AMERICAN
LITERARY MASTERS

BY LEON H. VINCENT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT 1906 BY LEON H. VINCENT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published March 1906

TO
GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

PREFACE

The nineteen men of letters whose work is reviewed in this volume represent an important half-century of our national literary life. The starting-point is the year 1809, the date of “A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker.” No author is included whose reputation does not rest, in part, on some notable book published before 1860.

Readers of modern French criticism will not need to be told that the plan of dividing the studies into short sections was taken from Faguet’s admirable “Dix-Septième Siècle.”

I am indebted for many helpful criticisms to Mr. James R. Joy, to Miss Mary Charlotte Priest, and especially to Mr. Lindsay Swift of the Boston Public Library.

L. H. V.

January 23, 1906.

Contents

I
Washington Irving

REFERENCES:

[E. A. Duyckinck]: Irvingiana, a Memorial of Washington Irving, 1860.

W. C. Bryant: A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of Washington Irving, 1860.

Pierre M. Irving: The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, 1862–64.

C. D. Warner: The Work of Washington Irving, 1893.

I
HIS LIFE

Scotch and English blood flowed in Washington Irving’s veins. His father, William Irving (whose ancestry has been traced by genealogical enthusiasts to De Irwyn, armor-bearer to Robert Bruce), was a native of Shapinsha, one of the Orkney Islands; his mother, Sarah (Sanders) Irving, came from Falmouth.

At the time of his marriage William Irving was a petty officer on an armed packet-ship plying between Falmouth and New York. Two years later (1763) he gave up seafaring, settled in New York, and started a mercantile business. He enjoyed a competency, but like other patriotic citizens suffered from the demoralization of trade during the Revolution. His character suggested that of the old Scotch covenanter. Though not without tenderness, he was in the main strict and puritanical.

Washington Irving was born in New York on April 3, 1783. He was the youngest of a family of eleven, five of whom died in childhood. Irving could perfectly remember the great patriot for whom he was named. He was much indebted to the good old Scotchwoman, his nurse, who, seeing Washington enter a shop on Broadway, darted in after him and presented her small charge with ‘Please your Excellency, here’s a bairn that’s called after ye!’ ‘General Washington,’ said Irving, recounting the incident in after years, ‘then turned his benevolent face full upon me, smiled, laid his hand on my head, and gave me his blessing.... I was but five years old, yet I can feel that hand upon my head even now.’

Up to the age of fifteen Irving attended such schools as New York afforded. He was not precocious. He came home from school one day (he was then about eight) and remarked to his mother: ‘The madame says I am a dunce; isn’t it a pity?’

Two of his brothers had been sent to Columbia College; that he was not, may be attributed partly to ill health, partly to an indolent waywardness of disposition and to the indulgence so often granted the youngest member of a large family. Always an inveterate reader, he contrived in time to educate himself by methods unapproved of pedagogical science. He decided on a legal career and entered the office of a well-known practitioner, Henry Masterton. During the two years he was there he acquired some law and attained ‘considerable proficiency in belles-lettres.’ He studied for a time with Brockholst Livingston (afterwards judge of the Supreme Court), and later with Josiah Ogden Hoffman.

As a boy Irving had always ‘scribbled’ more or less, and in 1802 he scribbled to some purpose, contributing the ‘Jonathan Oldstyle’ letters to the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ a paper founded and edited by his brother Peter Irving. His ambitions seemed likely to be frustrated by poor health, and a trip abroad was advised. He went to the Mediterranean, visited Italy, and spent a little time in France and England. The journey was not without adventures. He saw Nelson’s fleet on its way to Trafalgar; his boat was overhauled by pirates near Elba; and in Rome he met Madame de Staël, who almost overpowered him by her amazing volubility and the pertinacity of her questioning.

On his return home Irving passed his examinations (November, 1806), and was admitted to the bar with but slender legal outfit, as he frankly confessed. He was enrolled among the counsel for the defence at the trial of Aaron Burr at Richmond. There was no thought of taxing his untried legal skill; he was to be useful to the cause as a writer in case his services were needed.

Law gave place to literature. Irving and J. K. Paulding projected a paper, Salmagundi, to be ‘mainly characterized by a spirit of fun and sarcastic drollery.’ William T. Irving joined in the venture. The first number appeared on January 24, 1807. The editors issued it when they were so minded, and after publishing twenty numbers, brought it to an almost unceremonious close.

The following year Peter and Washington Irving began writing a burlesque account of their native town, a parody on Mitchill’s A Picture of New York. Peter was called to Liverpool to take charge of the English interests of Irving and Smith, and it fell to Washington to recast the chapters already written and complete the narrative. The book outgrew the design (as is the tendency of parodies), and was published on December 6, 1809, as A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker. It was received by the New York Historical Society, to whom it was dedicated, with astonishment, and by the old Dutch families with mingled emotions, among which that of exuberant delight was not in every case the most prominent.

For two years Irving conducted the ‘Analectic Magazine,’ published in Philadelphia. During the exciting months which followed the British attack on Washington (August, 1814), he was military secretary to the governor of New York. Being of adventurous spirit, he welcomed with joy the prospect of accompanying his friend Stephen Decatur on the expedition to Algiers. Disappointed in this and unable to get the fever of travel out of his blood, he sailed for England (May, 1815), intending nothing more than a visit to his brother in Liverpool and to a married sister in Birmingham.

Peter Irving had been ill, and in consequence his affairs had fallen into disorder. Washington undertook to disentangle them. He was unsuccessful. To the intense mortification of the brothers they were compelled to go into bankruptcy (1818), and Washington began casting about for a way to supplement his slender income. He refused an advantageous offer at home, and determined to remain in England. A literary project had taken shape in his mind, and he proceeded to carry it out.

In May, 1819, Irving published the first part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, containing five papers, one of which, ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ is a little masterpiece. The attitude of the public towards this venture convinced Irving that he might live by the profession of letters. The Sketch Book was followed by Bracebridge Hall, or the Humorists (1822), and by the Tales of a Traveller (1824). This last date marks a period in Irving’s literary life.

The years which Irving spent abroad had their anxieties, their depressions, their dull days, their long periods of drudgery. It is a temptation to dwell on their pleasures and their triumphs. Irving was fortunate in his friendships. He knew Scott, Campbell, Moore, and Jeffrey, and had the amusement on one occasion of seeing his visiting list revised by Rogers. He met Mrs. Siddons, marvelled at Belzoni, was amused by the antics of Lady Caroline Lamb, breakfasted at Holland House, and visited Thomas Hope at his country seat. In Paris he was presented to Talma by John Howard Payne, ‘the young American Roscius of former days,’ who had now ‘outgrown all tragic symmetry.’ He became (in time) persona gratissima to John Murray, his English publisher; and to be dear to one’s publisher must always be accounted among the great rewards of literature.

At the instance of Alexander Everett, the American Minister to Spain, Irving, in February, 1826, went to Madrid to translate Navarrete’s forthcoming collection of documents relating to Columbus. He presently abandoned the plan for a more grateful task, the writing of an independent account of the discovery of America, based on Navarrete, and on ample materials supplied by the library of Rich, the American consul at Madrid. To this he devoted himself with immense energy. The work was published in 1828, and was soon followed by the Conquest of Granada and Voyages of the Companions of Columbus.

In 1829 Irving became Secretary of the American Legation in London. The Royal Society of Literature voted him one of their fifty guinea gold medals, in recognition of his services to the study of history. The honor, distinguished in itself, became doubly so to the recipient because the other of the two awards for that year was bestowed on Hallam. In June, 1830, the University of Oxford conferred on Irving the degree of LL. D. In April, 1832, he sailed for America. He had been absent seventeen years.

After travels in various parts of the United States, including a long journey to the far West with the commissioner to the Indian tribes, Irving settled near Tarrytown. His home was a little Dutch cottage ‘all made up of gable ends, and as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat.’ Familiarly called ‘The Roost’ by its inmates, this ‘doughty and valorous little pile’ is known to the world as ‘Sunnyside.’ With the exception of the four years (1842–46) he passed in Spain as Minister Plenipotentiary, ‘Sunnyside’ was Irving’s abiding-place until his death.

His later writings are: The Alhambra, 1832; The Crayon Miscellany (comprising A Tour on the Prairies, Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, and Legends of the Conquest of Spain), 1835; Astoria (with Pierre M. Irving), 1836; Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U. S. A. (edited), 1837; Life of Goldsmith, 1849; Mahomet and his Successors, 1849–50; The Chronicles of Wolfert’s Roost, 1855; The Life of Washington, 1855–59.

Attempts were made to draw Irving into political life. He was offered a nomination for Congress; Tammany Hall ‘unanimously and vociferously’ declared him its candidate for mayor of New York; and President Van Buren would have made him Secretary of the Navy. All these honors he felt himself obliged to refuse. He accepted the Spanish mission (offered by President Tyler at the instance of his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster), because he believed himself not wholly unfitted for the charge, and because it honored in him the profession of letters.

Irving’s intellectual powers were at perfect command up to the beginning of the last year of his life. Then his health began to fail markedly, and the final volume of his Washington cost him effort he could ill afford. He died suddenly on November 28, 1859, and was buried in the cemetery at Sleepy Hollow.

II
IRVING’S CHARACTER

Irving was broad-minded, tolerant, amiable, incapable of envy, quick to forget an affront, and always willing to think the best of humanity. His tactfulness was due in part to his large experience of life, but more to the possession of a nature that was sweet, serene, frank, and unsophisticated. For Irving was no courtier; he could as little flatter as practise the more odious forms of deceit. His gifts of irony and ridicule, supplemented with an extraordinary power of humorous delineation, were never abused. It might be said of him, as of another great satirist, that ‘he never inflicted a wound.’

