Chapter V: Part 5

_John Lothrop Motley._--Bancroft, Prescott, Motley (1814-77), and Parkman were all born and reared in the vicinity of Boston, and all were graduated from Harvard University. Motley and Bancroft continued their studies at Göttingen and Berlin. While in Germany, Motley enjoyed the friendship of Prince Bismarck, who was his fellow-student. “We lived,” said Bismarck, “in the closest intimacy, sharing meals and outdoor exercise.” In 1841 Motley was appointed secretary to the American Legation at St. Petersburg; but he soon relinquished the post and returned to America. Ten years later he took up his residence in Europe, where he remained for half a decade pursuing historical studies. At the end of this time (1856) appeared “The Rise of the Dutch Republic: A History.” In 1860 came the first two volumes of “The History of the United Netherlands,” and in 1868 the last two. The continuation of the Dutch history came out in biographical form (1874) as “The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years’ War.” Meanwhile, Motley had been appointed to the American Ministry to Austria (1861) and to England (1869). Both appointments ended unhappily. An interesting circumstance connects Motley’s career with Prescott’s and, indirectly, with Washington Irving’s. With noble generosity, Irving had abandoned his well-formed plan of writing a Conquest of Mexico when he learned, through a common friend, of Prescott’s intentions in the same field. This act involved real sacrifice. “I had,” Irving afterward confesses, “no other subject at hand to supply its place. I was dismounted from my _cheval de bataille_, and have never been completely mounted since.” Prescott was presently to realise the cost of Irving’s surrender. For Motley, in turn, essayed to enter the field made illustrious by the author of “Ferdinand and Isabella.” In ignorance of Prescott’s plans for “The History of Philip,” Motley began his study of related subjects. The news then came to him as a blow. “For I had not,” Motley says, “first made up my mind to write a history, and then cast about to take up a subject. My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself.” Prescott listened to the younger man’s proposal to retire, “with frank, ready, and liberal sympathy,” and insisted that Motley should proceed. More than this, he made handsome allusion, in the Preface to his “Philip,” to the forthcoming work on the revolt of the Netherlands. Motley wrote with zeal and enthusiasm. He loved liberty. The story of a people fighting for freedom fired his imagination. His ardour led him, naturally, toward the advocacy of favourite characters and parties; and the greater moderation of the Dutch historians themselves tends to support the charge of partiality. But Motley’s partiality was not mere partisanship. It rested upon a nice discrimination of the good and the bad, of the noble and the mean. His Dutch history is classic. It is renowned for its scholarly qualities and for its vivid colouring. Froude, without previous knowledge of the writer or of his work, placed “The Rise of the Dutch Republic” among “the finest histories in this or in any language.” While, by the more exacting standards of current schools, it is criticised for its lack of philosophical insight, it is still justly regarded as a faithful and striking picture of an heroic people.

_Francis Parkman._--The New England School had told the story of the Spaniard in America and in the Netherlands. It was further to enrich its native literature by another brilliant history of the struggle for conquest of a great nation in foreign lands. Parkman (1823-93) is the historian of the rise and decline of France’s power in North America. Like Motley, he was captivated by an impressive and dramatic cycle of events, and--again like Motley--he possessed breadth of vision and tenacity of purpose sufficient to his task. Parkman had a passion for the wilderness;--a passion which he fed in youth and early manhood by excursions, large and small, to the woods, the prairies, and the mountains. In his twenties, he appears, a picturesque figure in the great West, living and hunting with Indians, eating pemmican, and playing host at a feast of dog-meat and tea. In spite of outdoor life and travel, Parkman was seldom well. A serious affection of the eyes, and nervous troubles which may have emanated from it, kept him, from his undergraduate days, either incapacitated or on the border-line of invalidism. He was tortured till his death by pain, lameness, insomnia, and at times almost complete blindness. His suffering and infirmities recall Prescott. It is not easy to decide which of the two men struggled more heroically against overwhelming odds. As early as his sophomore year at Harvard, Parkman planned to write the history of the “Old French War” for the conquest of Canada; “for here, as it seems to me,”--so he writes--“the forest drama was more stirring and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any other passage of our history.” “The Oregon Trail”--an account of his adventures on the great plains and beyond--began to appear in _The Knickerbocker Magazine_ in 1847, and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac” came out in 1851. Later, the plan widened to include the whole course of the conflict in America between France and England. The result was a series of books unexcelled in western historiography: “The Pioneers of France in the New World” (1865), “The Jesuits in North America” (1867), “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West” (1869), “The Old Régime” (1874), “Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV” (1877), “Montcalm and Wolfe” (1884), and, finally, “A Half-Century of Conflict” (1892). The series received the general title, “France and England in North America.” In his “Montcalm and Wolfe,” Parkman reached the height of his fame. Wretched health turned the author’s attention to horticultural diversions. In 1871 he was appointed professor of horticulture in Harvard University; in 1866 he published his famous “Book of Roses.” His intimate knowledge of the scenes and peoples of whom he wrote and an engaging and finished manner impart to his historical books an unusual vivacity and charm. His work, while it is, as he intended, “a history of the American forest,” is also the history of two powerful and opposing systems of civilisation--“feudal, militant, and Catholic France in conflict with democratic, industrial, and Protestant England.” Less impulsive than Motley and less serene than Prescott, Parkman possessed at once the ardour and the restraint necessary to the vivid and impartial rendering of a glowing theme vastly important in the history of the New World. Himself cast in an heroic mould and exhibiting a fine type of the Puritan spirit, he was at home among chivalrous men and bold and impressive deeds. Jameson, writing of him shortly before his work was finished (see “The History of Historical Writing in America,” 1891), declares him to be, “next after one or two who survived from the preceding period, the most conspicuous figure in the American historiography of the last twenty-five years, the only historian who can fairly be called classical.”

