Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page B

whatever is suggested by objects before me, or whatever rises in my imagination; and hope to write better and more copiously by and by (Irving, The Complete Works of Washington Irving, vol. 8, p. 5).
    What is remarkable about this retrospective account of his correspondence with Scott is the extent to which Irving identified as his own character traits he attributed to Geoffrey Crayon, the narrative persona he constructed for The Sketch-Book. In “The Author’s Account of Himself,” Irving describes how he spent the “holiday afternoons” of his youth “in rambles about the surrounding country [making himself] familiar with all its places famous in history or fable [and] neglect[ing] the regular exercises of the school” (pp. 49-50). These idle, romantic habits informed his peculiar narrative perspective, that of an outside observer of “the shifting scenes of life.”
    In describing this point of view, Irving presents writing as an activity that affords an aesthetic pleasure akin to travel or to shopping for prints.
    I have wandered through different countries, and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher; but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-shop to another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape (p. 51).
    More than a simple pun on the title of his book, this description exemplifies a significant shift in the public conception of reading. The subjects of his sketches are not meant to illustrate ethical norms for citizenship. They are meant to provide some distraction and relief from the pressures and anxieties of modern, professional life. Literature had become a leisure activity rather than a moral exercise in character formation.
    If Geoffrey Crayon is a self-portrait, then Irving clearly thought of himself as a romantic writer recording his unique impressions with little regard for instructing readers in the political or moral truths of the moment. In so doing, he assumed a narrative persona that Nathaniel Hawthorne later imitated when he wrote in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, “I am a citizen of somewhere else” (Hawthorne, vol. 1, p. 44). Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon inaugurated a literary tradition of interiority and introspection that led subsequent writers such as Henry David Thoreau to declare that the true American frontier was to be found within each individual’s experience. “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south,” Thoreau wrote in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “[they are] wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor.... Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT” (Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, pp. 323-324). Irving’s insistence that literature was a species of imaginative entertainment rather than a means of moral or political instruction helped usher in a new conception of artistry that contributed to the formation of an American literary culture conducive to democratic individualism.
    Irving grew up in a post-Revolutionary America torn between its democratic aspirations for the future and its memories of the colonial era. During his boyhood, British sympathizers lived next door to veterans of the Continental army. Memories of the hardships endured while quartering British troops during the occupation of New York were mixed with frustration over financial losses incurred from the severing of ties with Great Britain. The War of 1812, often referred to as the Second War of American Independence, rekindled and put to rest some of these memories, but the early republic continued to be haunted by its British colonial past. The story “Rip Van Winkle” wonderfully illustrates Irving’s strategy for putting these ghosts to rest. Set in