His modesty was excessive. It is impossible to find in his writings or his correspondence any hint that he was inclined to put unusual value on his work. Grateful as he was for praise, it would never have occurred to him that he had a right to it. With all his knowledge of the world he was singularly diffident. Moore hit off this trait when he said that Geoffrey Crayon was ‘not strong as a lion, but delightful as a domestic animal.’

Not his least admirable virtue was a spirit of helpfulness where his brother authors were concerned. Irving was ‘officious’ in the good old sense of the word, glad to be of service to his fellows, untiring in efforts to promote their welfare. He could praise their work, too, without disheartening qualifications. The good he enjoyed, the bad he put to one side. And he never forgot a kindness. A publisher who had once befriended him, though fallen on evil days, found himself still able to command some of Irving’s best manuscripts.

Criticism never angered Irving. Personal attacks (of which he had his share) were suffered with quiet dignity. He rarely defended himself, and then only when the attack was outrageous. He could speak pointedly if the need were. His reply to William Leggett, who accused him in ‘The Plain Dealer’ of ‘literary pusillanimity’ and double dealing, is a model of effectiveness. One paragraph will show its quality. Imputing no malevolence to Leggett, who doubtless acted from honest feelings hastily excited by a misapprehension of the facts, Irving says: ‘You have been a little too eager to give an instance of that “plain dealing” which you have recently adopted as your war-cry. Plain dealing, sir, is a great merit when accompanied by magnanimity, and exercised with a just and generous spirit; but if pushed too far, and made the excuse for indulging every impulse of passion or prejudice, it may render a man, especially in your situation, a very offensive, if not a very mischievous member of the community.’

Something may be known of a man by observing his attitude at the approach of old age. Irving’s beautiful serenity was characteristic. People were kind to him, but he thought their kindness extraordinary. He wondered whether old gentlemen were becoming fashionable.

III
THE WRITER

Irving’s prose is distinguished for grace and sweetness. It is unostentatious, natural, easy. At its best it comes near to being a model of good prose. The most striking effects are produced by the simplest means. Never does the writer appear to be searching for an out-of-the-way term. He accepts what lies at hand. The word in question is almost obvious and often conventional, but invariably apt.

For a writer who produced so much the style is remarkably homogeneous. It is an exaggeration to speak of it as overcharged with color. There are passages of much splendor, but Irving’s taste was too refined to admit of his indulging in rhetorical excesses. Nor is the style quite so mellifluous as it seemed to J. W. Croker, who said: ‘I can no more go on all day with one of his [Irving’s] books than I could go on all day sucking a sugar-plum.’ The truth is that Irving is one of the most human and companionable of writers, and his English is just the sort to prompt one to go on all day with him.

Yet there is a want of ruggedness, the style is almost too perfectly controlled. It lacks the strength and energy born of deep thought and passionate conviction, and it must be praised (as it may be without reserve) for urbanity and masculine grace.

IV
EARLY WORK KNICKERBOCKER’S HISTORY, SKETCH BOOK, BRACEBRIDGE HALL, TALES OF A TRAVELLER

The dignified appearance of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s learned work, the quiet simplicity of the principal title, and the sober dedication gave no hint to the serious-minded that they were buying one of the most extraordinary books of humor in the English language. The deception could not last long, but it is to be hoped that on the day of publication some honest seeker after knowledge took a copy home with the intent to profit at once by its stores of erudition.

On a basis of historical truth Irving reared a delightfully grotesque historical edifice. The method is analogous to that children employ when they put a candle on the floor that they may laugh at the odd shadows of themselves cast on wall and ceiling. The figures are monstrous, distorted, yet always resembling. Nothing could be at once more lifelike and more unreal than Irving’s account of New Amsterdam and its people under the three Dutch governors.

Here is a world of amusement to be had for the asking. One reader will enjoy the ironical philosophy, another the sly thrusts at current politics, a third the boisterous fun of certain episodes, such as the fight between stout Risingh and Peter Stuyvesant, the hint of which may have been caught from Fielding’s account of how Molly Seagrim valorously put her enemies to flight. But the book will always be most cherished for its quaint pictures of snug and drowsy comfort, for its world of broad-bottomed burghers, amphibious housewives, and demure Dutch damsels wooed by inarticulate lovers smoking long pipes, and for the rich Indian summer atmosphere with which the poet-humorist invested the scenes of a not wholly idyllic past.

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon is in one respect well named; it has the heterogeneous character that we associate with an artist’s portfolio. Notes of travel, stories, meditations, and portraits are thrown together in pleasant disorder. A paper on ‘Roscoe’ is followed by the sketch entitled ‘The Wife,’ and the history of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is succeeded by an essay on the attitude of English writers towards America. In another sense the volume is not a mere sketch-book, for each sketch is a highly finished picture. Here is often a self-consciousness radically unlike the abandon of the History of New York. At times Irving falls quite into the ‘Keepsake’ manner. A faint aroma as of withered rose leaves steals from the pages, a languid atmosphere of sweet melancholy dear to the early Nineteenth Century.

Other pages are breezy enough. The five chapters on Christmas at Bracebridge Hall, the essay on ‘Little Britain,’ on the ‘Mutability of Literature,’ and that on ‘John Bull’ are emphatically not in the ‘Keepsake’ vein. Of themselves they would have sufficed to redeem The Sketch Book from the worst charge that can be brought against a piece of literature,—the charge of being merely fashionable. But the extraordinary vitality which this book has enjoyed for eighty-five years it owes in the main to ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’ Written in small form, embodying simple incidents, saturated with humor, classic in their conciseness of style, these stories are faultless examples of Irving’s art.

Irving dearly loved a lovable vagabond, and Rip is his ideal. The story is told in a succession of pictures. The reader visualizes scenery, character, incident, the purple mountains, the village nestling at their feet, the ne’er-do-weel whom children love, the termagant wife, the junto before the inn door, the journey into the mountains, the strange little beings at their solemn game, the draught of the fatal liquor, the sleep, the awakening, the return home, the bewilderment, the recognition,—do we not know it by heart? Have we not read the narrative a hundred times, trying in vain to penetrate the secret of its perfection? Something of the logic of poetry went into the creation of this idyl. We are left with the feeling that Irving himself could not have changed a word for the better.

‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is etched with a deeper stroke, is broader, more farcical. There is no pathos, but downright fun and frolic from the first line to the last. The audacious exaggeration of every feature in the portrait of Ichabod Crane is inimitably clever. The schoolmaster gets no pity and needs none. And the reader is justified in his unsympathetic attitude when later he learns that Ichabod, instead of having been carried off by the headless Hessian, merely changed his quarters, and when last heard of had studied law, written for the newspapers, and gone into politics.

In Bracebridge Hall Geoffrey Crayon returns to the English country house where he had spent a Christmas, to enjoy at leisure old manners, old customs, old-world ideas and people. Never were simpler materials used in the making of a book; never was a more entertaining book compounded of such simple materials. The incidents are of the most quiet sort, a walk, a dinner, a visit to a neighboring grange or to a camp of gypsies, a reading in the library or the telling of a story after dinner. The philosophy is naïve, but the humor is exquisite and unflagging.

The reader meets his old friends, the Squire, Master Simon, old Christy, and the Oxonian. New characters are introduced, Lady Lillycraft and General Harbottle, Ready-money Jack, Slingsby the schoolmaster, and the Radical who reads Cobbett, and goes armed with pamphlets and arguments. Among them all none is more attractive than the Squire. With his scorn of commercialism, his love of ancient customs, his good-humored tolerance of gypsies and poachers, with his body of maxims from Peacham and other old writers, and his amusing contempt for Lord Chesterfield—these and other delightful traits make Mr. Bracebridge one of the most ingratiating characters in fiction.

Bracebridge Hall contains interpolated stories, the ‘Stout Gentleman,’ the ‘Student of Salamanca,’ and the finely finished tale of ‘Annette Delabarre.’ The papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker are not yet exhausted; having furnished Rip and Ichabod to The Sketch Book they now contribute to Bracebridge Hall the story of ‘Dolph Heyliger.’

The Tales of a Traveller, a medley of episodes and sketches, is divided into four parts. In the first part the Nervous Gentleman of Bracebridge Hall continues his narrations. These adventures, supposed to have been told at a hunt dinner, or at breakfast the following morning, are intertwined, Arabian Nights fashion, story within story. They are grotesque (the ‘Bold Dragoon,’ with the richly humorous account of the dance of the furniture), or weird and ghastly (the ‘German Student’), or romantic (the ‘Young Italian’).

The second part, ‘Buckthorne and his Friends,’ displays the seamy side of English dramatic and literary life. Modern realism had not yet been invented, and it is easy to laugh over the sorrows of Flimsy, who, in his coat of Lord Townley cut and dingy-white stockinet pantaloons, bears a closer relation to Mr. Vincent Crummles than to any one of the characters of A Mummer’s Wife.

