What were the forms of this evident endeavor to interpret American life in brief fictions; and, more important, what was the form toward which they were groping? For this inquiry the natural point of departure is the tales of Irving. Any reappreciation of Irving would now be officious. We know that classical serenity, alike of pathos and of humor; and we have heard often enough that he got his style of Addison. Indeed no attentive reader of English literature could well fail to discern either Irving’s schooling with the finest prose of the previous century--with Goldsmith, for instance, as well as Addison--or the essential originality of his own prose. He is a pupil of the _Spectator_.[7] That is a momentous fact in the history of American literature. We know what it means in diction. What does it mean in form? That our first eminent short fictions were written by the pupil of a school of essayists vitally affected their structure. The matter of the _Spectator_ suggested in England a certain type of novel;[8] its manner was not the manner to suggest in America the short story, even to an author whose head was full of the proper material. For though it may be hard to prove in the face of certain novels that an essay is one thing and a story another, it is obvious to any craftsman, _a priori_, that the way of the essay will not lead to the short story. And in fact it did not lead to the short story. The tales of Irving need no praise. Composed in the manner typical of the short story, they might have been better or worse; but they are not so composed. It was not at random that Irving called his first collection of them (1819–20) _The Sketch Book_. _The Wife_, for instance, is a short-story plot; it is handled, precisely in the method of the British essay, as an illustrative anecdote. So _The Widow and Her Son_; so _The Pride of the Village_, most evidently in its expository introduction; so, in essence of method, many of the others. And _Rip Van Winkle_? Here, indeed, is a difference, but not, as may at first appear, a significant difference. True, the descriptive beginning is modern rather than Addisonian; romanticism had opened the eyes of the son of the classicals; but how far the typical looseness of romanticism is from the typical compactness of the short story may be seen in Irving’s German tale of the _Spectre Bridegroom_, and it may be seen here. True again, the characterisation, though often expository, is deliciously concrete; but it is not more so than the characterisation of Sir Roger de Coverley; nor is Rip’s conversation with his dog, for instance, in itself the way of the short story any more than Sir Roger’s counting of heads in church. Unity of tone there is, unity clearer than in Irving’s models, and therefore doubtless more conscious. But Irving did not go so far as to show his successors that the surer way to unity of tone is unity of narrative form. Still less did he display the value of unity of form for itself.