Henry van Dyke

Henry Jackson van Dyke Jr. (10 November 1852 – 10 April 1933) was an American author, clergyman, educator, and diplomat who was one of the most popular and respected American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a man whose Christmas stories were read aloud in millions of households, whose nature essays celebrated the outdoor life of fishing, hiking, and contemplation with genuine literary skill, and whose criticism, sermons, and hymns made him a central figure in American cultural life during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He has since fallen into the obscurity that typically awaits writers whose virtues — moral earnestness, stylistic elegance, gentlemanly decorum — are the same qualities that cause subsequent generations to find them dull.

Life

Van Dyke was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, into a prominent Dutch Reformed family. His father was a clergyman, and Henry followed him into the ministry, graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1877 and serving as pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City from 1883 to 1899. He was an enormously popular preacher — eloquent, cultivated, and theologically moderate in an era of bitter denominational warfare. In 1899, he left the pulpit to become Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University, where he taught until 1923.

Van Dyke was also a public figure of considerable distinction. President Woodrow Wilson (his Princeton colleague) appointed him U.S. Minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1913, a post he held until 1916. He served as a Navy chaplain during World War I. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as its president.

The Story of the Other Wise Man (1895)

Van Dyke’s most famous work is a short story — more accurately a devotional tale — about Artaban, a fourth Magi who sets out to find the Christ child but is delayed by acts of mercy along the way. He spends thirty-three years searching, giving away his three gifts (a sapphire, a ruby, and a pearl) to help those in need, and finally arrives in Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion, where he dies and hears the voice of Christ: “Inasmuch as thou hast done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, thou hast done it unto me.”

The story was phenomenally popular. Van Dyke first told it as a sermon, then published it as a small book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into dozens of languages. It was adapted as a television film in 1985 starring Martin Sheen. For generations of American Christians, it was as much a part of Christmas as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Nature Writing

Van Dyke was a passionate fisherman and outdoorsman, and his nature essays — Little Rivers (1895), Fisherman’s Luck (1899), Days Off (1907) — describe the streams, forests, and mountains of the Adirondacks, the Canadian wilderness, and the American countryside with a gentlemanly lyricism that places him in the tradition of Izaak Walton and, later, Norman Maclean. Little Rivers is a minor classic of American nature writing — meditative, precise in its observation, and animated by a genuine love of wild places.

Literary Criticism

Van Dyke’s The Poetry of Tennyson (1889) was one of the first substantial critical studies of Tennyson published in America and remains a perceptive reading of the poet. He also wrote criticism on Browning, Wordsworth, and other Victorian poets. His critical writing is intelligent and well-crafted but conventional — he was a man of taste rather than a man of original critical theory.

Hymns

Van Dyke wrote the words to “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” (1907), set to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” which became one of the most widely sung hymns in the English-speaking world. It was featured prominently in the film Sister Act 2 (1993), which introduced it to a new generation. He also wrote the words to “Jesus, Thou Divine Companion,” a hymn of social Christianity.

Decline and Assessment

Van Dyke’s reputation collapsed after his death. The qualities that made him admired — his gentlemanly prose, his moral earnestness, his optimistic Christianity, his celebration of cultivated leisure — became precisely the qualities that the modernists rejected. He was too genial for the age of Hemingway, too pious for the age of Mencken, and too decorative for the age of Pound. His nature writing, his Christmas stories, and his hymns survive, but the rest of his large body of work is essentially unread.

This neglect is partly deserved — Van Dyke was not a writer of the first rank — but partly unjust. His best nature essays have a genuine quality of observation and a rhythmic prose that rewards reading, and The Story of the Other Wise Man remains a moving piece of devotional literature.

Collecting Van Dyke

Van Dyke’s books were published in handsome editions by Charles Scribner’s Sons, often with decorative bindings and illustrations. The Story of the Other Wise Man (1895) in first edition is the primary collectible, particularly in the earliest printings. Little Rivers (1895) and Fisherman’s Luck (1899) are sought by collectors of outdoor and angling literature. Signed copies exist but are not common.