Part third, the ‘Italian Banditti,’ is in a style which no longer interests, though many worse written narratives do. But in the last part, ‘The Money-Diggers,’ Irving comes back to his own. He is again wandering along the shores of the pleasant island of Mannahatta, fishing at Hellegat, lying under the trees at Corlear Hook while a Cape Cod whaler tells the story of ‘The Devil and Tom Walker.’ Ramm Rapelye fills his chair at the club and smokes and grunts, ever maintaining a mastiff-like gravity. Once more we see the little old city which had not entirely lost its picturesque Dutch features. Here stands Wolfert Webber’s house, with its gable end of yellow brick turned toward the street. ‘The gigantic sunflowers loll their broad jolly faces over the fences, seeming to ogle most affectionately the passers-by.’ Dirk Waldron, ‘the son of four fathers,’ sits in Webber’s kitchen, feasting his eyes on the opulent charms of Amy. He says nothing, but at intervals fills the old cabbage-grower’s pipe, strokes the tortoise-shell cat, or replenishes the teapot from the bright copper kettle singing before the fire. ‘All these quiet little offices may seem of trifling import; but when true love is translated into Low Dutch, it is in this way it eloquently expresses itself.’

Had Irving’s reputation depended on the four books just now characterized, it would have been a great reputation and the note of originality precisely what we now find it. But there was need of work in other fields to show the catholicity of his interests and the range of his powers.

V
HISTORICAL WRITINGS COLUMBUS, CONQUEST OF GRANADA, MAHOMET

The Life and Voyages of Columbus is written in the spirit of tempered hero-worship. It is free from the extravagance of partisans who make a god of Columbus, and from the skeptical cavillings of those who apparently are not unwilling to rob the great explorer of any claim he may possess to virtue or ability. As Irving conceives him, Columbus is a many-sided man, infinitely patient when patience is required, doggedly obstinate if the need be, crafty or open, daring in the highest degree, having that audacity which seems to quell the powers of nature, yet devout, with a touch of the superstition characteristic of his time and his belief.

On many questions, fine points of ethnography, geography, navigation and the like, Irving neither could nor did he presume to speak finally. History has to be rewritten every few years wherever these questions are involved. But the letters of Columbus, the testimony of his contemporaries, the reports of friend and enemy, throw an unchanging light on character. The march of science can neither dim nor augment that light. Irving was emphatically a judge of human nature. He needed no help in making up his mind what sort of man Columbus was. Modern scholars with their magnificent scientific equipment sometimes forget that cartography, invaluable though it is, is after all a poor guide to character. And yet, by the testimony of one of those same modern scholars, Irving’s life of the Admiral, as a trustworthy and popular résumé, is still the best.

One often wishes Irving had been less temperate. The barbarous tyranny of the Spaniards over the Indians of Hispaniola stirs the reader to deepest indignation. He longs for such treatment of the theme as Carlyle might possibly have given. Here is need of thunderbolts of wrath like unto those wielded by the Jupiter Tonans of history. But taken as a whole, the book has extraordinary virtues. It is a clear, full, well-ordered, picturesque, and readable narrative of the great explorer’s career. There is no better, nor is there likely to be a better. He who has time to read but one book on the discoverer of America will not go amiss in reading this one. He who proposes to read many books on the subject may well elect to read Irving’s first.

The supplementary Voyages of the Companions of Columbus narrates the adventures of Ojeda, that dare-devil of the high seas, of Nicuesa, of Vasco Nuñez, of Ponce de Leon. Though wanting the unity of the preceding volumes, these narratives are of high interest, and for vigor, animation, and picturesqueness must rank among the most attractive examples of Irving’s work.

While making collateral studies bearing on the life of Columbus, Irving became so captivated with the romantic and chivalrous story of the fall of Granada that he found himself unable to complete his more sober task until he had sketched a rough outline of the new book. When the Columbus was sent to the press, Irving made a tour of Andalusia, visited certain memorable scenes of the war, and on his return to Seville elaborated his sketch into the ornate and glowing picture known as A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, by Fray Antonio Agapida.

The book is commonly described as romance rather than history. It was written with a view to rescuing the ancient chronicle of the conquest from the mass of amatory and sentimental tradition with which it was incrusted, and of presenting it in its legitimate brilliancy. Irving believed, too, that the world had forgotten or had failed to realize how stern the conflict was. In the fifteenth century it was regarded as a Holy War. Christian bigot was arrayed against Moslem bigot. Atrocities of the blackest sort were perpetrated and justified in the name of religion. The title-page says that the narrative is taken from the manuscript of one Fray Antonio Agapida. The brother is an imaginary character, a personification of monkish zeal and intolerance. When the slaughter of the infidels has been unusually great, Fray Antonio makes his appearance, like the ‘chorus’ of a play, and thanks God with much unction. Through this mouth-piece Irving gives ironical voice to that sentiment it is impossible not to feel in contemplating the barbarities of a ‘holy’ war. A few readers were disturbed by the fiction of the old monk. They ought to have liked him. He is an amusing personage and comes too seldom on the stage.

The Life of Mahomet and his Successors has been spoken of as ‘comparatively a failure.’ If a book which sums up the available knowledge of the time on the subject, which is written in clear, pure English, which is throughout of high interest, in other words, which has solidity, beauty, and a large measure of the literary quality—if such a book is comparatively a failure, one hardly knows what can be the critic’s standard of measurement. Irving was not acquainted with Arabic. He drew his materials from Spanish and German sources. Yet it is not too much to say that no better general account of Mahomet and the early caliphs has been written.

VI
SPANISH ROMANCE THE ALHAMBRA, LEGENDS OF THE CONQUEST OF SPAIN

For three or four months Irving lived in the ancient Moorish palace and fortress known as the Alhambra. In his own phrase he ‘succeeded to the throne of Boabdil.’ The place charmed him beyond all others in the Old World. His craving for antiquity, his love of the exotic, his passion for romance, his delight in day-dreaming were here completely satisfied. He loved the huge pile, so rough and forbidding without, so graceful and attractive within. The splendor of its storied past intoxicated him. He roamed at will through its courts and halls, steeping himself in history and tradition. He was amused at the life of the petty human creatures, nesting bird-like in the crannies and nooks of the vast edifice. To observe their habits, record their superstitious fancies, listen to their tales, sympathize with their ambitions or their sorrows, was occupation enough. The history of the place could be studied in the parchment-clad folios of the Jesuit library. As for the legends, they abounded everywhere. The scattered leaves were then brought together in the volume called Tales of the Alhambra.

It is a Spanish arabesque. No book displays to better advantage the wayward charm of Irving’s literary genius. Whether recounting old stories of buried Moorish gold and Arabian necromancy, or describing the loves of Manuel and bright-eyed Dolores, or extolling the grace and intelligence of Carmen, he is equally happy. There was a needy and shiftless denizen of the place, one Mateo Ximenes, who captured Irving’s heart by describing himself as ‘a son of the Alhambra.’ A ribbon-weaver by trade and an idler by choice, he attached himself to the newcomer and refused to be shaken off. If it was impossible to be rid of him, it was equally impossible not to like him. Life was a prolonged holiday for Mateo during Geoffrey Crayon’s residence. Whatever obligations he had, of a domestic or a business nature, were joyfully set aside that he might wait upon the visitor. He became Irving’s ‘prime-minister and historiographer-royal,’ doing his errands, aiding in his explorations, and between times unfolding his accumulated treasures of legend and tradition. He was flattered by the credence given his stories, and when the reign of el rey Chico the second came to an end, no one lamented more than Mateo, left now ‘to his old brown cloak, and his starveling mystery of ribbon-weaving.’

Though not published until after Irving’s return to America, The Legends of the Conquest of Spain is a part of the harvest of this same period. The book describes the decline of the Gothic power under Witiza and Roderick, the treason of Count Julian, the coming of the Arabians under Taric and Muza, and the downfall of Christian supremacy in the Spanish peninsula. Irving was a magician in handling words, and this volume is rich in proof of it. Here may be found passages of the utmost brilliancy, such as the description of Roderick’s assault upon the necromantic tower of Hercules, and the opening of the golden casket.

The Legends serves a double purpose. As a book of entertainment pure and simple it is unsurpassed. It is also a spur to the reader to make his way into wider fields, and to learn yet more of that people whose history could give rise to these beautiful illustrations of chivalry and courage.

VII
AMERICAN HISTORY AND TRAVEL A TOUR ON THE PRAIRIES, ASTORIA, LIFE OF WASHINGTON

The list of Irving’s writings between 1835 and 1855 comprises eight titles. Two of these books have been commented on. The others may be despatched in a paragraph, as the old reviewers used to say.

Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey is an aftermath of the English harvest of impressions and experiences. The Life of Goldsmith, based originally on Prior’s useful but heavy work, and rewritten when Forster’s book appeared, is accounted one of the most graceful of literary biographies. Wolfert’s Roost is a medley of delightful papers on birds, Indians, old Dutch villages, and modern American adventurers, together with a handful of Spanish stories and legends.

There is a group of three books dealing with American frontier life and western exploration. The first of these, A Tour on the Prairies, shows how readily the trained man of letters can turn his hand to any subject. Who would have thought that the prose poet of the Alhambra was also able to do justice to the trapper and the Pawnee? Astoria (the first draft of which was made by Pierre M. Irving) is an account of John Jacob Astor’s commercial enterprise in the Northwest. Irving was amused when an English review pronounced the book his masterpiece. He had really taken a deeper interest in the work than he supposed possible when Astor urged it upon him. Bonneville in a manner supplements Astoria, and was written from notes and journals furnished by the hardy explorer whose name the book bears.

