Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories Read Free Page A

create for the reader an illusion of being there—in the Catskills or on the bank of the Hudson. Or for a quick indication of this scenic talent, one can turn to the first several paragraphs of “The Angler,” in which Crayon recalls boyhood fishing expeditions with his friends and in his quiet playful way demonstrates why the “piscatory tactics” recommended by Izaak Waltbn for “the velvet margins of quiet English rivulets” will not work on a rocky American mountain stream.
    Irving’s strengths as a writer were in humor and narrative. When he abandoned them, he risked trouble. He was not a very good essayist or moralizer. His thought is liveliest when it questions attitudes, doubts illusions, deflates pretensions—his own among them. At the same time the high authority of English taste in early nineteenth-century American culture obviously made him uneasy. In a prefatory “Advertisement” to the first English edition of The Sketch Book (see Appendix B), he claimed that he had originally intended not to publish it in England, giving as a major reason the “austerity” of “British critics” towards American writers. And in a far more remarkable admission in “L’Envoy,” the book’s final word (not a part of the original American edition), Crayon exposes his anxiety about “appearing before a public which ... from childhood” he has regarded “with the highest feelings of reverence.” That public of course is the British audience, fear of which, he admits, has heretofore undermined his self-confidence and stifled his creativity.
    Clearly the doctrine of America’s cultural dependency on England made sense to Irving. He has Crayon speak eloquently and cogently on the subject in the following passage from “English Writers on America,” one of the best known selections from The Sketch Book:
    We are a young people, necessarily an imitative one, and must take our examples and models, in a great degree, from the existing nations of Europe. There is no country more worthy of our study than England. The spirit of her constitution is most analogous to ours. The manners of her people,—their intellectual activity—their freedom of opinion—their habits of thinking on those subjects which concern the dearest interests and most sacred charities of private life, are all congenial to the American character....
    â€œEnglish Writers on America” first appeared in the second number of the American Sketch Book, before an English edition was contemplated. But Irving clearly knew that the essay would be read in England. By confronting the touchy issue of British condescension toward America and the consequent American resentment, he sought to play the apostle of good feelings—it was that “era”—between the two peoples, balancing criticism and praise for both sides. That he was not entirely comfortable doing so is suggested by the fact that at times his prose again rings slightly false.
    Whatever his uneasiness, however, most of the writing of The Sketch Book seems clear, uncomplicated, vivid, and relaxed when it is compared with the ponderousness that characterized much American prose in his time—the essays of The North American Review, for instance, or the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown or James Fenimore Cooper. It is not difficult to understand why selections from The Sketch Book were used as models of style in nineteenth-century American schoolrooms. Irving prided himself on being a stylist. The modem editor of The Sketch Book, Haskell Springer, tells us that in revising the text for the first English edition, Irving reworded and rephrased numerous passages in response to criticism, including specifically several passages singled out by Dana as marred by mixed metaphor.
    In addition he made several structural changes, the most important perhaps being to move “Westminster Abbey” from