་ Art of Book-Making, are fantasies, playful in mood, with a deeper undertone. When Irving employs satire, he always modifies it with gentleness. In his jests on authors he is usually willing to turn the joke against himself. In his allusions to scholarship he is hardly so fair, not because he says an unfair word, but because he leaves part of the truth unsaid. He himself loved to burrow in old books now and then, but not with scholarly intent, not with determination to master the lore of the past. Apart from the type of parasitic author portrayed in the BookMaking, apart from Irving's own type of pleasant taster of past learning, there exists the whole class of faithful scholars who by indefatigable research have reconstructed for us much of the past and have made it human again and inspiring. But Irving's small sin of omission need not be charged heavily against him, for he himself has made parts of the past live again; and in these essays has brightly made fun of pedantry and presumption. The Stratford-on-Avon essay also preserves a beautiful memory for us, not the memory of Shakespeare, which needs no preservation, but the memory of the little town itself. To-day its simplicity and gentle isolation has almost been banished by the swarms of tourists, many of whom come, one fears, less to pay tribute to the poet than to credit their own account with one more famous place "done." It is a curious speculation to think that Irving, seeking to restore in his own mind a past, portrayed for us the then present, which is now itself so much the past, that we must seek to restore it through such essays as this. Irving tried to see the Avon of Shakespeare rather than the Avon of his own day; for us, it is hard enough to see the Avon of Irving's time. It is not that the town has been modernized, or the lovely surrounding country affected, but that many of the Shakespeare associations have been used for their full commercial worth, advertised, as it were, to draw strangers. One would not belittle the real and often intense interest that makes Shakespeare's town an object of pilgrimage, nor can one blame the residents for making money out of the accident that a great poet was born and buried there three centuries ago. One only feels pained, for instance, that Irving's reverential description of the church no longer holds good: one sometimes may rub his eyes and wonder whether he is in a church or a railway station, so many are the staring, unchurchlike notices put up by the ecclesiastical authorities, so many are the swiftly passing tourists who come to see, see quickly, and pass out gaily to look at some other attraction. When it comes the turn of the younger readers of this book to stand at Shakespeare's tomb, it is commended to them that they keep in their hearts something of Irving's fine spirit, – a touch of reverence. The Angler is an essay too self-explanatory to need any interpretation or much comment. Irving gives us here, amiably and not without a touch of slyness, the experience of many and many a lover of English literature who has been beguiled by his delight in Izaak Walton in his study, to try to become a practical disciple of that "compleat angler" at the brook-side. To Walton's volume, which is of that class of books that no one likes merely halfway, a book that wholly charms you, but only if you surrender yourself to its charm,—to this book Irving does courteous justice, passing from the account of the manufactured angler to the angler born. The two remaining papers are discursively narrated stories, just as the other papers are discursively written essays. We are not hurried through a sequence of events; we pleasantly ramble from one incident to another. A sense of looseness of construction is averted by a style that keeps in the proper key, effecting thus a unity for the narrative. The Sleepy Hollow Legend is outranked by the Rip Van Winkle because of two reasons, neither of which is a matter resting wholly on the writer's skill. The first reason is that the material, the subject, of the latter legend is in itself more striking than the other: Ichabod Crane's adventure pales before Rip Van Winkle's. The second reason is that for generation after generation of Americans, Rip Van Winkle in dramatic form has been made a delight through the perfect acting of Joseph Jefferson in the title rôle. It will be many a day before the tradition of his presentation, full of a charm and colour and buoyant humour, passes out of memory. And meanwhile, through the help of an actor, an author's story has become a household word. Here, then, follow the pages of Irving for you to read with that fair-minded receptiveness to anything good, that is the beginning of a liberal education. THE SKETCH-BOOK-3 THE VOYAGE Ships, ships, I will descrie you Amidst the main, I will come and try you, And projecting, What's your end and aim. One goes abroad for merchandise and trading, Another stays to keep his country from invading, -OLD POEM. 5 IO To an American visiting Europe, the long voyage he has to make is an excellent preparative. The temporary absence of worldly scenes and employments produces a state of mind peculiarly fitted to receive new and vivid 15 impressions. The vast space of waters that separates the hemispheres is like a blank page in existence. There is no gradual transition, by which, as in Europe, the features and population of one country blend almost imperceptibly with those of another. From the moment you lose sight 20 of the land you have left, all is vacancy until you step on the opposite shore, and are launched at once into the bustle and novelties of another world. In travelling by land there is a continuity of scene and a connected succession of persons and incidents, that 25 |