=Recent Historical Writings.=--Since the Civil War America has been prolific in historical records. General histories and local histories abound; histories of administrations, of periods, of popular movements, indefatigable and scholarly researches in politics, war, finance, and social and economic institutions. The literary value of these records is not, however, to be inconsiderately judged from their bulk. Times and standards in American historiography have changed. Among the multitude of authors one must not look for many names which may be written down with those of Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. Not that the modern period is wanting in good work or able writers. These are to be found in abundance. But most of the work belongs to science and not to letters; and besides, eminence is not fostered by the catholic distribution of talent and training. Jameson picks up Amiel’s blunt opinion that “the era of mediocrity in all things is commencing” and applies it to American historians. At the same time, this wise critic inclines to the belief that the vast improvement in technical process and workmanship realised within the present generation is the natural means to the development of a more substantial and more profound school of historians than the West has thus far created. The term “mediocrity” does not, indeed, do full justice to the period and the authors in question, and we must seek other grounds of excuse for the brevity of our review of them. These grounds are found, first, in the indirect importance to literature of the great mass of recent work, and, secondly, in the impossibility of setting the achievements of contemporary workers in just perspective.

The writers, great and little, of the periods already surveyed were, in large measure, self-trained. Until the last two or three decades, colleges and universities offered little incentive to methodical work upon historical subjects. Even Harvard, from whose doors went one after another the men who were to make the New England School famous, taught history only incidentally. Now, an academic school has arisen. Young men and women are trained in undergraduate and graduate studies by teachers who are themselves historical writers and investigators. Students are taught the discriminating use of historical instruments, and sound methods of reconstruction and interpretation. The change has been wrought under the unequal pressure of external influence, emphasis laid upon scientific method, a quickened consciousness of the importance and dignity of American history, and, finally, the example of those graceful and inspiring writers who gave to Western historiography an honourable place in the world’s literature. The academic school owes its existence to no single founder. It is, by its nature, a school of coöperative endeavour,--coöperation, first, between teacher and pupil, and coöperation, later, in the conjoint and organised labour of productive hands and brains. Among its early advocates and promoters were Charles Kendall Adams, university professor and president, teacher and historian, who adapted the German seminary method to the American university; Henry Adams, professor at Harvard University and author of a brilliant history in nine volumes (1889-91) of the country under Jefferson and Madison (1801-17); Justin Winsor, librarian, bibliographer, and editor of the useful and scholarly “Narrative and Critical History of America” (1884-89), and Herbert Baxter Adams, of Johns Hopkins, historian and instructor of historical students. The coöperative labours of the period have borne abundant fruit. Besides Winsor’s volumes should be mentioned “The American Nation: a History from Original Sources by Associated Scholars,” a gigantic work in twenty-seven volumes just finished (1904-8) under the editorship of Albert Bushnell Hart. The authorship is divided among a number of competent historical writers. The collection lays claim to being “the first comprehensive history of the United States, now completed, which covers the whole period” from the discovery of America to the present. Similar undertakings are, however, in progress, and a number of coöperative works of smaller scope are already in print. Other notable histories covering comparatively long periods of time are Edward Channing’s “A History of the United States,” to be completed in eight volumes; a series of nine volumes relating to preconstitutional times written by John Fiske, after the manner of Parkman, and including “The Critical Period of American History” (1888), “The Beginnings of New England” (1889), “The American Revolution” (1891), “The Discovery of America” (1892), etc.; James Schouler’s “History of the United States under the Constitution” (1880-99); “A Popular History of the United States” (1876-81), by William Cullen Bryant and Sydney H. Gay; “A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War” (6 of the 7 volumes published, 1883-1906), by John B. McMaster; “The Constitutional and Political History of the United States,” (1877-92), by Hermann E. von Holst, and “A History of the American People” (1902), by President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University. Channing’s attempt to cover, by the labours of a single competent scholar, the entire history of the country is comparable to that of George Bancroft. John Fiske wrote readable and popular narratives of historical events. He did much, both by books and lectures, to arouse general interest in matters of American life past and present. McMaster’s substantial and illuminating history is social rather than political. He seeks to portray the whole life of the people. Von Holst’s aim was, on the other hand, political. The author was a German-American. He held, among academic posts, professorships at Freiburg and the University of Chicago. His critical review, often disparaging to democratic institutions, may be taken as a counterblast to the ebullient patriotism of earlier, native writers. As the work of a foreign observer of American affairs, it suggests the reflections of de Tocqueville, of James Bryce, and of Goldwin Smith. President Wilson’s five volumes contain a wise and judicial commentary, in the form of a long and attractive essay, on the main course of events since the days of discovery. For the multitude of American historical writers who have treated single epochs, space permits mention of only one or two names. James Ford Rhodes’ “History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850” (7 volumes, 1902-6), the work of “nineteen years’ almost exclusive devotion,” is commonly regarded as the most thorough and best balanced study of the Civil War, its causes and its consequences. Henry Adams has, in his “History of the United States,” etc., investigated with competence and penetration the administrations of Jefferson and Madison.

