h a glance at the shelf containing Irving's books suggests but
little of that personal quality to which he owes his significance as
an interpreter of America to the Old World. This son of a narrow, hard,
Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter about town when New York was
only a big slovenly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire and
sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood and youth were passed in
that period of Post-Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United
States in some of its most unlovely aspects. Historians like Henry
Adams and McMaster have painted in detail the low estate of education,
religion, and art as the new century began. The bitter feeling of the
nascent nation toward Great Britain was intensified by the War of 1812.
The Napoleonic Wars had threatened to break the last threads of our
friendship for France, and suspicion of the Holy Alliance led to an era
of national self-assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only one
expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West seemed to be gaining upon
the older civilizations represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The
self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine American. And at this
moment came forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of
perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt
that they ought to know one another better and to like one another more.
That was Irving's service as an international mediator. He diffused
sweetness and light in an era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It
was a triumph of character as well as of literary skill.

But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of
the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is
rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the
conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and
Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles
Lamb. Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles
Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise.
It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite
modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and
sound style upon fresh American material. In "Rip van Winkle" and "The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow" he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson,
and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the
exquisite fitness of the lan