A recent anonymous writer has said that most of the writing of our day is characterized by an intellectual strain.  I have no doubt that this will appear to be the case to the next generation.  It is a strain to say something new even at the risk of paradox, or to say something in a new way at the risk of obscurity.  From this Irving was entirely free.  There is no visible straining to attract attention.  His mood is calm and unexaggerated.  Even in some of his pathos, which is open to the suspicion of being “literary,” there is no literary exaggeration.  He seems always writing from an internal calm, which is the necessary condition of his production.  If he wins at all by his style, by his humor, by his portraiture of scenes or of character, it is by a gentle force, like that of the sun in spring.  There are many men now living, or recently dead, intellectual prodigies, who have stimulated thought, or upset opinions, created mental eras, to whom Irving stands hardly in as fair a relation as Goldsmith to Johnson.  What verdict the next generation will put upon their achievements I do not know; but it is safe to say that their position and that of Irving as well will depend largely upon the affirmation or the reversal of their views of life and their judgments of character.  I think the calm work of Irving will stand when much of the more startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual achievement of this age has passed away.

And this leads me to speak of Irving’s moral quality, which I cannot bring myself to exclude from a literary estimate, even in the face of the current gospel of art for art’s sake.  There is something that made Scott and Irving personally loved by the millions of their readers, who had only the dimmest ideas of their personality.  This was some quality perceived in what they wrote.  Each one can define it for himself; there it is, and I do not see why it is not as integral a part of the authors —­an element in the estimate of their future position—­as what we term their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, or their art.  However you rate it, you cannot account for Irving’s influence in the world without it.  In his tender tribute to Irving, the great-hearted Thackeray, who saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere literary art in the sum total of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to Lockhart,—­“Be a good man, my dear.”  We know well enough that the great author of “The Newcomes” and the great author of “The Heart of Midlothian” recognized the abiding value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith.  These are beneficences; and Irving’s literature, walk round it and measure it by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature.  The author loved good women and little children and a pure life; he had faith in his fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any subservience to the highest; he retained a belief in the possibility of chivalrous actions, and did not care to envelop them in a cynical suspicion; he was an author still capable of an enthusiasm.  His books are wholesome, full of sweetness and charm, of humor without any sting, of amusement without any stain; and their more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry nor pretension.