His stories do not culminate. As there is little emphasis on any given incident, so there is no direction of incidents toward a single goal of action. Think of the Catskill legend done _à la mode_. Almost any clever writer for to-morrow’s magazines would begin with Rip’s awakening, keep the action within one day by letting the previous twenty years transpire through Rip’s own narrative at the new tavern, and culminate on the main disclosure. That he might easily thus spoil _Rip Van Winkle_ is not in point. The point is that he would thus make a typical short story, and that the _Sketch Book_ did not tend in that direction. Nor as a whole do the _Tales of a Traveller_. Not only is _Buckthorne and His Friends_ avowedly a sketch for a novel, but the involved and somewhat laborious machinery of the whole collection will not serve to move any of its separable parts in the short-story manner. Even the _German Student_, which is potentially much nearer to narrative singleness, has an explanatory introduction and a blurred climax. Such few of the Italian bandit stories as show compression of time remain otherwise, like the rest, essentially the same in form as other romantic tales of the period. In narrative adjustment Irving did not choose to make experiments.[9] It is not surprising, therefore, that Irving’s influence, so far at it is discernible in subsequent short fictions, seems rather to have retarded than to have furthered the development toward distinct form. Our native sense of form appears in that the short story emerged fifteen years after the _Sketch Book_; but where we feel Irving we feel a current from another source moving in another direction. The short descriptive sketches composing John Pendleton Kennedy’s _Swallow Barn_ (1832) have so slight a sequence,[10] and sometimes so clear a capacity for self-consistent form, that it is easy to imagine them as separate short stories of local manners; but, whether through Irving, or directly through the literary tradition of Virginia, they keep the way of the _Spectator_. James Hall, who had been still nearer to the short story of local manners in his _French Village_ (1829), was poaching on Irving’s manor in his _Village Musician_ (1831) with evident disintegration. In Hawthorne, who, of course, was nearest of all before Poe’s genius for form seized and fixed the short story, it is difficult to be sure of the influence of Irving. True, Hawthorne’s earlier historical tales, though they have far greater imaginative realisation, are not essentially different in method from Irving’s _Philip of Pokanoket_; but it was quite as likely Hawthorne’s natural bent toward the descriptive essay that made his earlier development in fiction tentative and vacillating, as any counsel from the happy, leisurely form of the elder master. Be that as it may, Irving’s influence in general, if not deterrent, seems at least not to have counted positively in the development of the short story.