THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
WASHINGTON IRVING
As in painting it is not the huge canvas but the miniature which is most finished and delicate in detail, so in American fiction it is a short story of the simplest type, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which furnishes perhaps the choicest illustration of the perfection of literary handiwork.
The incidents of the tale are meager; the characters are very few. Ichabod Crane, the Yankee schoolmaster, is pretty much all. But with what a master hand are drawn the few lines that portray his grotesque personality! “He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small and flat on top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched on his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow escaped from a cornfield.”
In the matter of style, this little sketch is as near perfection as it is possible to come. The landscape pictures are so lifelike that the reader is flushed by the opulence of the autumn harvests “in which the birds were taking their farewell banquets,” or hushed by the calm brooding over the Tappan Zee, while the schoolmaster jogs along upon his ancient nag to lay siege to the heart and the inheritance of the fair Katrina Van Tassel. The crullers and doughnuts on the table of the Dutch farmer inspire an appetite in the reader almost as keen as that of the pedagogue; and the final catastrophe, when, after the rejection of his suit, the trembling Ichabod falls a victim to the Headless Horseman, overthrown by the pumpkin hurled from the hands of the irreverent Brom Bones, is a climax worthy of the humor of Cervantes himself. Indeed, there are strong grounds for believing that Don Quixote was the model of the lank pedagogue, who, whether he bestrides Gunpowder, or delves in the lore of ghosts and hobgoblins, or shakes himself to pieces in the dance, irresistibly calls to mind the peerless knight of La Mancha. But whether or not Irving borrowed the lay figure from another, he has moulded the cast upon it so perfectly that Ichabod is all his own.