PS ^m. A li. f%^(l^'i J^J^'^n'^ "^^'^.^1^ ^^ '^- / BRIEF REMARKS ON THE " WIFE" OF *' Uxor invicH——' esse nescis ? " Mitte singultus, Hob. NEW- YORK: PRINTED BY GRATTAN AND BANKS, Corner ofJVassau ^ Spruce Streets. 1819. BRIEF REMARKS t^m WASHINGTON IRVING. Our countryman, Mr. Washington Irving, now in England, is occupied, it seems, in a work he calls *' The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman,^^ coming out in numbers ; No. 1 containing an article entitled as above, " the wife;" consisting of an ob- servation, a smile to illustrate it, and a narrative or fact to prove it. A few brief remarks on each in their order. The observation may be abbreviated, and without injury to it, to import, " that women sustain the reverses of fortune with fortitude ; that disasters, which break down the spirit of a man, call forth all their energies ; and that the wife is the supporter of the husband under misfortune ;" Now, all this is very true, but is it not also very trite ? Can it be a question, whether the wife possesses not, and, at least equal to what we can boast of it, for the hus- band, the " ne cede malls, sed contra audentior ito;^^ never to yield to the ills of life ; on the contrary, the more numerous and sore, she the more collected and unwearied to resist them? Her spirit in another view of it. The husband, dubious of succeeding^ and whatever the purpose, may pause, and faulter, and, if left unsustained by the wife, would ultimate- ]j faint and abandon — no hesitation or retrospect with her ; witness Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth ; perhaps his masterpiece, if any thing can be selected from him so to be distinguished. The character within the limits of truth and nature, still may it not be asked, whether a limit to the mind that could conceive it ? so that really Mr. Irving has taught us nothing we did not know before ; yet, as we are to believe, he meant to say something complimentary or civil to the sex, possibly to make amends for a delinquency in never having addressed one of them in the " ivay of courtship,^^ it might be viewed as ungracious were it otherwise than well received. The simile runs thus ; — " As the vine, which has long twined its grateful foliage around the oak, and been lifted up by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and bind its shattered boughs ; so it is beautifully ordered by providence that woman, who is the mere dependant and orna- ment of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged recesses of his na- ture, tenderly supporting the drooping head and binding up the broken heart." — I object to it, as too long — count the folio, and probably it will be found as long again, either as Addison's, " So the staunch Hound, &c." or his, " So when an Angel, &c.," hitherto the longest on records It is irksome to the mind to be detained in examining, as it proceeds, whether the simile, and the person or thing to be likened, agree throughout, as much so as to overlook a boy's exercise in making of Latin to see if no false concord. I use the phrases, count the folio, and on record^ presuming them to be familiar to Mr. Irving, he hav- ing been once engaged in the study of the Law. He quitted it because, as is supposed, rather dry, and on a calculation, that although he might improve by it in the faculty of thought or judgment, he would suf- fer proportionably in his native gift of imagination ; and in which he was doubtless correct, it not being impossible that, had he continued in it a portion of time longer, he would have found himself utterly unequal to his Knickerbocker History of New^-York ; certainly a total absence of Quiz, the very life and spirit of it. The like as to his story of Rip Van Winkle and his Wife of the Kaat's Kill. Pray what makes Mr. Irving spell the Old Dutch name Kat's Kill with double a ? It has also a place as an article in the Sketch Book, and as of the Knickerbocker genus of composition, inasmuch as both Rip and his Wife are wholly of Mr. Irving's creation, there never having been any such etis or existence m rerum na- tura as a scolding Dutch Wife. Not that the Dutch Wife never scolds ; she scolds her servants ; she scolds her neighbours ; but she never scolds in quality as Wife ; she never scolds her Husband. — This has been ascribed hy some to the judicious manner ia which the Dutch formulary of matrimony is framed, where, instead of relying on obey, honour, love, and so forth, none of them of import so definite as to pre- clude construction, the Wife is made explicitly to promise to be silent ; and though not exactly mar- ried within the four walls of a church, which has been imagined to add to the solemnity of the cere- mony, it must be acknowledged on all hands, that no where is the wife found so scrupulously observant of the marriage vow as among the Dutch. The non-existence of the Scolding Wife involves the non-existence of its correlative, the Henpecked Husband. Indeed