It was fitting that Irving should crown the literary labors of forty years with a life of Washington. He had a deep veneration for the memory of the great American. The theme was peculiarly grateful to him. He seems to have regarded the work as something more than a self-imposed and pleasant literary task—it was a duty to which he was in the highest degree committed, a duty at once pious and patriotic. Though he had begun early to ponder his subject, Irving was nearly seventy when he commenced the actual writing; and notwithstanding the book far outgrew the original plan, he was able to bring it to a successful conclusion.

Three quarters of the first volume are devoted to Washington’s history up to his thirty-second year. It is a graphic account of the young student, the surveyor, the envoy to the Indians, the captain of militia. Irving shows how it is possible to present the ‘real’ Washington without recourse to exaggerated realism. The remainder of the volume is given to an outline of the causes leading to the Revolution, to the affair of Lexington and Concord, the Battle of Bunker Hill, Washington’s election to the post of commander-in-chief, and the beginning of military operations around Boston. The next three volumes are a history of the Revolutionary War, with Washington always the central figure. The fifth volume covers Washington’s political life, and his last years at Mount Vernon.

Of two notable characteristics of this book, the first is its extraordinary readableness. To be sure the Revolution was a great event, and Irving was a gifted writer. Nevertheless for a historian who delights in movement, color, variety, the Revolutionary War must often seem no better than a desert of tedious fact relieved now and then by an oasis of brilliant exploit. Irving complained of the dulness of many parts of the theme. Notwithstanding this he brought to the work so much of his peculiar winsomeness that the Washington is a book always to be taken up with pleasure and laid down with regret.

The second notable characteristic is the freedom from extravagance either of praise or of blame. The crime and the disgrace of Arnold do not color adversely the historian’s view of what Arnold was and did in 1776. No indignant partisan has told with greater pathos the story of André. Nothing could be more temperate than Irving’s attitude towards the Tories, or, as it is now fashionable to call them, the Loyalists of the American Revolution. He could not deny sympathy to these unfortunates who found themselves caught between the upper and lower millstones, a people who in many cases were unable to go over heart and soul to the cause of the King, and who found it even more difficult to espouse the cause of their own countrymen. Even the enemies of Washington, that is to say, the enemies of his own political and military household, are treated with utmost fairness.

For Washington himself, Irving has only admiration, which, however, he is able to express without fulsome panegyric. He dwells on the great leader’s magnanimity, on his evenness of temper, his infinite patience, his freedom from trace of vanity, self-interest, or sectional prejudice, his confidence in the justness of the cause, and his trust in Providence, a trust which faltered least when circumstances were most adverse. Irving admired unstintedly the warrior who could hold in check trained and seasoned European soldiers with ‘an apparently undisciplined rabble,’ the ‘American Fabius’ who, when the time was ripe, was found to possess ‘enterprise as well as circumspection, energy as well as endurance.’

The personal side of the biography is not neglected, but no emphasis is laid on particulars of costume, manners, speech, what Washington ate and drank, and said about his neighbors. Irving could have had little sympathy with the modern rage for knowing the size of a great man’s collar and the number of his footgear. The passion for such details is legitimate, but it is a passion which needs to be firmly controlled. In brief, throughout the work emphasis is laid where emphasis belongs, on the character of Washington, who was the soul of the Revolutionary War, and then on the moral grandeur of that great struggle for human rights.

* * * * *

A historian of American literature says: ‘Irving had no message.’ He was not indeed enslaved by a theory literary or political; neither was he passionate for some reform and convinced that his particular reform was paramount. But he who gave to the world a series of writings which, in addition to being exquisite examples of literary art, are instinct with humor, brotherly kindness, and patriotism, can hardly be said not to have had a message.

Irving rendered an immense service to the biographical study of history. Columbus, Mahomet, the princes and warriors of the Holy War, are made real to us. Nor is this all. His books help to counteract that tendency of the times to make history a recondite science. History cannot be confined to the historians and erudite readers alone. Said Freeman to his Oxford audience one day: ‘Has anybody read the essay on Race and Language in the third series of my Historical Essays? It is very stiff reading, so perhaps nobody has.’ And one suspects that Freeman rejoiced a little to think it was ‘stiff reading.’

Nevertheless the public insists on its right to know the main facts. And as Leslie Stephen says, ‘the main facts are pretty well ascertained. Darnley was blown up, whoever supplied the powder, and the Spanish Armada certainly came somehow to grief.’ That man of letters is a benefactor who, like Irving, can give his audience the main facts, expressed in terms which make history more readable even than romance.

Irving perfected the short story. His genius was fecundative. Many a writer of gift and taste, and at least one writer of genius, owes Irving a debt which can be acknowledged but which cannot be paid. Deriving much from his literary predecessors, and gladly acknowledging the measure of his obligation, Irving by the originality of his work placed fresh obligations on those who came after him.

With his stories of Dutch life he conquered a new domain. That these stories remain in their first and untarnished beauty is due to Irving’s rich humor and ‘golden style,’ and to that indescribable quality of genius by which it lifts its creations out of the local and provincial, and endows them with a charm which all can understand and enjoy.

II
William Cullen Bryant

REFERENCES:

G. W. Curtis: The Life, Character, and Writings of William Cullen Bryant, Commemorative Address before the New York Historical Society, 1878.

Parke Godwin: A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, 1883.

John Bigelow: William Cullen Bryant, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1890.

W. A. Bradley: William Cullen Bryant, ‘English Men of Letters,’ 1905.

I
HIS LIFE

The author of ‘Thanatopsis’ was born at Cummington, a village among the hills of western Massachusetts, on November 3, 1794. Through his father, Doctor Peter Bryant, a physician, he traced his ancestry to Stephen Bryant, an early settler at Duxbury; through his mother, Sarah Snell, he had ‘a triple claim’ to ‘Mayflower’ origin.

Doctor Bryant was a many-sided man. He collected books, read poetry (Horace was his favorite), wrote satirical verse, was a musician and something of a mechanic. He was an ardent Federalist, a member of the Massachusetts legislature for several terms, and then of the senate. He possessed in high degree the art of imparting knowledge. Medical students thought themselves fortunate in being allowed to study under his direction. Doctor Bryant’s father and grandfather were both physicians, and he hoped that his second-born (who was named in honor of the Scottish practitioner, William Cullen) would follow in the ancestral footsteps.

Bryant began to make verses in his eighth year. At ten he wrote an ‘address’ in heroic couplets, which got into newspaper print. The boy used to pray that he might write verses which would endure. A political satire, The Embargo or Sketches of the Times, ‘by a youth of thirteen,’ if not in the nature of evidence that the prayer had been answered, so delighted Doctor Bryant that he printed it in a pamphlet (1808). A second issue containing additional poems was brought out the next year. To this the author put his name.

Bryant was taught Greek by his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Snell of Brookfield, and mathematics by the Reverend Moses Hallock of Plainfield. He entered the Sophomore class at Williams College in October, 1810, and left the following May. He was to have spent the two succeeding years at Yale, but the plan had to be abandoned for want of money. Some time during the summer of 1811 ‘Thanatopsis’ was written in its first form and laid aside.

The poet began reading law with Judge Samuel Howe of Worthington, who once reproached his pupil ‘for giving to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads time that belonged to Blackstone and Chitty.’ He continued his studies under William Baylies of Bridgewater, was admitted to the bar at Plymouth in August, 1815, practised awhile at Plainfield, and then removed to Great Barrington. The lines ‘To a Waterfowl’ were written the night of the young lawyer’s arrival in Plainfield.

He made progress in his profession and was called to argue cases at New Haven and before the supreme court at Boston. The intervals of legal business were given to poetry. Bryant’s father urged him to contribute to the new ‘North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal,’ the editor of which was an old friend. The young lawyer-poet seeming indifferent to the suggestion, Doctor Bryant carried with him to Boston two pieces he had unearthed among his son’s papers, namely, ‘Thanatopsis’ in its first form, and ‘A Fragment’ now called ‘Inscription at the Entrance of a Wood.’ Both were printed in the ‘Review’ for September, 1817. Other poems followed, together with three prose essays (on ‘American Poetry,’ on ‘The Happy Temperament,’ and on the use of ‘Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse’). He also contributed poems to ‘The Idle Man,’ Richard Henry Dana’s magazine, and the ‘United States Literary Gazette.’

In June, 1821, Bryant married Miss Frances Fairchild of Great Barrington. In April of this year he had been invited to give ‘the usual poetic address’ before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. ‘The Ages’ was written for this occasion and publicly read on August 30. At the instance of his Boston friends, Bryant printed ‘The Ages’ with seven other pieces in a little pamphlet entitled Poems.

Never in love with the law, the poet began to regard it with aversion. He was intellectually restless and took to play-writing. A farce, ‘The Heroes,’ in ridicule of duelling, was sent to his friends, the Sedgwicks, in New York, who admitted its merits but doubted its chances of success on the stage, Bryant, at the suggestion of Henry Sedgwick, made two or three visits to the city in search of congenial work. He thought he had found it when he undertook to edit ‘The New York Review and Athenæum Magazine,’ a periodical made by amalgamating ‘The Atlantic Magazine’ with the older ‘Literary Review.’ Bryant wrote to a friend that it was a livelihood, ‘and a livelihood is all I got from the law.’

