Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories Read Free

style. While he knew that The Sketch Book was going to be popular, his assessment of the new work was mixed. On the whole he seemed to prefer Irving’s earlier writings. American literature, he believed, had needed the wit and humor of Salmagundi and Knickerbocker to counteract its excessive earnestness, a quality derived from the nation’s “being rather raw in authorship” and thus fearful of being adjudged coarse and undignified. Dana discerned an admirable naturalness and freedom in the youthful Irving but found The Sketch Book a bit too “dressy,” too “elegant,” slightly artificial or foreign.
    Dana’s strictures on Irving’s new style take on added significance in the context of a debate that had been in progress in the United States for at least two decades, a disagreement related to American sensitivity to British criticism. With the American Revolution had come a conviction that the new nation ought to have a literature commensurate with its lofty political ideals. But the early results, particularly in belles lettres, disappointed many. In A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), for instance, the Reverend Samuel Miller of New York asserted that American writings were “in general, less learned, instructive, and elegant than are found in Great-Britain and some of the more enlightened nations on the Eastern continent.” The causes were not hard to find, he maintained: American institutions of higher education were inferior; there was no system of patronage to provide authors with financial support and the leisure to write; the “spirit of our people is commercial” ; and, “still connected with [Britain] by the ties of language, manners, taste, and commercial intercourse,” Americans were inclined to consider “her literature ... as ours.” All in all, Miller found that Americans had few incentives to encourage the work of native writers.
    Many American readers accepted British literary standards and consequently their own cultural inferiority. There were occasional complaints, however, on both sides of the Atlantic that American literature was insuf ficiently distinguishable in subject or style from English literature. In the United States these complaints increased noticeably after the War of 1812, especially in the pages of the North American Review, founded in Boston in 1815. Giving voice to a romantically oriented and more sophisticated form of literary nationalism, the new journal criticized American writers for undue subservience to the classics. Edward Tyrell Channing, for instance, declared in 1816 that war inevitably exists between individual genius and “rules for versification, laws of taste, books of practical criticism, and approved standards of language.” He urged writers to keep faith with their own thoughts and feelings instead of imitating approved models. Obviously congruent with the democratic ethos, Channing’s doctrine of aesthetic freedom and self-reliance was to begin to exert a strong influence on American literature after 1830, in the era of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.
    There is undoubtedly some validity to Dana’s complaints about Irving’s style. We need look no further than the third paragraph of “The Author’s Account of Himself,” where we find Crayon rhythmically extolling America’s “mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains with their bright aerial tints; her valleys teeming with wild fertility”—and so on and on. For all their glitter, these hackneyed generalities fail to convey a sense that the writer has had close encounters with the American wilderness. Such overwriting in the earlier Irving would almost certainly have signaled parody.
    But “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” give us all the proof we need that Irving was perfectly capable of depicting American landscapes in such a way as to