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 language to the images and
ideas which Irving desired to convey.
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