The editor of the ‘Review’ was active in various ways. He studied the Romance languages, gave a course of lectures on poetry before the Athenæum Society (1825), and annual courses on mythology before the National Academy of the Arts of Design (1826–31). He was amused with New York life; Great Barrington had not been amusing. He published verse and prose in his own review and helped Sands and Verplanck edit their annual, ‘The Talisman.’ Somewhat later he edited Tales of the Glauber Spa (1832), the joint work of Sands, Leggett, Paulding, Miss Sedgwick, and himself.[1]

The ‘Review’ suffered from changes in the business management, and Bryant’s prospects became gloomy. At this juncture (1826) he was invited to act as assistant to William Coleman, editor of the ‘New York Evening Post.’ In 1828 he became ‘a small proprietor in the establishment,’ and when Coleman died (July, 1829) Bryant assumed the post of editor-in-chief and engaged as his assistant William Leggett, a young New Yorker who had shown a marked ability in conducting a weekly journal called ‘The Critic.’ ‘I like politics no better than you do’ (Bryant had written to Dana), ‘but ... politics and a bellyfull are better than poetry and starvation.’

His theory of the journalist’s function is well known. ‘He regarded himself as a trustee for the public.’[2] Party was much, and Bryant was a strong Democrat, but the people were greater than party.

Bryant’s handling of public questions belongs to political history. His lifelong fight against a protective tariff, his defence of Jackson’s policy respecting nullification and the United States Bank, his maintenance of the right to discuss slavery as freely as any other subject about which there is a difference of opinion, his insistence that the question of giving the franchise to negroes in the state of New York be settled on its merits and as a local matter with which neither Abolitionist nor slave-holder had anything to do, his determined stand against the annexation of Texas and enlargement of the area of slavery, his position on a multitude of questions which in his life as a public censor he found it necessary to defend or to attack—are fully set forth in the two biographies by his coadjutors.

From 1856 Bryant acted with the Republican party, giving his cordial support to Frémont and to Lincoln. He was a presidential elector in 1861. He advocated the election of Grant in 1868, and again in 1872, the latter time reluctantly ‘as the best thing attainable in the circumstances.’

To secure the independence and detachment that would enable him to judge measures fairly, Bryant avoided intercourse with public men, kept away from Washington, took no office, and was otherwise singular. In this way he at least secured a free pen. As to the tone of the comments on men in public life, Bryant approved the theory of a brother editor who maintained that nothing should be said which would make it impossible for him who wrote and him who was written about to meet at the same dinner-table the next day. It is not pretended, however, that he was uniformly controlled by this theory. What was the prevailing idea of his journalistic manner may be known from Felton’s review of The Fountain, in which he marvels that these beautiful poems can be the work of one ‘who deals with wrath, and dips his pen daily in bitterness and hate....’

Since 1821 no collection of Bryant’s verse had been made. Then after ten years he gathered together eighty-nine pieces, including the eight which had appeared in the pamphlet of 1821, and issued them as Poems, 1832. Through the friendly offices of Irving the book was reprinted in England with a dedicatory letter to Samuel Rogers. Notwithstanding favorable notices, both English and American, Bryant was despondent. ‘Poetic wares,’ he said, ‘are not for the market of the present day ... mankind are occupied with politics, railroads, and steamboats.’ But he found it necessary to reprint the volume in 1834 (with additional poems), and again in 1836.

His work in prose and verse after 1839 includes The Fountain and Other Poems, 1842; The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems, 1844; Poems, 1847; Letters of a Traveller, 1850; Poems, 1854; Letters from Spain, 1859; Thirty Poems, 1864; Letters from the East, 1869; The Iliad of Homer, translated into English blank verse, 1870; The Odyssey, 1871–72; Orations and Addresses, 1873; The Flood of Tears, 1878.

The introduction to the Library of Poetry and Song is from Bryant’s pen, as is also the preface to E. A. Duyckinck’s (still unpublished) edition of Shakespeare. His name appears as one of the authors of A Popular History of the United States (1876), together with that of Sydney Howard Gay, on whom fell the burden of the actual writing. It is unfortunate that no adequate reprint of Bryant’s political leaders has been made. As much ought to be done for him as Sedgwick did for Leggett.

Bryant found relief from the strain of editorial work in foreign travel. He was abroad with his family in 1834–36, visiting France, Italy, and Germany. He did his sight-seeing deliberately, spending a month in Rome, two months at Florence, three months in Munich, and so on. He had been four months at Heidelberg, when, says one of his biographers (in phrases which he never learned from Bryant), ‘His studious sojourn at this renowned seat of learning was interrupted by intelligence of the dangerous illness of his editorial colleague,’ and he returned home. During a visit to England in 1845 Bryant met Rogers, Moore, Herschel, Hallam, and Spedding, heard one of his own poems quoted at a Corn Law meeting, where among the speakers were Cobden and Bright, and carried a letter of introduction to Wordsworth from Henry Crabb Robinson. He made yet other journeys to Europe and to the East.

Notable among Bryant’s public addresses were the orations on Cooper (1852) and Irving (1860) delivered before the New York Historical Society. He was a founder and the third president of the Century Association, first president of the New York Homœopathic Society, president of the American Free Trade League, and member of literary and historical societies innumerable. He held no public office, but as time went on it might almost be said that an office was created for him—that of Representative American. He seemed the incarnation of virtues popularly supposed to have survived from an older and simpler time. He was a great public character. The word venerable acquired a new meaning as one reflected on the career of this eminent citizen who was born when Washington was president, who as a boy had written satires on Jefferson, and who as a man had discussed political questions from the administration of John Quincy Adams to that of Hayes. Other men were as old as he, Bryant seemed to have lived longer.

‘And when at last he fell, he fell as the granite column falls, smitten from without, but sound within.’[3] His death was the result of an accident. He gave the address at the unveiling of the statue of Mazzini in Central Park. Though wearied with the exertion and almost overcome by the heat, he was able to walk to the house of a friend. As he was about entering the door he fell backward, striking his head violently against the stone step. He never recovered from the effects of this fall, and died on June 12, 1878.

II
BRYANT’S CHARACTER

We seldom think of Bryant other than as he appears in the Sarony photograph of 1873. With the snowy beard, the furrowed brow, the sunken but keen eyes, a cloak thrown about the shoulders, he is the ideal poet of popular imagination. Thus must he have looked when he wrote ‘The Flood of Years,’ and it is difficult to realize that he did not look thus when he wrote ‘Thanatopsis.’ We do not readily picture Bryant as young or even middle-aged.

Parke Godwin saw him first about 1837. He had a ‘wearied, almost saturnine expression of countenance.’ He was spare in figure, of medium height, clean shaven, and had an ‘unusually large head.’ He spoke with decision, but could not be called a copious talker. His voice was noticeably sweet, his choice of words and accuracy of pronunciation remarkable. When anything was said to awaken mirth, his eyes gleamed with ‘a singular radiance and a short, quick, staccato but hearty laugh followed.’ He was more sociable when his wife and daughters were present than at other times. Bryant’s reserve was always a conspicuous trait.

Under that prim exterior lurked fire and passion. ‘In court he often lost his self-control.’ It was thought that Bryant might keep a promise he once made of thrashing a legal opponent within an inch of his life (‘if he ever says that again’) though the man was twice his size. Not long after he became editor-in-chief of the ‘Post’ Bryant cowhided a journalistic adversary who had bestowed upon him by name, ‘the most insulting epithet that can be applied to a human being.’[4] It was the only time his well-schooled temper outwitted him.

His friendships were strong and abiding. He had an inflexible will and a keen sense of justice, so keen that it drove him out of the law. No thought of personal ease or advantage could turn him from a course he had mapped out as right. He was generous. His benefactions were many and judicious, and the manner of their bestowal as unpretending as possible.

Bryant’s ‘unassailable dignity’ was a marked trait of character. He refused an invitation to a dinner given Charles Dickens by a ‘prominent citizen’ of New York. ‘That man,’ said Bryant, ‘has known me for years without asking me to his house, and I am not going to be made a stool-pigeon to attract birds of passage that may be flying about.’

He was perfectly simple-minded, incapable of assuming the air of famous poet or successful man of the world. Doubtless he relished praise, but he had an adroit way of putting compliments to one side, tempering the gratitude he really felt with an ironical humor.

III
THE LITERARY CRAFTSMAN

Bryant was a deliberate and fastidious writer. His literary executors could never have said of him that they found ‘neither blot nor erasure among his papers.’ His copy, written on the backs of old letters or rejected manuscripts, was a wilderness of interlineations and corrections, and often hard to decipher.

Famous as he was for correctness, it seems a mere debauch of eulogy to affirm that all of Bryant’s contributions to the ‘Evening Post’ do not contain ‘as many erroneous or defective forms of expression’ as ‘can be found in the first ten numbers of the Spectator.’ But there is little danger of overestimating his influence on the English of journalism during the forty years and more that he set the example of a high standard of daily writing. He was sparing of advice, though in earlier days he could not always conquer the temptation to amuse himself over the English of his brother editors.[5] It has been denied that he had any part in compiling the famous ‘index expurgatorius,’ but it is not unreasonable to suppose that this list, embodying traditions of the editorial office, had his approval. Bryant was for directness and precision in writing. Ideas must stand on their merits, if they have them, for such phrasing will define them perfectly.

His prose style may be studied in his books of travel and his addresses. The literary characteristic of Letters of a Traveller and its companion volumes is excessive plainness, a homely quality like that of a village pedagogue careful not to make mistakes. One is often reminded of the honest home-spun prose of Henry Wansey’s Excursion to the United States.

