countries. The English, he thought, had “a national propensity to
blackguardism,” and certainly the remarks he drew from them did something
to vindicate the charge. When the London “Times” called him “affected,
offensive, curious, and ill-conditioned,” and “Fraser’s Magazine,” “a
liar, a bilious braggart, a full jackass, an insect, a grub, and a
reptile,” they clearly left little for America to say in that direction.
Yet Park Benjamin did his best, or his worst, when he called Cooper (in
Greeley’s “New Yorker”) “a superlative dolt and the common mark of scorn
and contempt of every well-informed American”; and so did Webb, when
he pronounced the novelist “a base-minded caitiff who had traduced his
country.” Not being able to reach his English opponents, Cooper turned
on these Americans, and spent years in attacking Webb and others through
the courts, gaining little and losing much through the long vicissitudes
of petty local lawsuits. The fact has kept alive their memory; but for
Lowell’s keener shaft, “Cooper has written six volumes to show he’s as
good as a lord,” there was no redress. The arrow lodged and split the
target.
Like Scott and most other novelists, Cooper was rarely successful with
his main characters, but was saved by his subordinate ones. These were
strong, fresh, characteristic, human; and they lay, as I have already
said, in several different directions, all equally marked. If he did not
create permanent types in Harvey Birch the spy, Leather-Stocking the
woodsman, Long Tom Coffin the sailor, Chingachgook the Indian, then there
is no such thing as the creation of characters in literature. Scott was
far more profuse and varied, but he gave no more of life to individual
personages, and perhaps created no types so universally recognized. What
is most remarkable is that, in the case of the Indian especially, Cooper
was not only in advance of the knowledge of his own time, but of that of
the authors who immediately followed him. In Parkman and Palfrey, for
instance, the Indian of Cooper vanishes and seems wholly extinguished;
but under the closer inspection of Alice Fletcher and Horatio Hale, the
lost figure reappears, and becomes more picturesque, more poetic, more
thoughtful, than even Cooper dared to make him. The instinct of the
novelist turned out more authoritative than the premature conclusions of
a generation of historians.
It is only women who can draw the commonplace, at least in English, and
make it fascinating. Perhaps only two English women have done this, Jane
Austen and George Eliot; while in France George Sand has certainly done
it far less well than it has been achieved by Balzac and Daudet. Cooper
never succeeded in it for a single instant, and even when he has an
admiral of this type to write about, he puts into him less of life than
Marryat imparts to the most ordinary midshipman. The talk of Cooper’s
civilian worthies is, as Professor Lounsbury has well said,—in what is
perhaps the best biography yet written of any American author,—“of a kind
not known to human society.” This is doubtless aggravated by the frequent
use of _thee_ and _thou_, yet this, which Professor Lounsbury attributes
to Cooper’s Quaker ancestry, was in truth a part of the formality
of the old period, and is found also in Brockden Brown. And as his
writings conform to their period in this, so they did in other respects:
describing every woman, for instance, as a “female,” and making her to
be such as Cooper himself describes the heroine of “Mercedes of Castile”
to be when he says, “Her very nature is made up of religion and female
decorum.” Scott himself could also draw such inane figures, yet in Jeanie
Deans he makes an average Scotch woman heroic, and in Meg Merrilies
and Madge Wildfire he paints the extreme of daring self-will. There is
scarcely a novel of Scott’s where some woman does not show qualities
which approach the heroic; while Cooper scarcely produced one where a
woman rises even to the level of an interesting commonplaceness. She may
be threatened, endangered, tormented, besieged in forts, captured by
Indians, but the same monotony prevails. So far as the real interest of
Cooper’s story goes, it might usually be destitute of a single “female,”
that sex appearing chiefly as a bundle of dry goods to be transported, or
as a fainting appendage to the skirmish. The author might as well have
written the romance of an express parcel.
His long introductions he shared with the other novelists of the day,
or at least with Scott, for both Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth are
more modern in this respect and strike more promptly into the tale.
His loose-jointed plots are also shared with Scott, but Cooper knows
as surely as his rival how to hold the reader’s attention when once
grasped. Like Scott’s, too, is his fearlessness in giving details,
instead of the vague generalizations which were then in fashion, and
to which his academical critics would have confined him. He is indeed
already vindicated in some respects by the advance of the art he
pursued; where he led the way, the best literary practice has followed.
