Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the idiosyncrasies, of his small genus.  I mean that he regarded life not from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic, the metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the literary point of view.  He belongs to that small class of which Johnson and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America has added very few.  The literary point of view is taken by few in any generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the pressure of all the complex interests of life, and it may even seem trivial amid the tremendous energies applied to immediate affairs; but it is the point of view that endures; if its creations do not mold human life, like the Roman law, they remain to charm and civilize, like the poems of Horace.  You must not ask more of them than that.  This attitude toward life is defensible on the highest grounds.  A man with Irving’s gifts has the right to take the position of an observer and describer, and not to be called on for a more active participation in affairs than he chooses to take.  He is doing the world the highest service of which he is capable, and the most enduring it can receive from any man.  It is not a question whether the work of the literary man is higher than that of the reformer or the statesman; it is a distinct work, and is justified by the result, even when the work is that of the humorist only.  We recognize this in the case of the poet.  Although Goethe has been reproached for his lack of sympathy with the liberalizing movement of his day (as if his novels were quieting social influences), it is felt by this generation that the author of “Faust” needs no apology that he did not spend his energies in the effervescing politics of the German states.  I mean, that while we may like or dislike the man for his sympathy or want of sympathy, we concede to the author the right of his attitude; if Goethe had not assumed freedom from moral responsibility, I suppose that criticism of his aloofness would long ago have ceased.  Irving did not lack sympathy with humanity in the concrete; it colored whatever he wrote.  But he regarded the politics of his own country, the revolutions in France, the long struggle in Spain, without heat; and he held aloof from projects of agitation and reform, and maintained the attitude of an observer, regarding the life about him from the point of view of the literary artist, as he was justified in doing.

Irving had the defects of his peculiar genius, and these have no doubt helped to fix upon him the complimentary disparagement of “genial.”  He was not aggressive; in his nature he was wholly unpartisan, and full of lenient charity; and I suspect that his kindly regard of the world, although returned with kindly liking, cost him something of that respect for sturdiness and force which men feel for writers who flout them as fools in the main.  Like Scott,