Turning to the volume of Orations and Addresses, the reader finds himself in another world. Bryant’s memorial orations are among the best of their kind, stately, uplifting, and at times even majestic. They belong to a type of composition which lies midway between oratory and literature and unites certain characteristics of each. Written primarily to be heard, and adapted to public utterance, they are also meant to be read. They must stand the test of the ear and then that of the eye. The listener must find his account in them as they come from the lips of the orator, and he who afterward turns at leisure the pages of the printed report must be satisfied. Bryant’s speeches are markedly ‘literary;’ and though oratorical they are wholly free from bombast. Poet though he was, he built no cloud-capped towers of rhetoric.

Coming now to his verse, we find that his poetic flights, though lofty, were neither frequent nor long continued. Apparently he was incapable of writing much or often. This seems true even after allowance is made for his busy and exacting life as a journalist. For years together he composed but a few lines in each year.

His theory fitted his own limitations. Bryant maintained that there is no such thing as a long poem, that what are commonly called long poems are in reality a succession of short poems united by poetical links. The paradox grows out of the vagueness attaching to the words ‘length’ and ‘poem.’ Exactly what a poem is, we shall never know. That is a shadowy line which divides poetry from verse. And there is no term so unmeaning as length. When does a poem begin to be long—is it when the poet has achieved a hundred verses or a thousand, when he has written six cantos or twelve?

To say, as Bryant is reported to have said, that ‘a long poem is no more conceivable than a long ecstasy,’ is to make all poetry dependent on an ecstatic condition. And it reduces all poetic temperaments to the same level. Why may not poetry be an outcome of ‘the true enthusiasm that burns long’?

Bryant showed skill in handling a variety of metrical forms; it is unsafe to say that he excelled only in blank verse. With declared partisanship for the short poem, he nevertheless did not cultivate the sonnet. Up to the time he was fifty-eight years of age he had written but twelve, and for some of these he apologized, saying, ‘they are rather poems in fourteen lines than sonnets.’

Comparing the length of his life with the slenderness of his poetical product, we are tempted to bring against this eminent man the charge of wilful unproductiveness. This reluctance, or inertia, or whatever it may be called, has helped to give the impression of a lack of spontaneity. We are aware of the effort through the very exactness with which the thing has been done. Bryant resembled certain pianists who plead as excuse for not playing, a lack of recent practice. When after repeated urgings one of the reluctant brotherhood ‘consents to favor us,’ he plays with precision enough but rarely with abandon. The conscious and over-solicitous artist shows in every note.

If much writing has its drawbacks, it also has its value. And the poet who sings frequently cannot offer as a reason for not performing, the excuse that his lyre has not been out of the case for weeks, and that in all probability a string is broken.

IV
THE POET

The fine stanzas entitled ‘The Poet’ contain Bryant’s theory of his art. The framing of a deathless poem is not the pastime of a drowsy summer’s day.

No smooth array of phrase,

Artfully sought and ordered though it be,

Which the cold rhymer lays

Upon his page with languid industry,

Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed,

Or fill with sudden tears the eyes that read.

The secret wouldst thou know

To touch the heart or fire the blood at will?

Let thine own eyes o’erflow;

Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill;

Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past,

And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast.

* * * * *

Yet let no empty gust

Of passion find an utterance in thy lay,

A blast that whirls the dust

Along the howling street and dies away;

But feelings of calm power and mighty sweep,

Like currents journeying through the windless deep.

This is flat contradiction of the idea that entirely self-conscious and self-controlled art can avail to move the reader. Bryant pleads for deepest feeling in exercise of the poetic function; it is more than important, it is indispensable. Of that striking poem ‘The Tides,’ he said ‘it was written with a certain awe upon me which made me hope that there might be something in it.’ The poem proved to be one of Bryant’s noblest conceptions. Yet a lady of ‘judgment’ told one of Bryant’s friends, who of course told him, that she did not think there was much in it.

Nature appeals to Bryant in her broad and massive aspects. ‘The Prairies’ is an illustration. Gazing on the ‘encircling vastness’ for the first time, the heart swells and the eye dilates in an effort to comprehend it:—

Lo! they stretch,

In airy undulations, far away,

As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,

Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,

And motionless forever.

As the poet looks abroad over the vast and glowing fields, there sweeps by him a vision of the races that have peopled these solitudes and perished to make room for races to come. It is magnificent even if it is not scientific. In the sense it gives of the spaciousness of the prairies with the myriad sounds of life projected on the great elemental silence, it is a true American poem.

‘A Hymn of the Sea’ is another illustration of that largeness of view characteristic of Bryant. Each thought is lofty and far-reaching. The cloud that rises from the ‘realm of rain’ shadows whole countries, the tornado wrecks a fleet, whirling the vast hulks ‘like chaff upon the waves:’—

These restless surges eat away the shores

Of earth’s old continents; the fertile plain

Welters in shallows, headlands crumble down,

And the tide drifts the sea-sand in the streets

Of the drowned city.

He conveys the idea not only of spaciousness but of endless duration in the lines describing the coral worm laying his ‘mighty reefs,’ toiling from ‘age to age’ until

His bulwarks overtop the brine, and check

The long wave rolling from the southern pole

To break upon Japan.

Certain lines in ‘A Forest Hymn’ are also remarkable for the sense they give of vast reaches of time, stretching not forward but backward into eternity:—

These lofty trees

Wave not less proudly that their ancestors

Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost

One of earth’s charms: upon her bosom yet,

After the flight of untold centuries,

The freshness of her far beginning lies

And yet shall lie.

The ‘Song of the Stars,’ though not one of Bryant’s happiest poems,—the hypercritical reader feeling that the ‘orbs of beauty’ and ‘spheres of flame’ might have made a more appropriate metrical choice for their song,—shows none the less the poet’s strength in dealing with nature in the large. The lines ‘To a Waterfowl’ are magical in part by virtue of the impression they make of immense distance. With the poet’s penetrating vision we can see the solitary way through the rosy depths, the pathless coast, and the one bit of life in

The desert and illimitable air.

Bryant’s mind readily lifts itself from the minute to the massive, as in the poem ‘Summer Wind,’ a fine example of the crescendo effects he knew so well how to produce. In a few lines he gives the sensation of heat, closeness, exhaustion, and pictures the plants drooping in a stillness broken only by the ‘faint and interrupted murmur of the bee.’ His thought then sweeps upward to the wooded hills towering in scorching heat and dazzling light, and then still higher to the bright clouds,

Motionless pillars of the brazen heaven—

Their bases on the mountains—their white tops

Shining in the far ether....

The poet never wearies of this majestic pageantry of the natural world. In ‘The Firmament,’ in ‘The Hurricane’ (imitated from Heredia), in ‘Monument Mountain,’ his chief thought is to translate the reader to his own lofty vantage-ground.

But Nature is not merely a spectacle, it has a power to heal and invigorate. Life loses its pettiness when one leaves the city and seeks the forest. The holy men who hid themselves ‘deep in the woody wilderness’ perhaps did not well—

But let me often to these solitudes

Retire, and in thy presence reassure

My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,

The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink

And tremble and are still.

The poet finds inspiration not alone in the terror of the storm, the majesty of the forest, the gray waste of ocean, the mystery of the night of stars, but in the humbler things, the rivulet by which he played as a child, the violet growing on its bank, the hum of bees, the notes of hang-bird and wren, the gossip of swallows, and the gay chirp of the ground squirrel. ‘The Yellow Violet’ and the lines ‘To the Fringed Gentian’ spring from this love of the unobtrusive charms of Nature. Less familiar than these, but a faultless example of Bryant’s art, is ‘The Painted Cup:’—

... tell me not

That these bright chalices were tinted thus

To hold the dew for fairies, when they meet

On moonlight evenings in the hazel bowers,

And dance till they are thirsty.

The poet will not call up ‘faded fancies of an ‘elder world.’ If the fresh savannahs must be peopled with creatures of imagination, it may be done without borrowing European elves:—

Let then the gentle Manitou of flowers,

Lingering among the bloomy waste he loves,

Though all his swarthy worshippers are gone—

Slender and small, his rounded cheek all brown

And ruddy with the sunshine; let him come

On summer mornings, when the blossoms wake,

And part with little hands the spiky grass,

And touching, with his cherry lips, the edge

Of these bright beakers, drain the gathered dew.

Bryant wrote poems of freedom. The earlier of these, ‘The Song of the Greek Amazon,’ the ‘Massacre at Scio,’ the ‘Greek Partisan,’ and ‘Italy,’ voice his sympathy with the oppressed nations of the Old World, the ‘struggling multitude of states,’ that ‘writhe in shackles.’

Among his later poems on the same theme, ‘Earth,’ ‘The Winds,’ ‘The Antiquity of Freedom,’ and ‘The Battle Field’ are representative. The first three with their many stately lines show how spontaneously his thought, even when nature is not the subject, grows out of the contemplation of nature and then returns to such contemplation as to a resting place. ‘The Battle Field,’ the expression of a noble faith in the outcome of ‘a friendless warfare,’ contains the most inspiring of his quatrains, as it is one of the best contributions made by an American poet to the stock of quotable English verse:—

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;

The eternal years of God are hers;

But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,

And dies among his worshippers.

His patriotic poems are few in number, but Bryant’s reticence must be taken into account. Coming from him, the verses mean more than if they came from another. Two of the best are ‘Oh Mother of a mighty Race’ and ‘Not Yet.’ The second of these, written in July, 1861, has a finely imaginative stanza in which are pictured the dead monarchies of the past eager to welcome another broken and ruined land among their number:—

Not yet the hour is nigh when they

Who deep in Eld’s dim twilight sit,

Earth’s ancient kings, shall rise and say,

“Proud country, welcome to the pit!

So soon art thou like us brought low!”

