Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories Read Free Page B

near the end to the middle of the book. He added three new selections to the second volume, including reworked versions of “Traits of English Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket,” originally written for The Analectic Magazine several years earlier. And he rearranged many of the other sketches and stories in the second volume. Thus, except for the brief “L’Envoy,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” now concludes the book. The first English edition is basically The Sketch Book we know today, even though Irving made a final revision in 1848, inserting two more sketches, “A Sunday in London” and “London Antiques,” both apparently at least partially drafted thirty years earlier.
    What Irving had when he was finished was a book with broad popular appeal that could also claim the attention of more serious readers. He had discovered popular culture for American (and perhaps English) literature and brought the two together in the uneasy relationship that has existed between them ever since. That is, he discovered a growing middle-class audience, able to read, curious about art and fashion, eager for information and entertainment, craving novelty and emotional stimulation, prepared to pay good money for an attractive product. What it did not want was an undue taxing of its intellectual faculties or an open challenge to its basic values. It was in this market that American writers would henceforth chiefly support themselves—the alternative, in the absence of patronage, being literature as an avocation. American printers, publishers, and booksellers, including some who doubled as hack writers, had made sizable profits from this trade earlier, but not writers with serious literary pretensions. The larger meaning of Irving’s success was that it blurred for good the distinction between the fine art and the business of literature in the United States.
    That he was in England when he wrote The Sketch Book, that a good deal of it is about England, and that it was highly praised by British critics helped enormously to sell it. For although his American readers increasingly defined their society as new, democratic, liberated from an oppressive past, they were nonetheless curious about the theoretically repudiated old world. As Crayon says, speaking in “The Author’s Account of Himself” of his own early desire to go abroad,
    ... Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical association. There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement—to tread as it were in the footsteps of antiquity—to loiter about the ruined castle—to meditate on the falling tower—to escape in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past.
    Here one touches America’s half-secret longing for knowledge of its counterself, of exactly what it professes not to be. Crayon will in due course offer much that is calculated to satisfy that longing. But readers may note a certain irony in the latter part of the passage just quoted. One suspects that in the heightened rhetoric of the long final sentence Crayon is slightly mocking his own interest in the past as a bit lugubrious, a not entirely healthy appetite for an up-to-date American.
    As he goes on in the next paragraph to speak of his “earnest desire to see the great men of the earth,” his facetiousness becomes fully obvious:
    ... I had read in the works of various philosophers, that all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore be as