This meagre list of the more important productions of the academic school clearly reveals the attraction of the American theme for the present American historian. Capable and impressive studies of foreign subjects there have been, it is true;--David Jayne Hill’s “History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe” and Henry C. Lea’s work on the medieval church are conspicuous instances;--but the great mass of research and writing has been gathered at home. Governmental affairs and political events loom large. Less interest has been taken in the subtler phases of national character and individual motive; although Fiske and McMaster and Woodrow Wilson and certain of the best biographers (whose important service to literature deserves separate consideration) represent a current tendency toward reflective and philosophical writing of a literary quality, which augurs well for the future of American historiography.

II. THE NOVELISTS

=The Beginnings.=--American fiction was one of the latest types of native literature to appear. The hard conditions of life imposed on the colonists by the necessity of clearing the forests and keeping the Indians in check were evidently unfavourable to sustained efforts in imaginative writing. And there were other reasons for the late growth of the novel. Except as they had a religious turn or an evident moral, stories were likely to be looked upon by the Puritans as a species of useless frivolity, which could have no part in the saving of souls.[3] Again, in the struggle with the mother country the robust and scholarly intellects of America had other matters to think of besides the elements of pure literature. The rights of man, the basis of resistance to tyranny, the principles of statecraft, the elements of democracy, were among the interests that absorbed the Washingtons, the Otises, and the Hamiltons of the latter part of the eighteenth century. But perhaps the most important reason for the tardy appearance of American fiction was the lack of tradition and legend. Of this Hawthorne complained as late as 1859, in the preface to “The Marble Faun”:

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of
writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no
antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor
anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple
daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It
will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find
congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our
stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events
of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and
wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.

Thus it was that for a long time Defoe and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne found no imitators in America. The American novel-reader, for the most part, was content with British provender, and satisfied his appetite for the marvellous with Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto,” Lewis’ “Monk,” and Mrs. Radcliffe’s “Romance of the Forest” and “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Toward the end of the eighteenth century several writers essayed the novel, but not with lasting success. In “The Foresters” (published serially in _The Columbian Magazine_, and in book form in 1792), Jeremy Belknap (1774-98) produced an ingenious though trivial allegorical tale of the colonisation of America and the rebellion of the colonies. In this, Peter Bullfrog stood for New York, Ethan Greenwood for Vermont, Walter Pipeweed for Virginia, Charles Indigo for South Carolina, and so on. Ann Eliza Bleecker (1752-83) was the author of “The History of Maria Kittle,” which in the form of a letter sets forth some harrowing experiences among the savages during the French and Indian War; and of “The Story of Henry and Anne,” a tale, “founded on fact,” of the misfortunes of some German peasants who finally settled in America; both of these were published posthumously in her “Works” in 1793. Mrs. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s “Charlotte Temple” (1790), a story of love, betrayal, and desertion, despite its absurdly stilted phrases and its long-drawn melancholy, has ever been popular with a certain class of readers; the editor of the latest edition (1905), Mr. Francis W. Halsey, has examined 104 editions, and his list is incomplete. An avowed antidote to “Charlotte Temple,” Mrs. Tabitha G. Tenney’s satirical “Female Quixotism” (1808), suggests to Professor Trent “an expurgated Smollett”; it is now unknown. Mrs. Hannah W. Foster, the wife of a clergyman in Massachusetts, wrote “The Coquette, or The History of Eliza Wharton, a Novel Founded on Fact” (1797), a story of desertion, showing the marked influence of Richardson. In the same year, appeared “The Algerine Captive,” by Royall Tyler, who was one of the first to turn to American life as a fruitful subject for fiction. His story is a broadly humorous picaresque tale, of the Smollett type, which introduces rather too many wearisome details of customs in Algiers; a fault for which his generally spirited style and his powerful description of the horrors of a slave-ship partially atone.

Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), the classmate at Princeton of James Madison and Philip Freneau, wrote “Modern Chivalry, or The Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His Servant” (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, published in four parts, 1792-7), a modern “Don Quixote” narrating his experiences in the Whisky Insurrection of 1794. Though widely read in its day, especially by artisans and farmers, its literary worth was not sufficient to preserve it. “The Gamesters,” published in 1805 by Mrs. Catharine Warren, was likewise popular in its day; it attempted “to blend instruction with amusement.”

