Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (70 page)

I beg you to accept my best thanks for the uncommon degree of entertainment which I have received from the most excellently jocose history of New York. I am sensible that as a stranger to American parties and politics I must lose much of the conceald satire of the piece but I must own I have never read anything so closely resembling the stile of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests and our sides have been absolutely tense with laughing. I think too, there are passages which indicate that the author possesses powers of a different kind & has some touches which remind me much of Sterne. I beg you will have the kindness to let me know when Mr. [Irving] take[s] pen in hand again for assuredly I shall expect a very great treat which I may chance never to hear of but through your kindness.

—from a letter to Henry Brevoort (April 23, 1813)

 

Mr. Irving is by birth an American, and has, as it were,
skimmed the cream,
and taken off patterns with great skill and cleverness, from our best-known and happiest writers, so that their thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his page, and smile upon us from another hemisphere, like ‘the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow.’ He succeeds to our admiration and our sympathy by a sort of prescriptive title and traditional privilege ...

Mr. Washington Irving’s acquaintance with English literature begins almost where Mr. Lamb’s ends,—with the
Spectator,
Tom Brown’s works and the wits of Queen Anne. He is not bottomed in our elder writers, nor do we think he has tasked his own faculties much, at least on English ground. Of the merit of his
Knickerbocker
and New York stories we cannot pretend to judge. But in his
Sketch-book
and
Bracebridge-Hall
he gives us very good American copies of our British Essayists and Novelists, which may be very well on the other side of the water, or as proofs of the capabilities of the national genius, but which might be dispensed with here, where we have to boast of the originals. Not only Mr. Irving’s language is with great taste and felicity modelled on that of Addison, Goldsmith, Sterne, or Mackenzie: but the thoughts and sentiments are taken at the rebound, and, as they are brought forward at the present period, want both freshness and probability...

Mr. Irving’s writings are literary
anachronisms.

—from
The Spirit of the Age
(1825)

 

There is no living writer, and there are very few among the dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with everything you have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say so. If you could know how earnestly I write this, you would be glad to read it—as I hope you will be, faintly guessing at the warmth of the hand I autobiographically hold out to you over the broad Atlantic.

—from a letter to Washington Irving (1842)

 

The
Spectator,
Mr. Irving, and Mr. Hawthorne have in common that tranquil and subdued manner which we have chosen to denominate
repose;
but, in the case of the two former, this repose is attained rather by the absence of novel combination, or of originality, than otherwise, and consists chiefly in the calm, quiet, unostentatious expression of commonplace thoughts, in an unambitious, unadulterated Saxon. In them, by strong effort, we are made to conceive the absence of all.

—from
Graham’s Magazine
(May 1842)

 

The “Sketch Book,” and the two succeeding works of Irving, “Bracebridge Hall” and the “Tales of a Traveller,” abound with agreeable pictures of English life, seen under favorable lights and sketched with a friendly pencil. Let me say here, that it was not to pay court to the English that he thus described them and their country; it was because he could not describe them otherwise. It was the instinct of his mind to attach itself to the contemplation of the good and the beautiful, wherever he found them, and to turn away from the sight of what was evil, misshapen and hateful. His was not a nature to pry for faults, or disabuse the world of good-natured mistakes; he looked for virtue, love and truth among men, and thanked God that he found them in such large measure. If there are touches of satire in his writings, he is the best natured and most amiable of satirists, amiable beyond Horace; and in his irony—for there is a vein of playful irony running through many of his works—there is no tinge of bitterness.

—from “A Discourse on the Life, Character and Genius of Washington Irving” (1860)

 

Was Irving not good, and, of his works, was not his life the best part? In his family, gentle, generous, good-humoured, affectionate, self-denying: in society, a delightful example of complete gentleman-hood; quite unspoiled by prosperity; never obsequious to the great (or, worse still, to the base and mean, as some public men are forced to be in his and other countries); eager to acknowledge every contemporary’s merit; always kind and affable to the young members of his calling: in his professional bargains and mercantile dealings delicately honest and grateful; one of the most charming masters of our lighter language; the constant friend to us and our nation; to men of letters doubly dear, not for his wit and genius merely, but as an exemplar of goodness, probity, and pure life.

—from
Cornhill Magazine
(January 1860)

 

It is in the
Sketch-Book
that Irving first appeals to us as a torchbearer in the great procession of English prose-writers. In
Knickerbocker
he had been dancing or skipping in the lightness of his heart to a delicious measure of his own; in
Salmagundi
he had waked up to a sense of literary responsibility, without quite knowing in what direction his new-found sense of style would lead him. In the
Sketch-Book
he is a finished and classic writer, bowing to the great tradition of English prose, and knowing precisely what it is that he would do, and how to do it. He sustains this easy mastery of manner through his next book,
Bracebridge Hall,
and then, if he wrote no less well in future, the voice at least had become familiar, and the peculiar wonder and delight with which his age received him faded into a common pleasure. The
Sketch-Book
and
Bracebridge Hall,
then, remain the bright original stars in this gracious constellation.