No, sullen group of shadows, No!

To the same year belong the spirited verses ‘Our Country’s Call:’—

Strike to defend the gentlest sway

That Time in all his course has seen.

* * * * *

Few, few were they whose swords of old

Won the fair land in which we dwell;

But we are many, we who hold

The grim resolve to guard it well.

Strike, for that broad and goodly land,

Blow after blow, till men shall see

That Might and Right move hand in hand,

And glorious must their triumph be!

Such was the temper of men who had looked with philosophic composure and curiosity on the movements of the sometimes well-nigh frenzied abolitionists. The blow at the integrity of the nation fired their cool patriotism to white heat.

What lightness of touch Bryant had is shown in that exquisite lyric ‘The Stream of Life.’ He could be conventional, as in the love poem where he celebrates ‘the gentle season’ when ‘nymphs relent,’ and very sensibly advises the young lady ’ere her bloom is past, to secure her lover.’ He was not strong in wit or humor. The verses ‘To a Mosquito’ might have been read with good effect to a party of well-fed clubmen after dinner, but finding them in the same volume with ‘A Forest Hymn’ gives one an uncomfortable surprise, like finding a pun in Lowell’s Cathedral. That Bryant could write agreeable narrative verse, ‘The Children of the Snow’ and ‘Sella’ bear witness. That he is at his best in meditative poems, lofty characterizations of Nature, grand visions of Life and Death, is proved by hundreds of felicitous verses which have become an inalienable part of our young literature.

He never really excelled the work of his youth. Bryant will always be known as the author of ‘Thanatopsis.’ This great vision of Death is his stateliest poem and his best, the most felicitous of phrase and the loftiest in imagery. Written by a stoic, magnificently stoical in tone, it offers but a stoic’s comfort after all. Perhaps this is a secret of its popularity, on the theory that while professed pagans are few the instinct towards paganism still exists, and most among those who say least about it.

V
LATEST POETICAL WORK THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY

The collected edition of Bryant’s poems of 1854 contains a handful of translations, twelve from the Spanish, four from the German, one each from the French, the Provençal, the Portuguese, and the Greek. In 1864 a translation of the fifth book of the Odyssey was printed in the volume entitled Thirty Poems. The praise which it called out gave Bryant the impulse to further experiments of the same sort; and after the death of his wife (in 1866), when the necessity was upon him of forgetting his grief so far as possible in some engrossing work, he undertook a version of the Iliad and the Odyssey entire.

He gave himself methodically to the task, translating about forty lines a day. Later he increased the daily stint to seventy-five lines. He chose blank verse because ‘the use of rhyme in a translation is a constant temptation to petty infidelities.’

Bryant retained the misleading Latin forms of proper names. Worsley says: ‘Not even Mr. Gladstone’s example can now make Juno, Mercury, and Venus admissible in Homeric story.’ But Worsley confessed his own inability to write Phoibos, Apollôn, and Kirké. Bryant’s argument for his course looks specious: ‘I was translating from Greek into English, and I therefore translated the names of the gods, as well as the other parts of the poem.’ Probably he had an affection for the old nomenclature, a sentiment like Macaulay’s, who ‘never could reconcile himself to seeing the friends of his boyhood figure as Kleon, and Alkibiadês, and Poseidôn, and Odysseus.’[6]

An enthusiastic admirer of Bryant declares that in the opinion of ‘competent critics’ his versions of Homer ‘will hold their own with the translations of Pope, Chapman, Newman, or the late Earl Derby.’ Much depends on the question of what a ‘competent critic’ is, and which one of several competent critics is to be taken as final authority. Competent critics, who, by the way, seldom agree, have a habit of agreeing on anything sooner than the merits of a version of Homer. And when one remembers the fearful attack made by Matthew Arnold on Newman (‘Any vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely regret’)—he may well hesitate to take as a compliment the statement that Bryant will ‘hold his own’ with Newman.

The question of the higher merit of the poem rests with the experts at last. Pessimists all, they are discouragingly hostile to metrical versions of the Iliad. Yet the most uncompromising of them would hardly deny a lay reader the privilege of enjoying Homer, in so far as possible, through the medium of Bryant’s blank verse. They might even be persuaded to admit that this version has a peculiar adaptability to the needs of the public; that the clarity and beauty of the English, the dignified ease of the measure, the sustained energy and vigor of the performance as a whole, fit Bryant’s Homer in a high degree to the use for which it was intended. The argument from popularity, that always unsafe and often vicious argument, has a measure of force here. Granting that Homer in any honest translation is better than no Homer at all, may not the uncompromising scholars be called on to rejoice that this more than honest, nay, this admirable translation of the Iliad has sold to the extent of many thousands of copies? Where there are so many buyers, there must be readers not a few.

* * * * *

Bryant was one of those unusual men who have two distinct callings. Much surprise has been expressed at his apparent ability to carry on his functions of journalist and poet without clash. But is it true, or more than superficially true, that he did so carry them on? To be sure, he wrote his editorial articles at the newspaper office and his verses elsewhere, but this is a mere mechanical distinction. A man of Bryant’s depth of conviction and passionate temperament does not throw off care when he boards a suburban train for his country home.

The history of Bryant’s inner life has not been written, perhaps cannot be. This is not to imply that his character was enigmatic and mysterious, but merely to emphasize the fact of his extraordinary reserve. More than most self-contained men he kept his own counsel. Such a history would show how deep his experience of the world had ploughed into him, and it might explain in a degree the remote and stoical character of his verse.

Bryant’s poetical work as a whole has an impassive quality often described as coldness. Partly due to his genius and accentuated by the excessive retouching to which he subjected his verse, it grew in still larger measure out of his determination not to impart to his verse any of the feverishness of spirit consequent upon a life of political warfare. The poet held himself wonderfully in check, as a man of iron will allows no mark of the strong passion under which he labors to show in his face. Bryant was rarely betrayed into so much of personal feeling as flashed out in that bitter stanza of ‘The Future Life:’—

For me the sordid cares in which I dwell,

Shrink and consume my heart, as heat the scroll;

And wrath has left its scar—that fire of hell

Has left its scar upon my soul.

While the detachment was not complete, Bryant undoubtedly kept his poetic apart from his secular life in a way to command admiration. This he accomplished by extraordinary self-restraint. As a part of the varied and long-continued discipline to which he subjected himself, the self-restraint made for character. The question, however, arises whether the poetry did not, in certain ways, suffer under the very discipline by which the character developed.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Bryant’s contributions were the stories entitled ‘Medfield’ and ‘The Skeleton’s Cave.’ As originally planned the book was to have been called The Sextad, but Verplanck, who would have made the sixth author, withdrew.

[2] John Bigelow.

[3] W. C. Bronson.

[4] Bryant’s apology to the public for his course, together with Leggett’s statement as an eye-witness, will be found in the ‘Evening Post’ of Thursday, April 21, 1831. Neither the guarded account of the episode in Godwin’s Bryant, nor the brief notice in Haswell’s Reminiscences of an Octogenarian is quite accurate.

[5] As in an ironical leader commending journalists who refuse to say that a man ‘was drowned,’ a dangerous innovation, and, ‘to preserve the purity of their mother tongue,’ stick to time-honored metaphors and say that the man ‘found a watery grave.’—‘Evening Post,’ August 17, 1831.

[6] G. O. Trevelyan.

III
James Fenimore Cooper

REFERENCES:

W. C. Bryant: A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper, 1852.

T. R. Lounsbury: James Fenimore Cooper, ‘American Men of Letters,’ fourth edition, 1884.

W. B. Shubrick Clymer: James Fenimore Cooper, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1900.

I
HIS LIFE

James Cooper was the eleventh of the twelve children of William and Elizabeth (Fenimore) Cooper, of Burlington, New Jersey. He was born in that picturesque town by the Delaware on September 15, 1789. The name James, given him in honor of his grandfather, had also been borne by his first American ancestor, who is said to have come from Stratford-on-Avon, in 1679. In fulfilment of a promise to his mother (whose family had become extinct in the male line), the novelist, in 1826, changed his name to Fenimore-Cooper.

At the close of the Revolutionary War, William Cooper acquired large tracts of land on Otsego Lake in New York, settled there in 1790, founded the village still known as Cooperstown, and built for himself a stately home to which he gave the name of Otsego Hall. He was the first judge of the county and a member of Congress, a man of strong character and agreeable address.[7]

Cooper’s boyhood was passed amid picturesque natural surroundings, on the edge of civilization, the scene of The Deerslayer and The Pioneers. He attended the village school, prepared for college with the rector of St. Peter’s Church, Albany, entered Yale in the second term of the Freshman year (Class of 1806), and was dismissed in the Junior year for some boyish escapade the nature of which is unexplained.

It was decided that he should enter the navy. There was then no training school, and boys took the first lessons in seamanship in the merchant marine. Cooper spent a year before the mast in the ‘Sterling,’ sailing from New York to London, thence to Gibraltar, back to London, and from London to Philadelphia. His experiences are set forth in the early chapters of Ned Myers. The ‘Sterling’ lost two of her best hands by impressment as soon as she reached English waters. Cooper’s indignation at these outrages afterwards found voice through the lips of Ithuel Bolt in the story entitled Wing-and-Wing.

He was commissioned midshipman on January 1, 1808, and served awhile on the ‘Vesuvius.’ In the following winter he was one of the party sent to Oswego to build a brig for the defence of the lake, and became acquainted with the regions described in The Pathfinder. In the summer of 1809 he had charge of the gun-boats on Lake Champlain, and in the autumn was ordered to the sloop of war ‘Wasp.’

