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Addison and Steele. He has Defoe's verisimilitude of manner and Goldsmith's verisimilitude of visual rendering. The influence of Defoe does not appear to have been stressed hitherto, although it is well-known that Robinson Crusoe was a favorite book of his boyhood.

He has the "sense and sensibility" of Goldsmith, and also his gift of gentle satire.) George Saintsbury has remarked in his Peace of the Augustans that Goldsmith is inimitable, and has pointed out that Thackeray, who could write like Steele or like Horace Walpole, to take two very different contemporaries of Goldsmith, never attempted to imitate him. Well, Irving probably did not try to imitate him, but his sensitive and unconscious assimilation of Goldsmith's style, no doubt while reading The Vicar of Wakefield over and over again as a boy, accomplished the feat.

In later years, Irving was influenced by his friend Sir Walter Scott, but this influence is to be observed chiefly in the more deliberate direction of his interest toward the historic past, and for our purpose in this study it need not be further discussed, except to point out that it may have helped to determine the subject matter of the stories told in The Alhambra.

It has been the fashion of short story critics during the past few years to refer slightingly to Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and to claim that their technique is crude. One critic, for example, whose study of the American short story has been unusually careful and valuable, Professor Baldwin, has pointed out that a writer who was relating the story of Rip Van Winkle to-day "would begin with Rip's awakening, keep the action within one day by letting the previous twenty years transpire through Rip's own narrative at the new tavern, and culminate on the main disclosure.” 1 We might readily suppose that Euripides would have handled Hamlet in a similar manner. Such speculations are not only useless, but actually harmful. It is a necessary, but frequently forgotten, platitude of criticism that we must measure a writer's achievement by what he sets out to do, and govern our appreciation accordingly. We must not judge Irving's technique to be inferior because it is different from that of Kipling, or because it is earlier. Each kind of writing has great merit. The one has ease, and the other intensity. It is, of course, arguable that the ideal short story should have

1 American Short Stories, 1904, p. 8.

both qualities, but the historical fact remains that intensity and ease have not yet been fused into a masterpiece by a short story writer in any language.

Furthermore, the point may be made that Irving's characteristic qualities of restraint and quiet balance have the merit of forestalling any reaction against his subject. There is an unfortunate tendency nowadays, which may perhaps be regarded as an excess of virtue, to value a short story in so far as it gives us a shock of surprise. As I have said before, it is the stories to which we can return again and again with a sense of refreshment and familiar recognition that survive the day for which they were written. By this test Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow will outlast many changing literary fashions.

It is always well to view a writer in the midst of his contemporaries. When we compare Irving's stories with those which other American writers published between 1819 and 1832, we find that it was his sense of humor which saved him from their excesses, and his sense of proportion and balance which led him to fill in what they more or less entirely neglected. It is true that the plots of his two best short stories are

rather tenuous, but the virtuosity of his style confers substance upon that tenuity. He was conscious himself of the fact that his materials were delicate. "My writings may appear light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians," he writes to Brevoort on March 3, 1819. "But if they possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work. I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle and French-horn." In this ambition he succeeded perfectly, and the measure of his success is the felicity with which he balances romantic feeling and classic form.

The answer to those who dismiss Irving from American literature as a European man of letters is to point out that he was the first of our writers to furnish us with valuable American folk legends. In Rip Van Winkle, for example, he conferred upon the old German tale of the sleeping Friedrich Barbarossa a vividly realized American background, and so transmuted its substance into significant reality. It is now an integral part of our racial memory.

Such a sense of background as Irving possessed is not found elsewhere in our literature, despite its

excessive preoccupation with local color, except in the work of Hawthorne and Henry James. The typical American romantic, whether he is an artist or a business man, finds the setting of his dream landscape in the future. Washington Irving and Henry James found it in their "sense of the past." It is pardonable for us to picture them strolling arm in arm through the Elysian fields, conversing upon the England both men loved. If there is unconscious comedy in this picture, I do not think that Irving supplies it. I, for one, should be happy listening to their leisurely dialogue.

Irving's example was followed without distinction by various friends and disciples in America, and more happily in England by Mary Russell Mitford. The detailed history of his influence is of interest to none but the specialist. A few names, however, call for some passing comment before I proceed to discuss the work of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe.

John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870), who was a friend of Irving, reveals in his writings a graceful facility which rises at times to a certain quiet level of careful characterization. The episodic shetches of Swallow Barn (1832), which was published in the same year as The Alhambra,