Speeches: Literary and Social

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 18, 1842

[At a dinner presided over by Washington Irving, when nearly eight
hundred of the most distinguished citizens of New York were
present, "Charles Dickens, the Literary Guest of the Nation,"
having been "proferred as a sentiment" by the Chairman, Mr. Dickens
rose, and spoke as follows:]

Gentlemen,--I don't know how to thank you--I really don't know how.
You would naturally suppose that my former experience would have
given me this power, and that the difficulties in my way would have
been diminished; but I assure you the fact is exactly the reverse,
and I have completely baulked the ancient proverb that "a rolling
stone gathers no moss;" and in my progress to this city I have
collected such a weight of obligations and acknowledgment--I have
picked up such an enormous mass of fresh moss at every point, and
was so struck by the brilliant scenes of Monday night, that I
thought I could never by any possibility grow any bigger. I have
made, continually, new accumulations to such an extent that I am
compelled to stand still, and can roll no more!

Gentlemen, we learn from the authorities, that, when fairy stories,
or balls, or rolls of thread, stopped of their own accord--as I do
not--it presaged some great catastrophe near at hand. The precedent
holds good in this case. When I have remembered the short time I
have before me to spend in this land of mighty interests, and the
poor opportunity I can at best have of acquiring a knowledge of,
and forming an acquaintance with it, I have felt it almost a duty
to decline the honours you so generously heap upon me, and pass
more quietly among you. For Argus himself, though he had but one
mouth for his hundred eyes, would have found the reception of a
public entertainment once a-week too much for his greatest
activity; and, as I would lose no scrap of the rich instruction and
the delightful knowledge which meet me on every hand, (and already
I have gleaned a great deal from your hospitals and common jails),-
-I have resolved to take up my staff, and go my way rejoicing, and
for the future to shake hands with America, not at parties but at
home; and, therefore, gentlemen, I say to-night, with a full heart,
and an honest purpose, and grateful feelings, that I bear, and
shall ever bear, a deep sense of your kind, your affectionate and
your noble greeting, which it is utterly impossible to convey in
words. No European sky without, and no cheerful home or well-
warmed room within shall ever shut out this land from my vision. I
shall often hear your words of welcome in my quiet room, and
oftenest when most quiet; and shall see your faces in the blazing
fire. If I should live to grow old, the scenes of this and other
evenings will shine as brightly to my dull eyes fifty years hence
as now; and the honours you bestow upon me shall be well remembered
and paid back in my undying love, and honest endeavours for the
good of my race.

Gentlemen, one other word with reference to this first person
singular, and then I shall close. I came here in an open, honest,
and confiding spirit, if ever man did, and because I felt a deep
sympathy in your land; had I felt otherwise, I should have kept
away. As I came here, and am here, without the least admixture of
one-hundredth part of one grain of base alloy, without one feeling
of unworthy reference to self in any respect, I claim, in regard to
the past, for the last time, my right in reason, in truth, and in
justice, to approach, as I have done on two former occasions, a
question of literary interest. I claim that justice be done; and I
prefer this claim as one who has a right to speak and be heard. I
have only to add that I shall be as true to you as you have been to
me. I recognize in your enthusiastic approval of the creatures of
my fancy, your enlightened care for the happiness of the many, your
tender regard for the afflicted, your sympathy for the downcast,
your plans for correcting and improving the bad, and for
encouraging the good; and to advance these great objects shall be,
to the end of my life, my earnest endeavour, to the extent of my
humble ability. Having said thus much with reference to myself, I
shall have the pleasure of saying a few words with reference to
somebody else.

There is in this city a gentleman who, at the reception of one of
my books--I well remember it was the Old Curiosity Shop--wrote to
me in England a letter so generous, so affectionate, and so manly,
that if I had written the book under every circumstance of
disappointment, of discouragement, and difficulty, instead of the
reverse, I should have found in the receipt of that letter my best
and most happy reward. I answered him, {5} and he answered me, and
so we kept shaking hands autographically, as if no ocean rolled
between us. I came here to this city eager to see him, and [laying
his hand it upon Irving's shoulder] here he sits! I need not tell
you how happy and delighted I am to see him here to-night in this
capacity.

Washington Irving! Why, gentlemen, I don't go upstairs to bed two
nights out of the seven--as a very creditable witness near at hand
can testify--I say I do not go to bed two nights out of the seven
without taking Washington Irving under my arm; and, when I don't
take him, I take his own brother, Oliver Goldsmith. Washington
Irving! Why, of whom but him was I thinking the other day when I
came up by the Hog's Back, the Frying Pan, Hell Gate, and all these
places? Why, when, not long ago, I visited Shakespeare's
birthplace, and went beneath the roof where he first saw light,
whose name but HIS was pointed out to me upon the wall? Washington
Irving--Diedrich Knickerbocker--Geoffrey Crayon--why, where can you
go that they have not been there before? Is there an English farm-
-is there an English stream, an English city, or an English
country-seat, where they have not been? Is there no Bracebridge
Hall in existence? Has it no ancient shades or quiet streets?

In bygone times, when Irving left that Hall, he left sitting in an
old oak chair, in a small parlour of the Boar's Head, a little man
with a red nose, and an oilskin hat. When I came away he was
sitting there still!--not a man LIKE him, but the same man--with
the nose of immortal redness and the hat of an undying glaze!
Crayon, while there, was on terms of intimacy with a certain
radical fellow, who used to go about, with a hatful of newspapers,
wofully out at elbows, and with a coat of great antiquity. Why,
gentlemen, I know that man--Tibbles the elder, and he has not
changed a hair; and, when I came away, he charged me to give his
best respects to Washington Irving!

Leaving the town and the rustic life of England--forgetting this
man, if we can--putting out of mind the country church-yard and the
broken heart--let us cross the water again, and ask who has
associated himself most closely with the Italian peasantry and the
bandits of the Pyrenees? When the traveller enters his little
chamber beyond the Alps--listening to the dim echoes of the long
passages and spacious corridors--damp, and gloomy, and cold--as he
hears the tempest beating with fury against his window, and gazes
at the curtains, dark, and heavy, and covered with mould--and when
all the ghost-stories that ever were told come up before him--amid
all his thick-coming fancies, whom does he think of? Washington
Irving.

Go farther still: go to the Moorish Mountains, sparkling full in
the moonlight--go among the water-carriers and the village gossips,
living still as in days of old--and who has travelled among them
before you, and peopled the Alhambra and made eloquent its shadows?
Who awakes there a voice from every hill and in every cavern, and
bids legends, which for centuries have slept a dreamless sleep, or
watched unwinkingly, start up and pass before you in all their life
and glory?

But leaving this again, who embarked with Columbus upon his gallant
ship, traversed with him the dark and mighty ocean, leaped upon the
land and planted there the flag of Spain, but this same man, now
sitting by my side? And being here at home again, who is a more
fit companion for money-diggers? and what pen but his has made Rip
Van Winkle, playing at nine-pins on that thundering afternoon, as
much part and parcel of the Catskill Mountains as any tree or crag
that they can boast?

But these are topics familiar from my boyhood, and which I am apt
to pursue; and lest I should be tempted now to talk too long about
them, I will, in conclusion, give you a sentiment, most
appropriate, I am sure, in the presence of such writers as Bryant,
Halleck, and--but I suppose I must not mention the ladies here -


THE LITERATURE OF AMERICA:


She well knows how to do honour to her own literature and to that
of other lands, when she chooses Washington Irving for her
representative in the country of Cervantes.