Page:St. Nicholas - Volume 41, Part 1.djvu/436

390 work we know and love, that Arthur Rackham reminds me of his own house retiring round the corner. He is willing to talk, and does talk, well and definitely, about a multitude of subjects, with equal keenness and interest; but if uou mention Rip, he will talk of Irving and Jefferson, rather than of Rackham. And it is interesting to hear Rip’s last creator on his predecessors. Of my grandfather he has said:

“One feels it was he who made the character for all time the great living entity that it is. At least I, for one, very much doubt whether Irving’s playful fiction or morality would have become immovably established—to the degree of a creed, a genuine local legend—if Jefferson had n't given Rip the living personality that we now recognize him by. I think Rip one of the most remarkable of created characters. Created as the sheerest piece of pleasant moralizing, acknowledging, even, that it was cribbed from old-world sources, here is Rip as firmly fixed in the hearts of all good Americans as any genuine myth. I can think of hardly another modern instance.”

Personally, I think that among recent inventions Peter Pan might have lived as the same kind of local myth, if his author had not created two entirely different Peters. The Peter of the play is not the Peter of the book, and the play has so outdistanced the book in its power