there is no word in the Dutch an- swering to the English henpeck. Should any con- ceited Englishman take occasion, from this single instance of defect in the Dutch, to boast of the co- piousness of his own, language, I would remind him, there are innumerable words and phrases in French not to be expressed in English. Vide Simond's Tra- vels passim. From the preface to the Van Winkle article, it ap- pears Mr. Irving intended it as a supplement or se- quel to his History of New- York. Acute critics have thought Homer ought to have stopped at the Iliad, but his muse grew vain, '' in plausus ambitiosa ;" a note on the passage takes a distinction between plau- dit and fame ; and " like a little demon whispered, Homer write more^^'^ and he wrote the Odyssey ; sup- ••« posing however, for the sake of illustration, the His- tory to be Mr. Irving's Iliad, and the Article his Odyssey, I do not think he has fallen off much, if any thing, and that he is as funny and fancilul in the last as in the first. I object further to the simile as wanting simplicity and unity, the " simplex duntaxat et unuin,^^ of the Master. " The great secret in writing," says the compiler of a recent school-book with a few plain sensible pages on style, "is to know when to be simple, ^^ The simile sets out with likening the wife to the vine twining itself around the oak. it was of the vineti-culture of the ancients, to add a word, my mite, to the nomenclature, to lead or train the vine, in order to expose the clusters to the sun, upwards along the trunk of a tree to the boughs ; the tree however was the elm and not the oak. " Ulmistjue adjungere vites,^^ to adjoin the vines to the elms, says Virgil. " Ego vidi pampineis oneratam vitibus ulmum,^^ I have seen the elm burdened with the vine luxuriant in shoots, says Ovid. The wife is not only the vine ; but, by twining, or leading, or training, herself around the tree, she becomes her own vine- dresser ; the instant thereafter, however, the tree, being spoken of as lifting up the vine to its boughs, is apparently the vine-dresser. There obviously is some confusion or interference here, and how to ex- plain it I am altogether at a loss : to make the hardy 8 plarit stoop down, and lift up, being certainly beyond' my contrivance. For thf^ sake of accuracy in citation, I repeat Mr. Irving's epithet for the oak, the hardy plant ; the prose hardy plant is one that will bear frost, and drought, and to be browsed and cropt, and yet thrive. The wife is not only a vine and a vine-dresser ; but almost instantly again, still as wife, she is, as it were, likened to a small hawser passed round a ship along her sides in a tempest, the sea-term for it I think is frapping, to save her, when her fastenings are giving way, from separathig, " She clings round the tree to bind up its shattered boughs when rifted by the thun- derbolt ;" the precise condition of the tree in the case cited from Ovid, " scBvofulmine tacta Jovis,^^ touched or struck by Jove's dire lightning ; but there, as w^e have seen, the vine, instead of performing a good office to the tree, avails herself of its boughs, shatter- ed as they may be, for her own accommodation. Ultimately the wife becomes the prophet, or rather, as we are in New-Testament times, a female Bar- nabas, a daughter of Consolation, " She is to bind up her broken-hearted husband." 1 am aware Mr. Irving may vouch, as precedent for multifariousness of figure and imagery, the fol- lowing much admired passage from the discourse of De Witt Clinton, Esq. before the literary and philo- sophical Society, he being President, After inveigh- ing, and very properly, against " invective in our " political writings, that it lias greatly tended to in- " jure our national character^ and that it has arisen " from the indiscriminate applause conferred on cer- " tain eminent political writers," the passage alluded to follows : — " We imitate, what we are taught to " admire, and unfortunately we have aped their " boldness of invective, and fierceness of denuncia- <* tion, without exhibiting those fascinations of genius " which operate like the cestus of Venus, conceal " deformity, and brighten all the charms of beauty " and grace. Junius arose in the literary, like a " comet in the natural world, menacing Pestilence " and War, and denouncing, in a style of boldness " and invective, the constituted authorities of Great " Britain. He created a new era in political writing ; " his works have become the archetype and text " book o{ political authors ; and every juvenile writer, " who enters the political lists, endeavours to bend " the bow of Ulysses, and, striving to make up in " venom what he wants in vigour, mistakes scurrility " for satire, and ribaldry for wit, and confounds the " natron of Egypt with the salt of Attica." If the sentence immediately preceding where Ju- nius, the subject of the simile, is mentioned, is to be viewed as context, then we have Junius, in the