Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

by Washington Irving

  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 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....

  “English 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 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 superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was confirmed by observing the comparative importance and swelling magnitude of many English travellers among us; who, I was assured, were very little people in their own country.—I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.

  Crayon’s sly wit thus asserts itself at the very beginning; he is not going overboard in adulation of the old world. It is in such irony as this that he keeps his balance, retains his good sense while catering to popular tastes. And as easily as he mocks the affectations of others, Americans or Europeans, he makes fun of excesses to which he himself is prone—antiquarianism, for instance, or (see “The Spectre Bridegroom”) the sentimentalism which, as journals Irving kept while struggling with The Sketch Book show, plagued him in periods of depression and self-doubt.

  To reduce The Sketch Book to the testament of a crypto-aristocratic anglophile and political conservative, as is sometimes done, is to miss its finer points and misunderstand Crayon. His England is admittedly only touristic, the product of “idle humour” and “vagrant imagination,” something he half-laughs at himself for offering the reader. Fighting for his literary life, and fearful of British critics, Irving had no incentive to go far in exhibiting the harsh realities of contemporary English life, the hardships, social dislocations, and class conflicts being generated by the industrial revolution. But both he and Crayon know that their England is somewhat obsolete and idealized. Here and there we are made aware of the increasing restlessness not only of nouveaux riches capitalists but of people in the lower orders as well.

  Fundamentally, Irving all his life was a political moderate, variously a Democratic-Republican, Federalist, Democrat, and Whig. He obviously found appealing the sense of order, social harmony, and stability embodied in the trimly laid out English countryside and the survival of old customs and traditions. But Crayon’s gentle satire in the much revered Christmas sketches makes it quite clear that Squire Bracebridge—to say nothing of his parson—has somewhat lost himself in the English past and is out of touch with current reality. And Crayon obviously has fears of becoming an anachronism himself.

  Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., is not just a fancy name for Washington Irving, even if, as middle-aged, bachelor Americans in England, as writers and avid readers, they have roughly similar temperaments. In Crayon the shy, pensive, slightly melancholy, and sentimental side of Irving exaggerates itself and becomes a fictional character, allowing the author to modify his own experiences or create entirely fictitious ones—as when Crayon’s interest in old things leads him through narrow gateways and dark passages to momentarily frightening encounters with personages who seem oddities from a forgotten world.

  Crayon’s self-characterization begins with the title page epigraph taken from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. It encourages us to view him as solitary, a “mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures.” And there is self-mockery in his next epigraph, a few half-comic, half-pathetic lines from another old book, Euphues, by John Lyly, which precede “The Author’s Account of Himself” and compare the homeless traveler to a “snaile that crept out of her shel” and “was turned eftsoones into a Toad.” While Crayon in his traveling is not “transformed into so monstrous a shape,” fear that he might be is never quite laughed off.

  His homesickness is a part of “The Voyage,” which ends with his exclamation upon disembarking at Liverpool, “I alone was solitary and idle. I had no friend to meet, no cheering to receive. I stepped upon the land of my forefathers—but felt I was a stranger in the land.” And what he shows us of Liverpool (in “Roscoe”), a banker-author’s struggle for artistic self-realization in “the very market place of trade,” does not altogether cheer him. We do not know whether the next sketch, “The Wife,” takes place in England or the United States, but again, as in “Roscoe,” financial disaster and bankruptcy have to be faced. Temporarily forsaking his spectatorial role, Crayon intervenes directly to keep the newlyweds together, revealing himself a man of feeling and Irving a literary descendant of Sterne, whose Sentimental Journey casts a shadow over Crayon’s tour.

  Subsequently as he takes us through rural landscapes or out-of-the-way London neighborhoods, inspects ancient churches, castles, country houses, and libraries, we are almost always aware of Crayon’s presence. Generally he is alone. In the “nooks and corners and bye places” that he sketches, his contacts with human beings are fleeting. In “The Stage Coach,” before he is rescued for Christmas by Frank Bracebridge, he looks on wistfully as three boys, returning from school for the holidays, reach their destination, are reunited with their pet animals, and walk up the road “to a neat country seat, ” where their mother and sisters are waiting: “I leaned out of the coach window, in hopes of witnessing the happy meeting, but a grove of trees shut it from my sight.”

  In the immediately preceding sketch, walking by himself among the tombs in Westminster Abbey as the dusk gathers, Crayon has become aware of the interior of the church as a formidable emptiness, from beyond which the sounds of the outside world can scarcely be heard. This image comes too close for comfort to epitomizing his experience in general: not sufficiently anchored in the living world, he finds himself alone contemplating the dead. His sense of the past doubles as a sensitivity to the passing of time. Why else does he so often join passing funeral processions? Mutability is the shadow that walks beside him.

  The Sketch Book persistently hints at a story about Crayon that is never fully told. But we may perceive it in “the fluctuations of his own thoughts and feelings; sometimes treating of scenes before him; sometimes of others purely imaginary, and sometimes wandering back with his recollections to his native country.” These are Crayon’s own words about himself in his “Prospectus” for the original American edition of The Sketch Book (see Appendix A). In explaining what his “writings partake of,” he warns readers not to expect much coherence in the miscellany. Yet by presenting the apparently random sketches as reflective of the shifting “thoughts and feelings” of a particular personality, the warning ironically suggests underlying connections.

  Irving omitted the “Prospectus” from the finished book. But what makes it “finished” is the reader’s sense that in the first London edition Irving’s seemingly aimless association of ideas and impulses may finally have gotten Crayon somewhere. The story all along has hinted that his “vagrant” wandering in a foreign country is a quest of sorts. Irving has rearranged the book so that after the morbidity of “Westminster Abbey,” the emotional nadir for Crayon, feelings become decidedly more positive. The English sketches on the whole are lighter now, more humorous, giving the impression that Crayon is feeling less a stranger in John Bull’s “family mansion.” True, there is pathos in “The Pride of the Village” and tragedy in “Philip of Pokanoket.” But the latter, with “Traits of Indian Character,” helps pull the book back toward America near the end, strengthening the image of the new world, which both contrasts with and complements the old.

  If we take “Rip Van Winkle” a
nd “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as instances of Crayon’s “wandering back with his recollections to his native country,” then these stories become part of his story. And positioning “Sleepy Hollow” at the end of that story (except for “L’Envoy”) adds to its poignancy. Not that “Sleepy Hollow” cannot stand completely on its own, a self-contained fiction, needing no connection with the rest of the book to be perfectly satisfying. It is the book that is enhanced by the connection, not the reverse. The same is true of “Rip Van Winkle.” There are many ways of looking at these two stories besides what is offered in the next few paragraphs.

  Narrated by Diedrich Knickerbocker, though encountered in Crayon’s book, the stories suggest a kinship between the two personae. Knickerbocker is not the same writer in The Sketch Book as in A History of New York. His rambunctiousness has been laid aside; he is no longer primarily a parodist. Instead of exploding in words, he tells his stories in an easygoing, unpretentious, oddly humorous way. His diction is that of a well-educated person who feels no compulsion to prove it. Fond of colloquialisms, he tends to use elegant words and phrases ironically. That Crayon should turn to stories that he or someone with whom he is in touch has “found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker” suggests that there is a counterforce working in him, balancing the attractions of England. The Knickerbocker stories give us specifically realized landscapes with figures in them to whom we are brought much closer than we are in the English sketches. Human beings, relate to one another and to the physical environment more informally. The narrator is at home in the land.