_Charles Brockden Brown._--The history of the novel in America, therefore, properly begins with Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), who has been called “the first professional man of letters and important creative writer of the English-speaking portion of the New World.” He was born in Philadelphia of a good Quaker family; just forty years earlier, his uncle, Charles Brockden, had drawn up the constitution of the old Philadelphia Library Company. From early childhood, books were familiar to the youthful Brown, who became an omnivorous reader, and at Robert Proud’s school undermined his health by excessive devotion to reading and study, so that he was always an invalid. He took up the study of law, but soon abandoned it, despite the protest of his family, for the career of “book-making.” After some writing of verse and of essays, he published in 1798 a successful novel, “Wieland, or The Transformation,” and at once followed this with five others, “Ormond, or The Secret Witness,” (1799), “Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793” (1799-1800), in which he gave an account of the ravages of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, “Edgar Huntly, or The Adventures of a Sleep-Walker,” “Clara Howard” (1801), and “Jane Talbot” (published in England in 1804). From 1798 till 1801, Brown lived amid congenial surroundings in New York; in the former year he nearly died of yellow fever, to which his friend Dr. Elihu H. Smith succumbed. Returning to Philadelphia in 1801, he spent the remainder of his life there; marrying happily in 1804, editing _The Literary Magazine_, and writing political pamphlets and works on geography and Roman history, until consumption brought his busy and useful life to a premature end.

Brown’s novels mostly belong with the “tales of terror” so popular in his day. A radical thinker and analyst, he rejects supernatural agencies in his explanation of events, and relies wholly on natural causes; but this does not diminish the number of marvels in his tales. The plots of one or two of his stories will give an idea of the character of all. The scene of “Wieland” is laid on the banks of the Schuylkill, in Pennsylvania. The Wielands are a cultivated German family. Wieland’s father has died mysteriously by what is explained as self- or spontaneous combustion, and the son has inherited a melancholy and superstitious mind, which develops into fanaticism. The family hear strange voices giving commands or warnings or telling of events beyond the reach of human knowledge. A mysterious man, Carwin, appears, with such powers of pleasing that he becomes very intimate with the family. At length Wieland, at the command of what he takes to be a heavenly voice, sacrifices to God his wife and children. Confined in a maniac’s dungeon, he bears his fate with a sense of moral exaltation. Having escaped, he attempts to offer up also his sister, the narrator of the story, when he learns that he has been deceived by the ventriloquism of Carwin, whom malice has thus led to trick the family. In a frenzy, Wieland kills himself; Carwin disappears; and the story ends with the marriage of the sister and Pleyel, a brother of Wieland’s late wife and now a widower. Less powerful than “Wieland,” but still superior to Brown’s other works, is “Ormond.” An artist, Stephen Dudley, engaging in pharmacy to support his family, is brought to beggary through the villainy of his partner. His daughter Constantia bears up bravely through severe trials. Just when life appears brighter, Ormond comes upon the scene, a mysteriously powerful man, much like Falkland in Godwin’s “Caleb Williams,” of great wealth, strong mind, and base morals; he deserts Helena Cleves, who commits suicide, and pursues Constantia. Stephen Dudley is murdered by an unknown hand. Having a legacy from Helena, Constantia is about to sail for Europe with her friend (who narrates the story) when Ormond, finding her invincible, assaults her in a lonely house and meets death by her hand, after he has himself slain Craig, now revealed as the assassin of Dudley at Ormond’s instigation. Constantia afterward lives quietly with her friend in Europe. Brown’s plots are usually disfigured by irrelevant incidents and superfluous characters; he frequently changed his plans and even his heroines, and, writing with great rapidity, often with a greedy printer at his elbow, he utterly failed to weld together the elements of his stories and often to give them proper motivation. His characters are drawn in bold and clear outlines, but are frequently uninteresting--being too sentimental or inconsistent, or given to long and prosy soliloquies. It cannot be affirmed that Brown understood human nature well. Of style he had none; his pages are innocent of epigram or humorous turn; he employs very little dialogue and makes but scanty and awkward use of dialect. Yet in certain passages, in describing great crises, he exhibits considerable vividness and power. Brown’s chief merit consists in the sense of reality with which he contrives to invest his scenes of gloom and terror.

The power possessed by this rare genius, says Mr. James H.
Morse,[4] of throwing gloomy characteristics into his theme, was
equalled by no other American writer. In the matter of morbid
analysis, Poe, in comparison with Brown, was superficial, Hawthorne
was cheerful, and the modern school of French writers are feeble.
With Poe, we can see that the gloom came by an effort of a spurred
imagination; with Hawthorne, that it was the work of an artistic
sense; but with Brown, it seems to have been constitutional--the
gift at once of temperament and circumstances.

Brown was an admirer of William Godwin and obviously imitated not only his method of developing characters but also his style. It may be added that Brown in turn found many readers in England, where several of his novels were republished and where, as we have seen, “Jane Talbot” was first published. Professor Dowden quotes Peacock as saying that of all the works with which Shelley was familiar, those which took the deepest root in his mind were Brown’s four novels, Schiller’s “Robbers,” and Goethe’s “Faust.” Brown’s influence upon subsequent American writers, moreover, was not inconsiderable, and his place in our literature, if not high, is at least honourable.

