There is an inexhaustible fund of humor in the story. The various excuses given by Schlemihl for the loss of his shadow are certainly grotesque. One was that when he was travelling in Russia it froze so hard that the shadow stuck to the ground; another that a rough man walked so rudely into the shadow that he tore a hole in it and it was sent out to be mended. Another excuse was that it disappeared during a long sickness, with the hair and nails of the hero, and while hair and nails had been restored, the shadow had never come back.
“Peter Schlemihl” is written in a charming style. The vocabulary and the diction are extremely simple. This is perhaps due to the fact that the book was intended for a child’s story, but still more, I think, to the fact that Chamisso being by birth a Frenchman, his diction has something in it of the clear and luminous character of French prose.
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.
IVANHOE
WALTER SCOTT
The novelist who puts the scene of his story in a place and a time far removed from his own has perhaps this advantage, that he offers to his reader scenes that have the charm of strangeness and novelty; but he suffers from a serious drawback,—he can never interpret the thoughts and conduct of his characters with the same truthfulness, nor in quite the same lively manner as if they were familiar to him by daily contact. For the human interest of his drama he has to rely not so much upon temporary or local characteristics as upon those which are common to all periods and all communities. Indeed, if there be any local color, it is apt to be that of the author’s own surroundings rather than of those in which the story is laid.
In “Ivanhoe,” Scott sought to reproduce the period of Richard I, and perhaps the reproduction is as lifelike as any that could be made, where the materials are so scanty. The novel belongs distinctly to the romantic school, and contains all the usual ingredients of books of chivalry,—knights errant, heroes in disguise, prodigies of valor, maidens in distress, a foul ravisher, a wandering monarch, a drinking friar, etc. These things are pruned of their most evident absurdities, but the story is still quite far removed from probability. The plot is palpably a creation of imaginative architecture, resembling some well proportioned temple or villa, rather than the product of natural development like a landscape or like life itself. In places the author invokes the Saxon Chronicle and other authorities in proof of the credibility of his narrative, but these references themselves show that he is not unconscious of the fact that his story stands in need of extraneous support.
And yet, this artificiality being once conceded, how beautiful is the structure! How fine the material, and how symmetrically it is put together! Sometimes, perhaps, the narrative lags a little; sometimes the descriptions, like those of Cedric’s hall or Athelstane’s castle, are longer than the impatience of the reader cares to tolerate. Yet the great scenes of the drama, how vividly do all these stand forth in our memory! How splendid the stage setting and how well arranged the incidents!