He left the service on his betrothal with Miss Susan DeLancey of Mamaroneck, New York, whom he married on January 1, 1811. For a few years he lived the life of a landed proprietor, dividing his time between Cooperstown, Scarsdale, and Mamaroneck. The dulness of a novel he was reading aloud to his wife provoked him to say that he could write a better one himself. Challenged to prove it, he produced Precaution (1820), a story of English life, following conventional lines. It was apprentice work. The effort of composition taught Cooper that he could write, but not that he could write well. He had no conceit of the book, and refused it a place in his collected writings.

In 1821 The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground, was published; its unqualified good fortune made Cooper a professed man of letters. From that time on until his death, twenty-nine years later, he produced books with uninterrupted regularity.

The Spy was followed by The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna, 1823; The Pilot, a Tale of the Sea, 1824; Lionel Lincoln, or the Leaguer of Boston, 1825; The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757, 1826. But one of this group of four can be pronounced a failure and two have had a success almost phenomenal in the history of letters.

Cooper shared the American passion for seeing foreign lands. The proceeds of authorship enabled him to carry out a plan he had formed of spending some time abroad. With his family and servants (a party of ten in all), he set sail from New York on June 1, 1826. He proposed to be gone five years. He overstayed that time by two years and five months. From May, 1826, to about January, 1829, he held the ‘nominal position’ of American consul at Lyons. His journeyings were made in a leisurely way after the fashion of the time. Eighteen months were spent in Paris and the vicinity, four months in London, and a few weeks in Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland. The winter of 1828–29 was passed in Florence, and was followed by a voyage to Naples. After spending some months at Sorrento and Naples, he settled in Rome for the winter of 1829–30. Thence to Venice, Munich, Dresden, and finally back to Paris.

He published while abroad The Prairie, 1827; The Red Rover, 1828; Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor, 1828; The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, 1829; The Water-Witch, or the Skimmer of the Seas, 1830; The Bravo, 1831; The Heidenmauer, or the Benedictines, 1832; The Headsman, or the Abbaye des Vignerons, 1833.

In November, 1833, Cooper returned to America. That and several ensuing winters were passed in New York, the summers in Cooperstown. Later he made Otsego Hall his permanent home.

He soon became embroiled in quarrels with the press. While in Paris his defence of Lafayette’s position in what is known as the ‘Expenses Controversy’ had provoked from his native land criticism which Cooper resented. He angered a part of the inhabitants of Cooperstown by making clear to them that Three Mile Point (a wooded tract on the lake, long used by the villagers as a picnic ground) was not theirs, as they maintained, but a part of the Cooper estate. With no thought of robbing them of their pleasure park, he insisted on their understanding that they enjoyed its use by favor and not by right.

For this the country papers assailed him. Combative by nature, Cooper brought suits for libel and recovered damages. The novel spectacle of an author baiting the newspapers ‘caused remark.’ The city press joined in the attack, the ‘Courier and Enquirer,’ the ‘New York Tribune,’ the ‘Albany Evening Journal,’ edited by Thurlow Weed, who once said apropos of his skill in stirring up litigation: ‘There is something in my manner of writing that makes the galled jades wince.’ Verdicts were given in Cooper’s favor. More libels followed, more suits were brought, more damages recovered. A cry arose that the liberty of the press was endangered. Cooper did not think so. He was a bulldog; when he had once fastened his teeth in a Whig editor, nothing could make him let go. He continued his prosecutions until he made his detractors respect him. It took about six years to do it. Bryant has described with grim humor the novelist’s warfare with that leviathan the Press: ‘He put a hook into the nose of this huge monster,’ said Bryant admiringly.[8]

This warfare disturbed Cooper’s peace of mind, but in no wise interrupted his literary activity. The following list records by no means all that he wrote after 1834, but will suffice to show his right copious and often happy industry. Besides ten volumes of travels, Cooper published: A Letter to his Countrymen, 1834; The Monikins, 1835; The American Democrat, 1838; Homeward Bound, or the Chase, 1838; Home as Found, 1838; The History of the Navy of the United States of America, 1839; The Pathfinder, or the Inland Sea, 1840; Mercedes of Castile, or the Voyage to Cathay, 1840; The Deerslayer, or the First War Path, 1841; The Two Admirals, 1842; The Wing-and-Wing, or Le Feu-Follet, 1842; Wyandotté, or the Hutted Knoll, 1843; Ned Meyers, or a Life before the Mast, 1843; Afloat and Ashore, or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford, 1844; Miles Wallingford (the second part of Afloat and Ashore), 1844; Satanstoe, or the Littlepage Manuscripts, 1845; The Chainbearer, or the Littlepage Manuscripts, 1846; Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, 1846; The Redskins, or Indian and Injin, 1846; The Crater, or Vulcan’s Peak, 1847; Jack Tier, or the Florida Reefs, 1848; The Oak Openings, or the Bee Hunter, 1848; The Sea Lions, or the Lost Sealers, 1849; The Ways of the Hour, 1850.

The Spy was dramatized and played successfully.[9] Dramatizations were also made of The Pilot, The Red Rover, The Water-Witch, The Pioneers (‘The Wigwam, or Templeton Manor’), and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (‘Miantonomah and Narrahmattah’). An original comedy, ‘Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats,’[10] was withdrawn after four performances. No satisfactory account exists of Cooper’s earnings by literature. It is believed that in the later years he was obliged to write, if not for the necessities of life, at least for the comforts and luxuries.

The hostility provoked by his energetic criticisms subsided in time. There was even a project on foot in New York to pay him the compliment of a public dinner as a proof of returning confidence. His untimely illness put to one side the question of honors of this poor sort.

Cooper died at Otsego Hall on September 14, 1851.

II
HIS CHARACTER

Cooper was a democrat in theory but not in practice. The rude ‘feudalism’ in which his boyhood was passed fostered the aristocratic sentiment. A residence abroad, in the obsequious atmosphere with which the serving classes invest any one who has the appearance of wealth, aggravated it. No one could have been more heartily ‘American’ than Cooper; but he made distinctions and his countrymen abhorred the distinctions.

Pride of this not unreasonable sort may go hand in hand with genuine modesty. Cooper was more unpretentious than his enemies were willing to allow. With a reputation that would have opened many doors he made no capital of it; he had no mind ‘to thrust himself on all societies.’

He was never slow to make use of the inalienable American privilege of speaking one’s mind. In 1835 the theory of the entire perfection of the American character was seldom challenged, at least by a native writer. That Cooper should entertain doubts on the subject was thought monstrous. It was resented in him the more because of his manner. Opinions quite as radical might have been uttered wittily and the end accomplished. Cooper had little wit. His touch was heavy and he was in dead earnest. He lacked neither courage, nor honesty, nor highmindedness, nor generosity, nor yet judgment (if his temper was unruffled), but he was entirely wanting in tact, and largely wanting in geniality of the useful, if superficial, sort, which lessens the wear and tear of human intercourse.

A philosopher divides famous men into two classes: those who are admired in their own homes (as well as in the world), and those who are admired anywhere but at home. Cooper belonged to the first class rather than the second. This proud, irascible, contentious, dogmatic man of letters enjoyed the unswerving loyalty and deep affection of every member of his family. And from this his biographer argues an essential sweetness of nature.

Cooper somewhere says: ‘Men are as much indebted to a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances for the characters they sustain in this world, as to their personal qualities.’ It was his ill-luck to have the accidents of his character often mistaken for the character itself.

III
THE WRITER

Cooper’s English at best, though fluent and spirited, is without grace; at worst it is clumsy and intractable. This writer of world-wide fame is singularly wanting in literary finish. He is not careless but colorless, not slovenly but neutral. He succeeds almost without the aid of what is commonly called ‘style.’ He is read for what he has to say, not for the way in which he says it. There are surprises in store for the reader, but they are not to be found in the perfect word, the happy phrase, or the balance of a sentence, but always in the unexpected turn of an adventure, in a well-planned episode abounding in incident, in the release of mental tension following the happy issue out of danger. As was said of another copious writer, ‘he weaves a loose web;’ one might add that it is often of coarse fibre. In few writers of eminence is form so subservient to contents. The defect was due to haste, to the natural and lordly contempt of a spontaneous story-teller for the niceties of rhetoric.

IV
ROMANCES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION THE SPY, LIONEL LINCOLN

Life in that unhappy strip of country known during the Revolution as ‘the neutral ground,’ Westchester County, New York, is the subject of The Spy. Here frequent and bloody encounters took place between skirmishers from the opposing armies. Marauding bands, ostensibly ‘loyal’ or ‘patriotic,’ though often composed of banditti, made life a misery and a terror to peaceably inclined householders. Cooper wrote from first-hand traditions. The family of his wife had been loyalists, and the most famous of Westchester County raiders was a DeLancey.

The chief character is Harvey Birch, the Spy. Professing to be in the employ of the British, he is the most trusted of Washington’s secret agents. His devotion to his chief is a passion, almost a religion. Mean of appearance, niggardly in his mode of life, he is capable of the last degree of personal sacrifice. His patriotism is of the most exalted kind, since it can have no proportionate reward. He must live (perchance die) detested by the people for whom he risks his life daily. Cooper makes us deeply interested in this uncouth being, who, persecuted to the point of despair, and even brought to the gallows, finds always a way of escape. Birch gambled with his life in stake. It was a desperate throw when he destroyed the bit of paper signed by Washington.