(_Life and Letters_, Vol. II, p. 314.)

Thus did Irving become completely domesticated in the new world that Rip Van Winkle had found so disconcerting when he came upon it out of the quiet colonial past. The rediscovery of America proved to be an agreeable business, and profitable in a professional way. His enthusiasms, which in 1831 he felt were “waning as to many objects of past interest,” were stimulated by the vast stir of the country, and the spirit of romance once more ran briskly in his veins. The better part of a year he rambled widely about the country, in order, as he said, to get at home “upon American themes.” He visited Boston and the White Mountains, then West to Ohio and St. Louis, then with an Indian commissioner he penetrated the southwest prairies as far as the wild Pawnee country beyond the South Canadian River, then to New Orleans and Charleston, finally settling down in Washington to immerse himself in politics. From there he passed over the Potomac for an extended trip through the Old Dominion, returning to New York where he spent some time with Astor at Hell Gate, finally in 1835 settling at Tarrytown which was to be his home to the last. He had definitely determined on his new field of work. His imagination had been stirred by his visit to the prairies; the romance of the westward expansion was beginning to find expression in the works of Timothy Flint and James Hall; the public interest was ripe and John Jacob Astor was at hand to encourage him. Thus stimulated Irving proposed to make the field of western romance his own, with the result that he published in quick succession _A Tour of the Prairies_, _Astoria_, and _The Adventures of Captain Bonneville_.

On the whole the new venture did not prosper. The spirit of the West was not to be captured by one whose heart was in Spain. In _A Tour of the Prairies_ there is a certain homely simplicity and straightforwardness that spring from a plain recital of undramatic experience; and in _Astoria_ there is an unembellished narrative of appalling hardship and heroic endurance, with none of the tawdry romantics that mar the work of Flint and Hall. Yet neither is creatively imaginative, neither stirs one with a sense of high drama. The atmosphere of Snake River could not be created in the quiet study at the “Roost”; it needed the pen of a realist to capture the romance of those bitter wanderings in mountain and sagebrush. It is journeyman work, and on every page one is conscious of the professional man of letters faithfully doing this day’s allotment. It is much the same with his _Life of Washington_. In this last great undertaking Irving no longer writes with gusto. The golden days of Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle are long since gone; the magic is departed from his pen; and a somewhat tired old gentleman is struggling to fulfill his contract with his publisher. It was a mistake to venture on the work, despite the fact that he had long been planning it. His historical equipment was inadequate. He might make a pretty story out of Washington’s early life and his days with the army, but he was far too ignorant of politics, too credulous in judging his materials, to interpret justly the fierce party struggles that seethed about the President. Quite unconsciously in this last work he returned to the political prejudices of his youth, and wrote an account of Washington’s administrations deeply colored by his Federalist sources.

The most distinguished of our early romantics, Irving in the end was immolated on the altar of romanticism. The pursuit of the picturesque lured him away into sterile wastes, and when the will-o’-the-wisp was gone he was left empty. A born humorist, the gayety of whose spirits overflowed the brim, he was lacking in a brooding intellectuality, and instead of coming upon irony at the bottom of the cup--as the greater humorists have come upon it after life has had its way with them--he found there only sentiment and the dreamy poetic. As the purple haze on the horizon of his mind was dissipated by a sobering experience, he tried to substitute an adventitious glamour; as romance faded, sentiment supplied its place. So long as youth and high spirits endured, his inkwell was a never-failing source of gayety, but as the sparkle subsided he over-sweetened his wine. This suffices to account for the fact that all his better work was done early; and this explains why the Knickerbocker _History_ remains the most genial and vital of his volumes. The gayety of youth bubbles and effervesces in those magic pages, defying time to do its worst. The critic may charge the later Irving with many and heavy shortcomings, but the romantic smoke-clouds that ascend from Wouter Van Twiller’s pipe cannot be dissipated by the winds of criticism.

