Visitor Ratings: Characters. Rip was the first character in American fiction to be known far beyond our own borders, and he remains one of the best known. In the class with him belong James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking (or Natty Bumppo), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom, Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He has been called un-American, and so he is, and so Irving plainly intended him to be. If one insists on finding a bit of distinctive Americanism somewhere in the story, he will find it not in Rip but in the number and rapidity of the changes that American life underwent during the twenty years that serve as background to the story. George William Curtis calls Rip "the constant and unconscious satirist of American life," but surely Irving would have smiled at finding so purposeful a mission laid upon the stooping shoulders of his vagabond ne'er-do-well hero. Rip is no satirist, conscious or unconscious. He is a provincial Dutch type, such as Irving had seen a hundred times; but he is so lovable and is sketched so lovingly that we hardly realize the consummate art, the human sympathy, and the keen powers of observation that have gone into his making. Every other character in the story, including Wolf, is a sidelight on Rip. Of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Irving said: "The story is a mere whimsical band to connect the descriptions of scenery, customs, manners, etc." The emphasis, in other words, was put on the setting. Of "Rip Van Winkle" might he not have said, "The descriptions of scenery, customs, manners, etc. are but so many channels through which the character of Rip finds outlet and expression"? Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but sometimes when the rest of the landscape is cloudless they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory. At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists in the early time of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant (may he rest in peace!), and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weathercocks.

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