—from
Critic
(March 31, 1883)

 

The “revival” of American literature in New York differed much in character from its revival in New England. In New York it was purely human in tone; in New England it was a little superhuman in tone. In New England they feared the devil; in New York they dared the devil; and the greatest and most original literary dare-devil in New York was a young gentleman of a good family, whose “schooling” ended with his sixteenth year, who had rambled much about the island of Manhattan, who had in his saunterings gleaned and brooded over many Dutch legends of an elder time, who had read much but had studied little, who possessed fine observation, quick intelligence, a genial disposition, and an indolently original genius in detecting the ludicrous side of things, and whose name was Washington Irving. After some preliminary essays in humorous literature his genius arrived at the age of indiscretion, and he produced at the age of twenty-six the most deliciously audacious work of humor in our literature, namely, The
History of New York,
by Diedrich Knickerbocker. It is said of some reformers that they have not only opinions, but the courage of their opinions. It may be said of Irving that he not only caricatured, but had the courage of his caricatures. The persons whom he covered with ridicule were the ancestors of the leading families of New York, and these families prided themselves on their descent. After the publication of such a book he could hardly enter the “best society” of New York, to which he naturally belonged, without running the risk of being insulted, especially by the elderly women of fashion; but he conquered their prejudices by the same grace and geniality of manner, by the same unmistakable tokens that he was an inborn gentleman, through which he afterward won his way into the first society of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Still, the promise of Knickerbocker was not fulfilled. That book, if considered as an imitation at all, was an imitation of Rabelais, or Swift, or of any author in any language who had shown an independence of all convention, who did not hesitate to commit indecorums, and who laughed at all the regalities of the world. The author lived long enough to be called a timid imitator of Addison and Goldsmith. In fact, he imitated nobody. His genius, at first riotous and unrestrained, became tamed and regulated by a larger intercourse with the world, by the saddening experience of life, and by the gradual development of some deep sentiments which held in check the audacities of his wit and humor. But even in the portions of
The Sketch-Book
relating to England it will be seen that his favorite authors belonged rather to the age of Elizabeth than to the age of Anne. In
Bracebridge Hall
there is one chapter called “The Rookery,” which in exquisitely poetic humor is hardly equalled by the best productions of the authors he is said to have made his models. That he possessed essential humor and pathos, is proved by the warm admiration he excited in such masters of humor and pathos as Scott and Dickens; and style is but a secondary consideration when it expresses vital qualities of genius. If he subordinated energy to elegance, he did it, not because he had the ignoble ambition to be ranked as “a fine writer,” but because he was free from ambition, equally ignoble, of simulating a passion which he did not feel. The period which elapsed between the publication of Knickerbocker’s history and
The Sketch-Book
was ten years. During this time his mind acquired the habit of tranquilly contemplating the objects which filled his imagination, and what it lost in spontaneous vigor it gained in sureness of insight and completeness of representation. “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” have not the humorous inspiration of some passages in

Knickerbocker, but perhaps they give more permanent delight, for the scenes and characters are so harmonized that they have the effect of a picture, in which all the parts combine to produce one charming whole. Besides, Irving is one of those exceptional authors who are regarded by their readers as personal friends, and the felicity of nature by which he obtained this distinction was expressed in that amenity, that amiability of tone, which some of his austere critics have called elegant feebleness.

—from
American Literature, and Other Papers
(1887)

1. Is there anything
American
about Irving’s writing other than the occasional settings and characters, anything in his spirit or sensibility or way of looking at things that strike you as typically American?

2. Analyze a typical passage of Irving’s prose. What’s good about it? What’s not so good?

3. Hazlitt writes that Irving’s writings are “literary
anachronisms.”
Poe pretty much agrees. Thackeray describes him as “one of the most charming masters of our lighter language.” Edwin Whipple describes “that amenity, that amiability of tone, which some of his austere critics have called elegant feebleness.” Is this condescension deserved? Or can Irving’s absence of bite or partisanship be evidence of great tolerance, or even an aloof philosophic perspective in which everything is understood and therefore forgiven?

4. In some of Irving’s tales there is what we might call a “spooky” or gothic dimension. Is this dimension the supernatural, or is the supernatural used as a metaphor for the psychological realm or for fear of the unknown?

Bell, Michael Davitt.
The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Irving, Pierre M.
The Life and Letters of Washington Irving.
4 vols., 1862-1864. 3 vols. New York: Putnam, 1973.

McClary, Ben, ed.
Washington Irving and the House of Murray: Geoffrey Crayon Charms the British,
1817-1856. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969.

McLamore, Richard V. “The Dutchman in the Attic: Claiming an Inheritance in
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.” American Literature
72 (March 2000), pp. 31-57.

Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey.
Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Tuttleton, James W., ed.
Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction.
New York: AMS
Press,
1993.

Wagenknecht, Edward.
Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.