II • James Kirke Paulding

Far more native to the limitations and hardships of American life and far more loyal to its homely aspirations was James Kirke Paulding, whose literary reputation came to be so deeply overshadowed by that of his early friend. Sprung from plain stock--whether English or Dutch his son remained in doubt, although inclining to believe the former--and cradled in the fierce partisanship of the Revolutionary struggle, he never abandoned his inherited liberalism or found his love of country growing less. To the end of his life he remained a primitive American of an earlier generation, somewhat puzzled by the ways of another age that speculated in prosperity by running in debt, and measured a man’s wealth by the amount he owed. His father had been an active Whig in a Tory neighborhood who did not stint his service to the Revolutionary cause. He was a member of the local Committee of Safety, and acted as State Commissary to the Revolutionary forces, a post which in the end brought him to ruin. In the dark days of the struggle he pledged his private credit for supplies, and was never reimbursed by a negligent commonwealth. The outcome was financial disaster. The father was imprisoned for debt and his courage broken, and the family long suffered from want. “We were not only poor,” the son wrote later, “but steeped in poverty.” But there was excellent stuff in the awkward, dreamy country boy. He was “built of stubborn oak,” he remarked whimsically, “seasoned in the school of poverty, like an old chimney-piece in a log cabin.” When at the age of nineteen he was suddenly plunged into the world of New York City, he was shy, uncouth, self-educated, and felt himself an alien in Wall Street and Broadway. For the Federalist upper class he seems to have felt the instinctive hostility of the outsider; but through the agency of the Irvings--an elder sister having married William Irving--he was brought into the companionship of a group of clever young men, and under the stimulus of high talk and exuberant pranks, the latent idealism of his nature expanded freely. This was his university, and while it left something to be desired in the way of discipline, suffering too free a rein to his discursive fancy, it quickened his native wit, awakened his creative imagination, and put him to school to the pleasant craft of writing. The _Salmagundi Papers_ were the first fruits of the literary apprenticeship of the group, and although Irving has come to receive the chief credit for them, the wit of Paulding seems quite as sprightly, and his gayety as fresh.

That his later career in letters was less notable resulted in part from the fact that he was an inveterate rambler by nature, and partly from the fact that writing with him was occasional, a pleasant relief from humdrum duties, and he did not choose to lay a curb on his vagrant ways. In letters as in life he was always discursive, forgetful of his objective in his delight at the beauty of the countryside, loading his pages down with nature descriptions and clogging the action of his tales with somewhat tedious homilies. After forty years of writing he remained still an amateur, incapable of pruning the wilful tangle of his fancy--an essayist of the leisurely school who ventured incautiously into the realms of verse and fiction without mastering the technic of the business. There was perhaps too much of the homespun in him to permit him to become an artist. The experience of his youth marked him too deeply, and all his life he remained as conscious a son of the people as Hamlin Garland was later, delighting to chronicle the ways of the obscure, somewhat militant in proclaiming the excellence of homely virtues. Formed in an environment that bred a spontaneous democracy, he was a confirmed equalitarian, untroubled by the itch to rise in the world or exploit his fellows. Alone among the Knickerbocker group, he was a Jeffersonian in the fundamentals of his social creed; not in the lesser matters of Kentucky Resolutions and the like, but in his Physiocratic leanings, in his profound distrust of all middle-class programs and his preference for the simple country ways over the city economy; and it was this deep-rooted agrarianism that set him against capitalism and made him a later Jacksonian. In him there spoke out the authentic New York, not of Broadway merchants or Wall Street bankers, but of the plain rank and file of the people. Untouched by foreign travel but widely acquainted with his native America, he was fashioned out of the wool from the fireside loom and domestic dye-pot.

A writer so consciously and completely American would find abundant occasion to put his pen to the service of his country at a time when every English traveler turned critic and on his return home published a volume of truculent disparagement of ways and things American. For the most part those volumes were a defense of Toryism by the easy method of attacking democracy, and they annoyed Paulding beyond measure. He would not let them go unanswered, and from _The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_ (1812) to _John Bull in America_ (1825), he published five different replies, varying his attack from argument to burlesque. Something more than loyalty to his country seems to have spurred him on. His dislike of England was inveterate, partly because of the old Revolutionary feud, partly because of later antagonisms. Almost at the hour of his birth the Paulding family had been forced to quit their home for fear of the British and Tories who daily threatened them; and a deep hatred of the British Tory he drew in with his mother’s milk. To him England was a Tory country, reeking with social injustice, the home of ancient abuses, and necessarily the implacable enemy of democratic America. He was convinced that want and tyranny and subserviency dogged the daily life of the English common people; and the English Reviews that attacked the ways of democracy with caustic British superiority, filled his honest republican heart with wrath, and he jabbed his quill into the tough skin of John Bull with patriotic vigor. The shame of the burning of the capitol rankled in the American heart, and Paulding discovered fresh grievances in remembering that from England had come the banking system and the “shin-plaster dynasty” that would breed in the new country the evils of the old if they were not looked to. He was convinced that the mother country wished ill to her offspring, and he thanked God in successive volumes that democratic America was not what Tory England was.

