He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of our
literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, "Who reads an American
book?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vivid
writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be read;
but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very high.
There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as works of
creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike in wealth of
color and humor, in pathos and dramatic action.
Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But they
have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not the
rather attenuated story of Irving, which--as far as the twenty years of
sleep went--was borrowed from an old German legend.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with
Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twain
did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach than
Irving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of
insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor of Sir Roger
de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's is
his own--American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful of
Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak of
Irving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain and
Bret Harte as American literature's most conspicuous and original modern
examples.
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