The “Edinburgh Review” exhausted its heavy artillery upon him for his
accurate descriptions of costume and localities, and declared that they
were “an epilepsy of the fancy,” and that a vague general account would
have been far better. “Why describe the dress and appearance of an Indian
chief, down to his tobacco-stopper and button-holes?” We now see that it
is this very habit which has made Cooper’s Indian a permanent figure in
literature, while the Indians of his predecessor, Charles Brockden Brown,
were merely dusky spectres. “Poetry or romance,” continued the “Edinburgh
Review,” “does not descend into the particulars,” this being the same
fallacy satirized by Ruskin, whose imaginary painter produced a quadruped
which was a generalization between a pony and a pig. Balzac, who risked
the details of buttons and tobacco pipes as fearlessly as Cooper, said
of “The Pathfinder,” “Never did the art of writing tread closer upon the
art of the pencil. This is the school of study for literary landscape
painters.” He says elsewhere: “If Cooper 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.” Upon such
praise as this the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper may well rest.
VI
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN
When, in 1834, the historian Jared Sparks undertook the publication
of a “Library of American Biography,” he included in the very first
volume—with a literary instinct most creditable to one so absorbed in
the severer paths of history—a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown by W.
H. Prescott. It was an appropriate tribute to the first imaginative
writer worth mentioning in America,—he having been born in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1771, and died there of consumption on
February 22, 1810,—and to one who was our first professional author. He
was also the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic,
upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards
an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence, concealed
doors opened in lonely houses, fatal epidemics laid cities desolate,
secret plots were organized, unknown persons from foreign lands died
in garrets, usually leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent
women was constantly endangered, though usually saved in time; people
were subject to somnambulism and general frenzy; vast conspiracies were
organized with small aims and smaller results. His books, published
between 1798 and 1801, made their way across the ocean with a promptness
that now seems inexplicable; and Mrs. Shelley, in her novel of “The Last
Man,” founds her whole description of an epidemic which nearly destroyed
the human race, on “the masterly delineations of the author of ‘Arthur
Mervyn.’”
Shelley himself recognized his obligations to Brown; and it is to be
remembered that Brown himself was evidently familiar with Godwin’s
philosophical writings, and that he may have drawn from those of Mary
Wollstonecraft his advanced views as to the rights and education of
women, a subject on which his first book, “Alcuin,” offered the earliest
American protest. Undoubtedly his books furnished a point of transition
from Mrs. Radcliffe, of whom he disapproved, to the modern novel of
realism, although his immediate influence and, so to speak, his stage
properties, can hardly be traced later than the remarkable tale, also
by a Philadelphian, called “Stanley; or the Man of the World,” first
published in 1839 in London, though the scene was laid in America. This
book was attributed, from its profuse literary quotations, to Edward
Everett, but was soon understood to be the work of a very young man
of twenty-one, Horace Binney Wallace. In this book the influence of
Bulwer and Disraeli is palpable, but Brown’s concealed chambers and
aimless conspiracies and sudden mysterious deaths also reappear in full
force, not without some lingering power, and then vanish from American
literature forever.
Brown’s style, and especially the language put by him into the mouths of
his characters, is perhaps unduly characterized by Professor Woodberry
as being “something never heard off the stage of melodrama.” What this
able critic does not sufficiently recognize is that the general style
of the period at which they were written was itself melodramatic; and
that to substitute what we should call simplicity would then have made
the picture unfaithful. One has only to read over the private letters
of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then
express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in
utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech. Even a
comparatively terse writer like Prescott, in composing Brown’s biography
only sixty years ago, shows traces of the earlier period. Instead of
stating simply that his hero was a born Quaker, he says of him: “He was
descended from a highly respectable family, whose parents were of that
estimable sect who came over with William Penn, to seek an asylum where
they might worship their Creator unmolested, in the meek and humble
spirit of their own faith.” Prescott justly criticises Brown for saying,
“I was _fraught with the apprehension_ that my life was endangered”; or
“his brain seemed to swell beyond its _continent_”; or “I drew every bolt
that _appended_ to it”; or “on recovering from _deliquium_, you found it
where it had been dropped”; or for resorting to the circumlocution of
saying, “by a common apparatus that lay beside my head I could produce
a light,” when he really meant that he had a tinder-box. The criticism
on Brown is fair enough, yet Prescott himself presently takes us halfway
back to the florid vocabulary of that period, when, instead of merely
saying that his hero was fond of reading, he tells us that “from his
earliest childhood Brown gave evidence of studious propensities, being
frequently noticed by his father on his return from school poring over
some heavy tome.” If the tome in question was Johnson’s dictionary, as
it may have been, it would explain both Brown’s style of writing and the
milder amplifications of his biographer. Nothing is more difficult to
tell, in the fictitious literature of even a generation or two ago, where
a faithful delineation ends and where caricature begins. The four-story
signatures of Micawber’s letters, as represented by Dickens, go but
little beyond the similar courtesies employed in a gentlewoman’s letters
in the days of Anna Seward. All we can say is that within a century, for
some cause or other, English speech has grown very much simpler, and
human happiness has increased in proportion.