For despite the English travelers--Weld, Parkinson, Ashe, Bradbury, Hall, Trollope, and all the rest of the loquacious tribe--Paulding was persuaded that America constituted the hope of the future. Here in this land he believed that men should eventually achieve a measure of well-being undreamed of in the old world; already the old tyrannies had been destroyed, the ancient poverty abated. From this stubborn idealism nothing could turn him aside. It finds expression in an early poem, and it provides the theme for his last novel. _The Backwoodsman_, published in 1818, is a rambling and somewhat plethoric idyll of the West, the hero of which is an archetype of the oppressed and exploited, who finds a generous asylum in the free land beyond the Alleghenies, and like Crèvecœur’s Andrew the Hebridean, expands the horizons of his mind under the beneficent touch of freedom. _The Puritan and His Daughter_, written over thirty years later, deals with a different phase of the same general theme. It is a vivid picture of the strife engendered in America by immigrant families who bring hither their old-world feuds and animosities, and the curative influence of the free environment that, in discovering the good rather than the bad in neighbors, draws together the younger generation despite the jealous parental authority that would keep them apart. The bigoted fathers make trouble enough--the fanatical Puritan who fought with Cromwell and the headstrong Cavalier who defended divine right--wilful men whom even the common frontier perils cannot reconcile or make tolerant; but they are powerless to thwart the ways of nature. The son of the Cavalier discovers an attractive woman in the daughter of the Puritan, and when love walks in the twilight what matters theology or politics. Youth has its own notions of divine right; in its creed the dogmas of John Calvin and Robert Filmer have no place; and if the lovers are more tolerant than the fathers it only proves that a freer environment will manage to soften the traditional animosities and beget a kindlier race from the merging of classes. Such at least is the characteristic thesis that Paulding elaborates through two volumes of discursive narrative interspersed with bits of vigorous action.

Of this kindly melting pot Paulding himself was a product. He had rid himself wholly of all ties that would bind him to Europe. He was partisan to no cause or party, literary or political, of the old world. He was content to be American and suffer his native land to bound his loyalties. In his own literary practice he refused to imitate the current English fashions and he spoke his mind freely to the American reading public for its greedy swallowing of cheap imported food. He did not take kindly to the English romantic writers, and went often out of his way to have a dig at his two pet aversions, Scott and Byron.[424] His amusing tale of _Koningsmarke, the Long Finne_, is a good-natured burlesque of certain romantic mannerisms of the Waverley novels, and a defense of Cooper’s _Pioneers_ for its homely realism. Paulding’s dislike of the “blood-pudding” fiction that had come over from England, and that proved so disastrous to the genius of Gilmore Simms, was inveterate, and in his whimsical dedication of _The Puritan and His Daughter_ to the sovereign people he comments on the public taste thus:

I am not ignorant of your preference for high-seasoned dishes
of foreign cookery, most especially blood-puddings, plentifully
spiced and sauced with adultery, seduction, poisoning, stabbing,
suicide, and all other sublime excesses of genius. I am aware also
that Your Majesty, being yourself able to perform impossibilities,
believed nothing impossible. Possessing this clew to Your Majesty’s
royal approbation, I solemnly assure you I have gone as far as I
could to secure it, with a safe conscience. I have laid about me
pretty handsomely, and sprinkled a good number of pages with blood
enough, I hope, to make a pudding. If I have any apology to make
to Your Majesty, it is for permitting some of my people to die a
natural death, a thing so unnatural that it has been banished from
all works of fiction aiming at the least semblance to truth....
But, may it please Your Majesty, I am troubled with weak nerves,
and my great grandfather was a Quaker. I am, therefore, naturally
averse to bloodshed, and have more than once nearly fallen into
convulsions over the pages of Monsieur Alexandre Dumas, whom
I consider a perfect Guillotine among authors. In short, may
it please Your Majesty, I abjure poisoning, or smothering with
charcoal, and confess myself deplorably behind the spirit of this
luminous age, which is as much in advance of all others, as the
forewheel of a wagon is ahead of the hind ones.