_John Davis_, an Englishman about whom little is known, wrote several novels of American life, most of which were published here, and became somewhat popular. He lived in the United States from 1798 till 1802, and travelled over a large part of the country. His first novel, “The Original Letters of Ferdinand and Elizabeth” (1798), was a conventional story of seduction and suicide. It was followed by “The Farmer of New Jersey” (1800), “The First Settlers of Virginia” (1805), a pioneer historical novel, crude and ill managed, “Walter Kennedy, an American Tale” (London, 1805), and “The Post Captain” (1813). The most that can be said of these stories is that their author was shrewd and observant, and had some journalistic skill.

_Mrs. Sally Keating Wood_ (1760-1855), wife of General Abiel Wood, of Maine, may be mentioned as the author of “Julia and the Illuminated Baron” (1800), which recalls the mysterious evil power and atheistic tendencies attributed to the Bavarian order of the Illuminati, established in 1775, which, though suppressed in 1780 by the Elector, was supposed to have secretly persisted and spread over Europe. Mrs. Wood wrote also “Dorval, or The Speculator” (1801), “Amelia, or The Influence of Virtue” (1802), “Ferdinand and Elmira, a Russian Story” (1804), and “Tales of the Night” (1827), besides several novels that were never published. Mrs. Wood placed many of her scenes in Europe.

_Isaac Mitchell._--At Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1811, was published in two volumes “The Asylum, or Alonzo and Melissa, an American Tale, Founded on Fact.” Of the author of this Gothic romance, Isaac Mitchell,[5] little is known save that he was successively the editor of _The Farmer’s Journal_, _The Political Barometer_, and _The Republican Crisis_, all of Albany, New York, and that after losing his position through political changes, he moved to Poughkeepsie. The story was later abridged and compressed into one volume by Daniel Jackson, Jr. (Mitchell’s name disappearing from the title-page), and in this form was long popular throughout America; Mr. Reed thinks that for nearly a quarter of a century a new edition appeared practically every year. The narrative is full of elaborate descriptions of nature.

_Washington Irving._--In general Irving will be discussed rather with the essayists than with the novelists; but his stories and tales must be considered here. They have contributed largely if not chiefly to his enduring reputation. His first book, “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” (1809), in which he works out a grotesquely humorous drama of the Dutch fathers wrestling with the weighty problems of statecraft, is of course in the main fictitious. No doubt it is at times pretentious or overdone, and the humour is occasionally a little too broad for the decorum of to-day; but the irrepressible spirit of comedy, the delightfully burlesqued descriptions of stolid Dutch character, the vivid though leisurely narrative, give it a supreme place in our humorous literature. “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are doubtless the most read parts of “The Sketch Book” and have long since become classics; no more faithful narratives of quaint old Dutch life have ever been written. In them the boisterous exuberance of the “History” gives way to a more graceful, refined, and mature style, which invests the homely simplicity and contentment of colonial Dutch life with a kind of idyllic charm. Only a little less successful were Irving’s other stories of early New Amsterdam life--notably “The Money-Diggers” in “Tales of a Traveller,” and “Dolph Heyliger” in “Bracebridge Hall.” Inferior because more conventional and less spontaneous are the first three parts of the “Tales”; yet even here, in dealing with the sentimental and the terrible, Irving compares favourably with other story-tellers of his day. In the stories scattered through “The Alhambra,” Irving showed clearly that he had found another source of inspiration in the romantic legends of Spain and the Moors--legends full of Oriental mystery and of the splendid glories of old Spain, so charmingly and truthfully set forth that the Spaniards themselves spoke of him as “the poet Irving.” And “poet” he is in the large sense that he has created imperishable scenes and characters in that realm of romance in which we delight to wander, far from the prosaic world and the madding crowd.

_James Kirke Paulding._--A contrast with Irving in more than one respect is afforded by James K. Paulding (1778-1860), the friend and collaborator of Washington Irving and the brother-in-law of William Irving. The author of “The Sketch Book” gave his whole life to the profession of letters; for Paulding, on the other hand, literary composition was only an avocation. The genial humour of Irving, too, differs from the satirical and ironical vein too often indulged in by his friend. Born in Dutchess County, New York, Paulding went to New York City while a young man and became associated with the Irvings in writing _Salmagundi_, the success of which gave Paulding confidence in himself and led him to further literary efforts. “The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” (1812), a loosely constructed and amateurish satire in the style of Arbuthnot, became very popular both in America and in England. “Koningsmarke, the Long Finne” (1823), now remembered only for the familiar assertion that “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” was a burlesque on Cooper’s “Pioneers.” Paulding’s most successful work, which deserves to live, was “The Dutchman’s Fireside” (1831), in which are charming descriptions of quaint Dutch customs and personages, of the picturesque scenery of the Hudson, and of the vast expanse of wilderness that stretched to the westward. In general, however, Paulding’s work was characterised by a too harsh and obstreperous Americanism, an immoderate and amusing hostility to foreigners, and a carelessness of workmanship which prevented it from enduring long.

_Samuel Woodworth._--As a curiosity must here be mentioned the long-forgotten “Champions of Freedom” (1816) of Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842). It was his one essay in fiction; a history of the War of 1812 in the style of a romance. It must be described as a chaotic miscellany, blending wild romance with commonplace realism, and conducting the reader from ballroom to battlefield and back again with the least possible suspicion of method or motive.

