Parson Weems has been remembered by generations of Americans only as the man —presumably a dust-dry, thin-lipped little pedant—who invented or at least popularized the most famous lie in U.S. history: the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. As revived by Van Wyck Brooks in The World of Washington Irving, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems appears to have been an attractive and useful citizen. A cheerful, ruddy-faced clergyman who had given up his parish to become a book agent (the Episcopal Church in the South was demoralized after the Revolution), Parson Weems for 31 years bounced over the early U.S. roads with his Jersey wagon loaded with good books. He carried a quill pen stuck in his hat, an inkhorn in his lapel, and his fiddle on the wagon seat beside him. "He stopped now and then at a pond or a stream to wash his shirt and take a bath, suspending his linen to dry on the frame of the wagon."
Parson Weems sold his books at fairs, races, sittings of county courts from New York to Georgia—between times "beating up the headquarters of all the good old planters and farmers . . . regardless of roads horrid and suns torrid." He sold Paradise Lost, The Vicar of Wakefield, Robinson Crusoe, Cook's Voyages, the works of Voltaire, Tom Paine and Bunyan and Bard's Compendium of Midwifery, which he touted as "the grand American Aristotle."
He also sold his own productions, which were bestsellers. Parson Weems wrote them at odd moments along the road—biographies of Washington, of Franklin, of Penn and—his best book—of General Francis Marion, the "little, smoke-dried, French-phizzed" Swamp Fox. They abounded in doubtful anecdotes, unblushing fabrications and factual errors, but they were also buoyant, impulsive, racy and full of the spirit of their subjects. After Washington's death Parson Weems wrote to his publisher: "Washington, you know, is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am nearly primed and cocked for 'em."
Thrill of Discovery. The World of Washington Irving, in which scores of such half-forgotten U.S. reputations are refurbished with vividness, discernment and charm, is the third published volume of Author Brooks's masterful study of the growth and character of the American mind. But chronologically, it is the first, dealing with the first 40 years of the last century. If & when the series is completed, The Flowering of New England, which appeared first (TIME, Aug. 24, 1936), will be No. 2; New England: Indian Summer (TIME, Aug. 19, 1940) will be No. 4; The World of Washington Irving, No. 1.
Hence, for any plain reader who may have been scared away by Author Brooks's reputation as the nation's most distinguished literary critic, Irving is an excellent place to begin his history. Van Wyck (rhymes with bike) Brooks is no mere dissector of dead tomes. In Irving, as in its two predecessors, the task which he has set himself is nothing less than to recreate the whole intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the period. Few Americans will read it without a thrill of discovery at learning how much more lively, vigorous and original an intellectual life the youthful U.S. enjoyed than previous apologetic, Europe-conscious historians have led the world to believe.