In his politics--and as a good American of the times he took his politics seriously--Paulding found in the popular drift towards Jacksonian democracy an expression of his deepest convictions. It was moving in the direction he had long faced, and he went with it whole-heartedly, enjoyed some of the emoluments of office, and eventually served as Secretary to the Navy in the cabinet of Van Buren. With Jackson’s attack on the Bank he must have been in deep sympathy, for his dislike of the new financial system was of long standing. His father had suffered heavily from a depreciated Continental currency, and he early came to distrust all banks and banking. His political views, indeed, were pretty much determined by the Physiocratic convictions that underlay his thinking. He had been a Jeffersonian long before the rise of Jacksonianism. Portions of his _Letters from the South_, published in 1817, seem like excerpts from the agrarian writings of John Taylor of Caroline. There is the same contemptuous analysis of the “shin-plaster dynasty,” the same concern at the growth of trading towns, the same conviction that cities and poverty and low morals go hand in hand, the same trust in the perennial wholesomeness of country life. Such a passage as this will suffice to reveal his leanings towards a Physiocratic economy:

I was saying, that we have too many people living in cities,
in proportion to our farmers, who, after all, are the backbone
of every country, whence originates its riches and its solid
strength.... Yet our people cling to the towns and cities,
attracted by the hope of sudden wealth, and despising the slow,
yet sure, rewards of agriculture, which, without leading a man to
inordinate riches, secure him for ever from the chances of sinking
into beggary or want. The race of paupers receives no recruits
from them; for in all my sojournings, I may say with truth, that
I never saw an industrious farmer forsaken, “or his seed begging
bread.” One great cause of the disproportion of numbers ...
between the agricultural and other classes of the community, is
the great system of paper money, which has struck at the root of
regular, persevering industry, whose rewards, though slow, are
always certain. For some years back, hardly a tradesman in our
cities, and of late in our little towns (each of which, however
insignificant, has now its snug little bank) thinks of growing rich
by his industry. No; he must get accommodations at some bank, and
plunge into speculations: nor can you now go into a cobbler’s stall
without seeing a bank notice, or perhaps two or three, stuck up
with an awl at the chimney-piece, to remind the honest gentleman
that he owes a great deal more than he can pay. Thus is the axe
laid to the very root of national morals, and consequently national
prosperity, and the whole American people, farmers excepted, sunk
into an abject subjection to banks and their directors. (_Letters
from the South_, Vol. I, pp. 100-102.)

So confirmed an agrarian would easily arrive at agrarian conclusions in his meditations on the nature and functions of the political state. Unlike Irving, who, having no political convictions, was equally pleased with Whig or Democrat if he happened to be a gentleman, Paulding was something of a political philosopher with clear-cut doctrines. He was too shrewd an observer of ways political to be caught by party cries, or to ignore the class selfishness that would make government a party to its ends. As a Jeffersonian he retained an old-fashioned distrust of the political state. As an eighteenth-century liberal he would keep the state within narrow bounds. Jealous for a freedom worthy of free citizens, he wanted government to keep hands off what did not concern it. He would not have the state used as a cat’s-paw to pull anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire, whether in the form of Clay’s American System, or what not. For protective tariffs and internal improvements--those grandiose schemes for hastening prosperity--he felt an old-fashioned repugnance that found issue in amusing caricature. In _Westward Ho!_ he introduces a French publican of a Mississippi River village who does not care for Yankee improvements and describes them thus:

Diable! monsieur, another improvement; last year they assess me for
one grand public improvement! one road to go somewhere, I don’t
know. Eh bien! I pay the money. Well, this year they assess me for
one other grand public improvement--very grand--voilà, monsieur,
one other road, right alongside the other, both going to the same
place. Diable! I no want to travel on two turnpike roads. Ah!
monsieur le colonel, I shall be very rich, O! very rich indeed,
by these grand improvements. They take away all my land to make
room for the grand improvement; they take away all my money to
pay for him, and then they tell me my land worth four, six time
so much as before. Peste! what that to me when my land all gone
to the dem public improvement, hey? I shall be very rich then.
Diable! I wish myself gone to some country where every thing was
go backwards--what you call tail foremost, instead of forwards,
for the dem march of improvement shall ruin me at last. (Vol. II,