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In like manner, the American writer found his way to the short story through the essay, and Irving is of very great significance as marking the clearest point of transition. The question may be fairly asked at this juncture: Why did not the in America lead to the novel as the characteristic form of American fiction, as it did in England? The answer is, I think, clear. It was partly a matter of temperament, and partly a matter of environment, though there is a necessary connection between the two. By temperament, the American who was a pioneer was impatient and restless. In general, as a writer he could not content himself with a literary form which demanded a long apprenticeship, much exhausting experimentation, and an uncertain public response. In like manner, as a reader, he would not concentrate willingly on a long piece of work, or respond to it with any great degree of sympathy, unless he was more or less vitally implicated in some immediate and pressing problem which it raised. Americans read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but they drew the line at Moby Dick. The American's environment was such that neither as a writer nor as a reader did he feel that he could afford the necessary leisure for conceiving and creating a

novel on the one hand, or for reading and digesting it on the other.

To the pioneer, leisure, perhaps of necessity, seems sinful. To devote one's life to literature is to confess oneself a weakling and to be despised. But the short story from a pioneer's point of view has the merit of being brief and of condensing emotion into a moment as it flies. It satisfies his gregariousness without affronting his conscience. It requires no leisure to grasp its point. It requires less leisure on the author's part than the novel to express his feeling. Moreover, it solves his own unconscious conflicts with a greater economy of energy and with greater apparent clarity and force. Its chance of survival and development in a pioneer civilization was infinitely greater than that of the novel, and to this day the short story is our characteristic literary form, and the novels we have produced are for the most part of insignificant literary value.

So much by way of introduction to Washington Irving. We have defined his historical place in the advance of the American short story as its real point of departure. Let us now examine his work more closely, and see how far it is of interest to us here. He was born in New York City in

1783 toward the close of the Revolution, and he died near Tarrytown, New York, in 1859 shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. His father was a Scotchman and a deacon in the Presbyterian church: his mother, an Englishwoman. As a boy, he suffered from the cold and severe discipline of his father, and we know that he had to seek the imaginative sustenance his nature craved by artifice and concealment. Such a boyhood explains the tendency of the man to banish harsh reality from his art. His mother, however, appears to have understood him. At the age of fifteen, he spent a summer holiday wandering alone in the Sleepy Hollow Region, and it is significant that Rip Van Winkle is, among other things, a tale of romantic escape from a scold. The Catskills represented such a romantic escape from a home and a harsh father, and the suppressed desires of the boy find fulfillment in the story written later by the man.

Irving had little formal schooling and his health was delicate. He studied law without enthusiasm, broke down physically, and traveled in Europe from 1804 to 1806. Returning home, he was admitted to the bar, but scarcely practiced. Soon after, he suffered severely from the loss of

Matilda Hoffman, whom he had hoped to marry. He never forgot this loss, though indications are not wanting that more than once in later years he had thoughts of marriage. His single life thus offers the second frustration to determine that impulse toward romantic escape which is the fundamental characteristic of his work.

His second sojourn in Europe began in 1815, and lasted for seventeen years, divided chiefly between England, France, and Spain. It is during this period that he published the three books which concern us here: The Sketch-Book (1819-20), Tales of a Traveler (1824), and The Alhambra (1832). He returned to America in 1832 for ten years, was American ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846, and spent the last thirteen years of his life in retirement, for the most part, at "Sunnyside," near Tarrytown, New York. His essays, biographies, and histories have no bearing on our subject.

From this brief outline of Irving's life, it will be seen at once that his work does not present such difficult psychological problems as that of Hawthorne or Poe. But we may perceive in his writings one significant fact, I think, which is usually ignored. He was in quiet revolt against the

American life of his time. I do not mean that his life in Europe denationalized him. While living in Spain, his letters show, on the contrary, that he was homesick for America. I mean that he foresaw the coming suppression of spiritual by material values in his own country and sought to stem that tide. Those critics who are actively questioning our own contemporary values, and who are disposed to find fault with him, would have had his sympathetic esteem and coöperation. Strain is not always a sign of intensity, he might have pointed out to them, but with their general thesis he would have had no quarrel. To those who say that Irving had no explicit message, we may reply that he had an implicit ideal. Colonel Newcome has something to tell us as well as Carlyle.

Irving's two best stories are Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and they both appear in The Sketch-Book. Coming to these stories after reading the work of his American predecessors, we perceive at once that Irving owes nothing to the style of his fellow countrymen. The influence, however, of Defoe, Goldsmith, Addison, and Steele are plain, though he has his eye fixed much more directly upon the object than

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