_John Neal._--Born in Portland, Maine, and beginning life as a shop-boy in Boston, John Neal (1793-1876) became in turn a wholesale dry-goods merchant, a lawyer, and a voluminous critic, poet, and novelist. He boasted that in thirty-six years he had written enough altogether to fill a hundred octavo volumes; yet to-day he is little more than a name. His first novel, “Keep Cool,” which he afterward spoke of with justice as a “paltry, contemptible affair,” appeared in 1817. His best novels are “Seventy-Six” (1823), a lively story of the Revolution, “Rachel Dyer” (1828), a story of the Salem Witchcraft, and “The Down-Easters” (1833), an extravagant tale which deals with the ways of steamboat passengers, and into which he manages to introduce plenty of horrors. Neal has been well styled “the universal Yankee, whittling his way through creation, with a half-genius for everything, a robust genius for nothing.” He is said to have been the originator of the woman’s suffrage movement, the first person to establish a gymnasium in America, and the first to encourage Edgar A. Poe.[6]

_James Fenimore Cooper._--The first American to win universal recognition as a powerful novelist was James Fenimore Cooper. Born at Burlington, New Jersey, on September 15, 1789, of English Quaker and Swedish parentage, he was taken, when a year old, to the Central New York wilderness, where his father, having become the owner of large tracts of land, had laid out the village of Cooperstown. Here, on the shores of the beautiful Otsego Lake, in a motley frontier settlement, the boy Cooper passed his earliest years. In due time entering the family of an Albany clergyman as a private pupil, Cooper proceeded in 1803 to Yale College, where he became a member of the class of 1806. An escapade in his third year led to his dismissal; after which he served a marine apprenticeship of a year and then entered the navy, serving as midshipman for nearly four years. In 1811, he married Susan A. De Lancey, a lady of Huguenot and Tory family, and a sister of Bishop De Lancey of Western New York; and at her request resigned his commission, to become an amateur farmer, successively at Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound, at Cooperstown, and at Scarsdale, Westchester County, all in New York State. Thus he arrived at the age of thirty without having even dreamed of a career of authorship. One day, reading a novel descriptive of English society, he impatiently threw down the book and exclaimed that he could write a better story himself. Challenged by his wife to do so, he wrote and published “Precaution” (1820), a dull and conventional story of English social life, purporting to be the work of an Englishman. Although the novel was not very successful, his friends urged Cooper to try again, and this time to write of scenes of which he had some personal knowledge. The publication of “The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground,” in December, 1821, marks the beginning of a long series of successes. “The Spy” met with a large sale both in America and in England. It was soon translated into most of the cultivated languages of Europe; and its popularity has never greatly waned. It is a story of the American Revolution, in which the patriotic hero, Harvey Birch, signally aids the American cause and exhibits a rare combination of the spy and the gentleman.

During the twenty-nine years remaining to Cooper, he produced thirty-two further volumes, chiefly romances. Of these, many are now rarely read, but the following have retained their popularity for successive generations:

“The Spy,” already referred to.

“The Leatherstocking Tales,” comprising (in the chronological order not of their production, but of the narrative):

“The Deerslayer, or The First War Path,” 1841.

“The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757,” 1826.

“The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea,” 1840.

“The Pioneers,” 1823, and “The Prairie,” 1827; and ten volumes of the “Sea Tales”:

“The Pilot,” 1823.

“The Red Rover,” 1828.

“The Two Admirals,” 1842.

“Homeward Bound, or The Chase,” 1838.

“The Water-Witch, or The Skimmer of the Seas,” 1830.

“The Wing-and-Wing, or Le Feu-Follet,” 1842.

“Afloat and Ashore,” 1844.

“Miles Wallingford,” 1844, published in England as “Lucy Hardinge.” A sequel to “Afloat and Ashore.”

“Jack Tier, or The Florida Reefs,” 1848.

“The Sea Lions, or The Lost Sealers,” 1849.

The popularity which Cooper achieved, and which reached its height with the publication of “The Last of the Mohicans,” was most remarkable; no other American has ever enjoyed anything like it. Not only were his stories read in well-nigh every household, but they were promptly dramatised, and furnished subjects for numerous paintings and poetical effusions. In Europe, his fame fairly rivalled that of Scott. In 1833, Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, wrote: “In every city of Europe that I visited the works of Cooper were conspicuously placed in the windows of every bookshop. They are published, as soon as he produces them, in thirty-four different places in Europe. They have been seen by American travellers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan.”

In 1822 Cooper removed with his family to New York, in order to be near his publisher and to put his daughters into school. There he founded a club, commonly known as the Bread and Cheese, to which many of the noted men of the time belonged. The years 1826-33 he spent in Europe, being for a part of this time United States consul at Lyons. On his return, he lived a few winters in New York; he then took up his permanent residence at Otsego Hall, Cooperstown, where he died in September, 1851.