first place, the cestus or girdle of the Queen of Love ex- hibiting fascinations ; secondly, we have him a co- met ; thirdly, an archetype ; fourthly, a text book ; fifthly, the bow of Ulysses, which our juvenile wri- ters, when they eater the Lists, strive to bend and 2 10 so tilt with the Arrow as doubtless more handj than' as heretofore, with the Spear ; and sixthl}' and lastly, salt, seasoning, grateful to the palate or Taste., and whh which they confound xh^'w natron, the sal ammo- niac of the shops, offensive to the smell, and pungent, in the extreme, so that the phial containing it applied to the nostril nigh takes away your breath. " Enough to vex one, even if a Saint," almost to say, confound them for it ! Ihe Narrative, According to Mr. Irving, it was casually recalled to his mind by observations made on a previous oc- casion by another, which he, at the moment, was repeating in the article, and so not originally in his view as a component part of it. It may be redu( ed to the following facts. " A friend of Mr. Irving '' marries a beautiful accomplished girl ; to the hus- " band he gives the name of Leslie, and to the wife <' the name of Mary ; the latter the Heroine of the " article furnishing the name, " The Wife." Leslie " has an ample fortune, and it was his mishap to " embark it in large speculations, and by sudden " disasters, it is swept from him, and he reduced to " almost penury — for a time he keeps his situation " to himself; at length he comes to Mr. Irving one " day, and relates it to him. Mr. Irving inquires of " him, whether his wife knows it ; at which he bursts " into tears, and cries, for God's sake, if you have any " pity on me, don't mention my wife !" Must we not intend here that Mr. Irving remains to be notified, that 11 invocation of the Deity as expletive^ no longer tole- rated? — " Leslie finally discloses it to her, and when " Mr. Irving asks him how she bore it ? he replies, " like an angeV^ Angels being preserved from ad- versity by a Power, an attribute of which, " not " subject to accidentSy'^ how are we to know how they would bear it ? — One, it is true, failed^ and most disasterously so ; and how he bears it, w^e, of our own race, and wofully to our own cost, know. " Leslie then disposes of his dwx^lling house, and " sells all his splendid furniture except his wife's " harp, and takes a small cottage in the country, a *' few miles from town. Mr. Irving one evening ac- " companied him to the cottage, and, as they ap- " proached it, they heard the sound of music ; it was *' Mary's voice singing a little air of which her hus- *' band was peculiarly fond." Does not Mr. Irving, by making Mary to sing, make her a little too light- hearted ? " She, expecting her husband, had set " out a table, under a beautiful tree behind the cot- " tage, with some delicious strawberries she had *' been gathering, and excellent cream for him." It is to be collected from the narrative, that Mr. Irving has laid the scene in New-York ; now, it may be said, with very little, if any, deviation from the literal truth, that the whole island shews neither cottage nor dairy, and the few roods left untilled, scarce soil sufficient to nurture a strawberry vine. We will perceive whence the mistake, upon advert- ing to it, that the article was written in England, 12 where a portion of the habitation is cottage, and' the gardens furnish strawberries, and the pastures milk, most abundantly; and that Mr. Irving has been so long abroad, that thetopography of the spot, his home, has passed from his remembrance. The mistake by him is as to place. A similar mistake by Sir Henry Clint6n, the British Com- mander, at the battle of Monmouth, in the war of our revolution as to time, A week passed before he prepared his despatch, or his report of it, to his government, and at the close he writes, " that he " took the position from whence the enemy had been '' first driven after they had quitted the plain ; and, ^* having reposed the troops till ten at night, to avoid " the excessive heat of the day, he took advantage " of the moonlight to rejoin General Knyphausen." — It was already the second quarter of the moon and the evening consequently light, so that even the circumstance, that there was an eclipse of the sun on the 25th of the month, and of course no moonlight so late as at ten in the evening of the 28th, the day of the battle, never suggested itself to his recollec- tion. Again, — a similar mistake by a general of our own, as to event. The battle of Bridgewater was on the 25th July, 1819; it commenced about the close of the day, but after three or four hours, the com- batants not being able to distinguish friend from foe, in the dark, the firing ceased on both sides, and, as it were by concert, at the same moment. For the numbers engaged, and the time it lasted, sel^ 13 dom a more well fought little fight. The British fell back to collect and form anew, and wait for the dawn, to advance