On the whole he seemed to prefer Irving’s earlier writings. American literature, he believed, had needed the wit and humor of Salmagundi and Knickerbocker to counteract its excessive earnestness, a quality derived from the nation’s “being rather raw in authorship” and thus fearful of being adjudged coarse and undignified. Dana discerned an admirable naturalness and freedom in the youthful Irving but found The Sketch Book a bit too “dressy,” too “elegant,” slightly artificial or foreign.

Dana’s strictures on Irving’s new style take on added significance in the context of a debate that had been in progress in the United States for at least two decades, a disagreement related to American sensitivity to British criticism. With the American Revolution had come a conviction that the new nation ought to have a literature commensurate with its lofty political ideals. But the early results, particularly in belles lettres, disappointed many. In A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), for instance, the Reverend Samuel Miller of New York asserted that American writings were “in general, less learned, instructive, and elegant than are found in Great-Britain and some of the more enlightened nations on the Eastern continent.” The causes were not hard to find, he maintained: American institutions of higher education were inferior; there was no system of patronage to provide authors with financial support and the leisure to write; the “spirit of our people is commercial”; and, “still connected with [Britain] by the ties of language, manners, taste, and commercial intercourse,” Americans were inclined to consider “her literature ... as ours.” All in all, Miller found that Americans had few incentives to encourage the work of native writers.

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.