In his later years, Cooper presented the singular spectacle of a popular novelist who was the most cordially hated man of his time. The fact is significant and helps to account for the failure of many of Cooper’s later stories. An ardent lover of his country and its republican institutions, he boldly rebuked the ignorance and supercilious condescension of European critics; he wrote “The Bravo” (1831), “The Heidenmauer” (1832), and “The Headsman” (1833), for the avowed purpose of assailing monarchical and praising democratic institutions, and kept this purpose in mind much too constantly to produce artistic work. On his return to America, contrasting the restless exertion and bustle, the material progress which obscured higher ideals than money-making, with the leisure and dignified culture of European lands, he did not hesitate to speak plainly of the defects in the American character. This naturally brought him much abuse from the press; and an unfortunate dispute with the citizens of Cooperstown over the ownership of Three-Mile Point on Otsego Lake, though the right was wholly on his side, only made him more intensely disliked.

In the early ’40’s, certain issues arose in New York State between the tenants of the old Patroons who held their large estates under original grants, and their landlords, the tenants attempting to secure under State legislation a title in fee to their rented lands. Cooper, whose family interests were themselves likely to be affected by these claims, threw himself with full force and bitterness into the contest. In addition to a number of magazine articles and speeches, he devoted three volumes to the presentation of the claims of the landlords, volumes which are now read but little, excepting by special students of the subject. They are entitled respectively:

“Satanstoe, or The Littlepage Manuscripts,” 1845;

“The Chainbearer,” 1846; and

“The Redskins, or Indian and Injin,” 1846.

“The Ways of the Hour” (1850) was also a novel with a purpose, which overweighted its interest as a story; the purpose was the reform of court procedure in the State of New York.

In “Homeward Bound” and its sequel, “Home as Found” (1838), the latter being one of his worst stories, Cooper lashed the petty vices of his countrymen and sought to show them what ought to be. As he might have expected, he only confirmed the public in its hatred of him, while he materially impaired his reputation as a story-teller. Had he been more tactful, philosophical, and far-seeing, he would have saved himself years of stormy conflict.

In Lakewood Cemetery at Cooperstown, on the hill overlooking Otsego Lake, is a majestic monument to Fenimore Cooper, twenty-five feet in height, and surmounted by a statue of the hunter Leatherstocking and his dog. As enduring as bronze is this character in our American fiction; the hero that will live longest of Cooper’s creations. In him Lowell found “the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths as Arthur in his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry.” The series in which he appears, “The Deerslayer,” “The Pathfinder,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Pioneers,” and “The Prairie,” the group which Cooper himself preferred to his other stories, is now (excepting always “The Spy”) more read than all Cooper’s other works put together. Drawn at first from life, Natty Bumppo becomes an idealised character, the perfect type of the bold frontiersman and scout, who read nature as an open book, and who was most at home when farthest from the haunts of the civilised world. Worthy to stand by his side is the noble Indian Chingachgook, “grave, silent, acute, self-contained,” as Mr. James H. Morse says of him; “sufficiently lofty-minded to take in the greatness of the Indian’s past, and sufficiently farsighted to see the hopelessness of his future,--with nobility of soul enough to grasp the white man’s virtues, and with inherited wildness enough to keep him true to the instincts of his own race.” Famous among Cooper’s sailor folk is Long Tom Coffin, of “The Pilot”--type of the rough but honest seaman, superstitious like all seamen but devoutly religious, faithful to the last and capable of the most heroic self-sacrifice. Other characters scarcely less well drawn, if less famous, move through Cooper’s pages--rough, uncouth waifs and strays of border life, grizzled old sea-dogs, soldiers’ and sailors’ wives and sweethearts, such as the wife of Ishmael Bush, Hetty and Judith Hutter, and Dew-of-June.

That he exhibited marked imperfections in style and technique no one will deny. He wrote too rapidly to attain to anything like elegance of style, and he is not infrequently obscure. He continually repeats words and expressions, to the great annoyance of the reader. The same carelessness that characterises his style is occasionally seen in the construction of his stories. Scenes are repeated. Mistakes due to forgetfulness occur, as in “Mercedes of Castile,” where the heroine presents her lover, on his outward voyage, with a cross of sapphire stones, emblems, she tells him, of fidelity, which later appear as turquoise stones. Peculiarities of habit or manner are referred to so continually that the reader becomes weary and disgusted. Numerous characters are, it must be admitted, conventional in the extreme. Cooper failed signally in his fine women. They are not creatures of flesh and blood; they are purely imaginary creatures in petticoats, mere simulacra, invariably paragons of sweetness, discretion, and artlessness, ever saying and doing the correct thing until the reader longs for a little less of the angel and a good deal more of Mother Eve. Finally, his introductions are exceedingly prolix and tedious, though in this respect he sinned in company with Scott and many another of the time.

But we must not let this catalogue of Cooper’s defects obscure his virtues. In spite of occasional carelessness of construction, all his best stories are highly interesting; he spins a good yarn. Never straining after effects, never loading his sentences with ornaments, when once started he moves straight ahead to his goal; one stirring scene follows another; there is wonderful fertility of resource, set forth with the confidence that begets faith. His was a large genius, which, though unsuccessful at miniature work, could manage a large canvas marvellously well. It must not be forgotten that Cooper was a pioneer; that he was the creator of our American romance of forest and prairie and sea. His descriptions of nature are done with the hand of a master. “If Cooper,” remarked Balzac, “had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art.” Moreover, Cooper’s stories are honest and wholesome like himself; they breathe the same genuineness, the same sincerity and hatred of shams and meanness; they uniformly hold up noble and worthy ideals; their tone is always as healthful and invigorating as a breath of ozone. As Professor Trent remarks, he “lifted the story of adventure into the realms of poetry”; and as the poet of the primeval American forest he has never been superseded.