again ; which they did, and, finding none to oppose them, took peaceable posses- sion of the ground, and of the cannon they lost the preceding evening. Our troops returned to their en- campment on the Niagara, where they arrived about 12 o'clock at NIGHT. The General's report of the battle is dated a fortnight thereafter, by which time, it would seem, he had conceived it to have issued in victory. His words are, " As I was retiring from the field, I saw mid felt that the victory was complete on our part, if proper measures were promptly adopt- ed to secure it," The improvement of these three# several instances of mistake is, that when to relate as from our own testimony,'* there is nothing like the time and place prese7it,^^ lest, by waiting, our memo- ry should either, not serve us to remember all, or serve us overmuch, and so remember more than all. The narrative winds up, " that the world has since *' gone prosperously with Leslie, and that his life *' has been a happy one ;" but, referring to the meeting when the regale of strawberries and cream, *' that he never afterwards experienced a moment of " such unutterable felicity." Ought not Mr. Irving, according to true drama, to have left him in the cottage ? — If the heroes and heroines, who die on the stage, were all brought back to life, would not the tragedy, as to its effect to " toake the soul, and mend the heart," be entire- u Ij spoiled by it? — At the same time, for the sake, of verisimilitude in the fiction, it is perhaps as well the narrative should end as it does ; it being un- doubiedly according to the usual or natural course of things, for one in business^ and especially if embark- ed in speculations, and whether large or not, or he a fortune or not, quite immaterial, lo fail, and give up, and sell off, and again, and within less time than from the crescent to the full orb, in credit, and cash, and as busy, and prosperous, as ever. In truth, and in a sense, a speculator never fails. Insolvency and not a failure, however in terms, not always a contra- diction in fact. Direful the stroke indeed if not a ^bre of the root left, as having escaped untouched, to nourish the stock for the shattered boughs to shoot forth anew ! The speculator of our own age, emphatically so, Napoleon Bonaparte, an instance in point. — He has failed four times. — The third time he took the beyie- fit of the act, and went to Elba. — The fourth time, the period of his career was short ; scarce beyond the usual bank credit ; and he is now within the limits in St. Helena; and notwithstanding he each time went off, leaving his indorsers in the lurch, it is surmised he has friends, cherishing a hope he may yet be liberated, and ready again to trust him ; so that it is difficult to pronounce definitively even as to him. 15 A little Narrative of my own. I was lately at tea, on an invitation from a family where I visit — the party not numerous ; and the ar- ticle, THE WIFE, becoming a subject of the conver- sation, during the evening, one of the ladies, Mrs. A., repeated the passage from the simile, and which, as I understood, she had committed to memory for the beauty of it : — " Woman, the stay and solace of ** man, when smitten with sudden calamity ? 'wind- " ing herself into the rugged recesses ol* his nature ; " tenderly supporting the drooping head, and bind- " ing up the broken heart ;" and, addressing herself to Mrs. B., asked her what she thought of it, and whether it was not beautiful ? Mrs. B., avoiding a direct answer, expressed herself, " I like taste and *' style, as far as I can judge of it, as well as others ; " but when I read, I look for something more, and " which I am sure 1 will not find if I do not under- " stand what I do read. I have a husband ; no wo- " man ever had a better ; and my fear is that I am " not thankful enough for him ; and should misfor- " tunes overtake him, I hope it will be given to me " to know I am to bear a full share of them ; in ** sickness, these hands, and no others, shall support " his drooping head ; but how am I to understand *' that he has recesses in his nature, and that they " aie rugged, and that I am to wind myself into " them ; indeed, and after all, Mr. Irving may write *' very beautifully and very movingly about it, still " I make it a query, whether one never married can 16 " know any more of the love between husband and- " wife, than, as they sometimes say, one born blind " can of colours ? — " Does it occur to you, madam, " replied Mrs. C, that the famous Doctor Saunder- " son, though blind from the first year from his " birth, lectured on light." " True," rejoined Mrs. D., the widow of a College Professor ; " but then it " was, as my husband would say, for 1 remember " his very words, scientifically or aritjicially only, " and not as ever having cfijoyed vision." — Here the discussion ended. FINIS. ^ I / ^ / A ¥'- ] ,!->'^ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 016 117 720 9