8 



Indiana University Studies 



and its people fairly well, he thinks, on the other hand, that his ob- 

 servation is ' 'perhaps at times superficial and incomplete", that he 

 fails properly to appreciate Spain's poetic aspects, that he is com- 

 pletely lacking in originality, and that it is doubtful whether his 

 fame will endure. He agrees with ^'E. D." in considering the pictures 

 of Enghsh life in olden days {in Br acehridge Hall) as ^'forced", but he 

 differs from him widely in his estimate of the History of New York, 

 which he regards as being undoubtedly the wittiest and the most 

 piquant of Irving's work. 



Philarete Chasles. Philarete Chasles, a journalist of cosmo- 

 politan tastes, who wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Journal 

 des Debats, and the Revue encyclopedique, who, moreover, resided in 

 England from 1819 to 1826, speaks briefly of Irving in the Revue 

 des Deux Mondes in 1835 and again in 1841. He recognizes, in 1835, 

 that both Irving and Cooper have become popular in France, but he 

 denies that their works show the existence of a literature that can 

 fairly be called American. Irving is ''quite English", he says, and 

 "copies Addison".'' In 1841 he regards him as the "best writer of 

 which the United States can boast", and credits him with possessing 

 "taste and learning" and a style "elegant, refined, and polished", 

 but he still maintains that Irving "strives to continue Addison and 

 Robertson, his masters", rather than to create something new.^ 



In 1851 he speaks of him at greater length in an article which has 

 since been published in a collection of studies on Anglo-American 

 literature. He still finds much to praise in Irving's style — its sim- 

 plicity, its sobriety, its grace, the harmoniousness of its coloring, and 

 the purity of its form — but he cannot conceal from himself, he says, 

 the fact that beneath it there is a certain lack of strength. Irving's 

 imagination, he declares, is not vivacious, his intelligence is neither 

 creative nor profound, his sensations are not strong. "Irving pleases 

 us," he says, "but he does not move us." He accuses him of making 

 a fetish of English writers, especially the contemporaries of Pope. 

 "In Irving there is absolutely nothing American," he writes, "all his 

 thoughts are turned toward England. . . For Irving everything 

 written by the contemporaries of Pope is as sacred as the gospel." 

 Strangely enough, at the end of his study he admits that Irving had 

 a certain amount, altho very small, of originality. "With Irving 

 appears the first gleam of genuine originality," he says, "with which 

 American literature is crowned." The most pleasing of Irving's 



1 Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1835, p. 170. 

 8 Revue des Deux Mondes, April 15, 1841, p. 309. 