Professor Lounsbury, whose Life of Cooper, in the “American Men of Letters” Series, remains the authoritative biography, sums up the man and his work as follows:

America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of
writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly
with their fellows than Cooper. She has had several gifted with
higher spiritual insight than he, with broader and juster views of
life, with finer ideals of literary art, and, above all, with far
greater delicacy of taste. But she counts on the scanty roll of her
men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism
or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature,
and no more heroic soul.

Mr. W. C. Brownell prepared for the Iroquois Edition of Cooper’s Works a critical introduction which may safely be accepted as the most just, most delicate, and most comprehensive analysis of the man and of his work. Mr. Brownell writes:

There is a quality in Cooper’s romance, however, that gives it
as romance an almost unique distinction. I mean its solid and
substantial alliance with reality. It is thoroughly romantic, and
yet--very likely owing to his imaginative deficiency, if anything
can be so owing--it produces, for romance, an almost unequalled
illusion of life itself.... Cooper’s ... work is in no sense a
_jardin des plantes_; it is like the woods and sea that mainly form
its subject and substance. Only critical myopia can be blind to
the magnificent forest, with its pioneer clearings, its fringe of
“settlements,” its wood-embosomed lakes, its neighbouring prairie
on the one side, and on the other the distant ocean with the cities
of its farther shore--the splendid panorama of man, of nature, and
of human life unrolled for us by this large intelligence and noble
imagination, this manly and patriotic American representative in
the literary parliament of the world.

_The Elder Dana._--Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879), lawyer, politician, poet, critic, and novelist, was one of the group of Boston writers that laid the foundations of New England literature. His tales, “Tom Thornton” and “Paul Felton,” are romantic stories of villainy and insanity, and give evidence of the influence of Brockden Brown. The narrative has at times an impetuous sweep that hurries the reader along in spite of himself; and the characterisation is wrought with powerful strokes. A collective edition of his “Poems and Prose Writings” appeared in 1833.

_Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Child._--Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was the daughter of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she was principal of a young ladies’ school for half a century. Her duties as a teacher did not prevent her from becoming a voluminous novelist. Her first story was “A New England Tale” (1822), which at once found favour. “Redwood” (1824) was translated into three or four Continental languages; on the title-page of the French translation, the novel was ascribed to Fenimore Cooper. Other novels which achieved great popularity for their faithful portraiture of early and contemporary New England life were “Hope Leslie, or Early Times in Massachusetts” (1827), “Clarence, a Tale of Our Own Times” (1830), “The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America” (1835), and “Married or Single” (1857). While Miss Sedgwick never rises to the height of absorbing interest, she is rarely dull, and some of her women, if we allow for the difference in time, do not suffer in comparison with those of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman. Her descriptions of simple country life were superior to any that had hitherto appeared. Mrs. Child, born Lydia Maria Francis (1802-1880), who likewise spent her life in Massachusetts, began writing early, producing her first novel, “Hobomok,” in 1824 and her second, “The Rebels,” a year later. The former deals with Salem life in colonial times; the latter is a story of the Revolution, describing the sack of Governor Hutchinson’s house and the Boston massacre. Although they give true pictures of early Puritan customs, they are not powerful as fiction. In 1836 she essayed a more ambitious flight in “Philothea,” a romance of the days of Pericles, which, in spite of its stilted rhetoric, reveals some imaginative power and deserves mention as a pioneer attempt to interpret Greek life to America.

_Timothy Flint._--A voluminous writer and in his day a well-known figure was Timothy Flint (1780-1840), a native of Reading, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1800. Becoming a Congregational minister, in 1815, in search for health, he crossed the Alleghany Mountains with his family, and after travelling in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, became a missionary, first at St. Charles, Missouri, and then in Arkansas. The success of his “Recollections of the Last Ten Years” (1826) led him to publish a novel, “Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot” (1826), dealing with adventures with the Comanche Indians, and with the Mexican struggle of 1821, which resulted in the fall of Iturbide. The story was crude and improbable, but some of its descriptions found favour. “Arthur Clenning,” his second novel, published in 1828, includes a shipwreck in the Southern Ocean, after which the hero and heroine arrive in New Holland and later settle in Illinois. He wrote some other novels, but none has survived. For a time (1833), Flint edited _The Knickerbocker_; and in 1835 he contributed some “Sketches of the Literature of the United States” to the London _Athenæum_.

_William Austin_ (1788-1841) a lawyer of Charlestown, Massachusetts, deserves to be noticed for the remarkable story of “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,” which he wrote for _The New England Galaxy_ (1827-8; reprinted in “The Boston Book,” 1841, and in other books and papers). The theme is the same as that of “The Wandering Jew.” While “originating in the inventive genius of its author,” as Joseph Buckingham says of it, it doubtless owed something also to German romance.