In the preface to his second novel, “Edgar Huntley,” Brown announces it
as his primary purpose to be American in theme, “to exhibit a series of
adventures growing out of our own country,” adding, “That the field of
investigation opened to us by our own country should differ essentially
from those which exist in Europe may be readily conceived.” He protests
against “puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and
chimeras,” and adds: “The incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of
the western wilderness are far more suitable.” All this is admirable, but
unfortunately the inherited thoughts and methods of the period hung round
him to cloy his style, even after his aim was emancipated. It is to be
remembered that almost all his imaginative work was done in early life,
before the age of thirty, and before his powers became mature. Yet with
all his drawbacks he had achieved his end, and had laid the foundation
for American fiction.
With all his inflation of style, he was undoubtedly, in his way, a
careful observer. The proof of this is that he has preserved for us many
minor points of life and manners which make the Philadelphia of a century
ago now more familiar to us than is any other American city of that
period. He gives us the roving Indian; the newly arrived French musician
with violin and monkey; the one-story farmhouses, where boarders are
entertained at a dollar a week; the gray cougar amid caves of limestone.
We learn from him “the dangers and toils of a midnight journey in a
stage coach in America. The roads are knee deep in mire, winding through
crags and pits, while the wheels groan and totter and the curtain and
roof admit the wet at a thousand seams.” We learn the proper costume for
a youth of good fortune and family,—“nankeen coat striped with green,
a white silk waistcoat elegantly needle-wrought, cassimere pantaloons,
stockings of variegated silk, and shoes that in their softness vie with
satin.” When dressing himself, this favored youth ties his flowing locks
with a black ribbon. We find from him that “stage boats” then crossed
twice a day from New York to Staten Island, and we discover also with
some surprise that negroes were freely admitted to ride in stages in
Pennsylvania, although they were liable, half a century later, to be
ejected from street-cars. We learn also that there were negro free
schools in Philadelphia. All this was before 1801.
It has been common to say that Brown had no literary skill, but it would
be truer to say that he had no sense of literary construction. So far
as skill is tested by the power to pique curiosity, Brown had it; his
chapters almost always end at a point of especial interest, and the next
chapter, postponing the solution, often diverts the interest in a wholly
new direction. But literary structure there is none: the plots are always
cumulative and even oppressive; narrative is inclosed in narrative; new
characters and complications come and go, while important personages
disappear altogether, and are perhaps fished up with difficulty, as with
a hook and line, on the very last page. There is also a total lack of
humor, and only such efforts at vivacity as this: “Move on, my quill!
wait not for my guidance. Reanimated with thy master’s spirit, all airy
light. A heyday rapture! A mounting impulse sways him; lifts him from
the earth.” There is so much of monotony in the general method, that one
novel seems to stand for all; and the same modes of solution reappear
so often,—somnambulism, ventriloquism, yellow fever, forged letters,
concealed money, secret closets,—that it not only gives a sense of
puerility, but makes it very difficult to recall, as to any particular
passage, from which book it came.
VII
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
There has been in America no such instance of posthumous reputation as
in the case of Thoreau. Poe and Whitman may be claimed as parallels, but
not justly. Poe, even during his life, rode often on the very wave of
success, until it subsided presently beneath him, always to rise again,
had he but made it possible. Whitman gathered almost immediately a small
but stanch band of followers, who have held by him with such vehemence
and such flagrant imitation as to keep his name defiantly in evidence,
while perhaps enhancing the antagonism of his critics. Thoreau could
be egotistical enough, but was always high-minded; all was open and
aboveboard; one could as soon conceive of self-advertising by a deer
in the woods or an otter of the brook. He had no organized clique of
admirers, nor did he possess even what is called personal charm,—or at
least only that piquant attraction which he himself found in wild apples.
As a rule, he kept men at a distance, being busy with his own affairs. He
left neither wife nor children to attend to his memory; and his sister
seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts. Yet
this plain, shy, retired student, who when thirty-two years old carried
the unsold edition of his first book upon his back to his attic chamber;
who died at forty-four still unknown to the general public; this child of
obscurity, who printed but two volumes during his lifetime, has had ten
volumes of his writings published by others since his death, while four
biographies of him have been issued in America (by Emerson, Channing,
Sanborn, and Jones), besides two in England (by Page and Salt).
Thoreau was born in Boston on July 12, 1817, but spent most of his life
in Concord, Massachusetts, where he taught school and was for three years
an inmate of the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson, practicing at various
times the art of pencil-making—his father’s occupation—and also of
surveying, carpentering, and housekeeping. So identified was he with the
place that Emerson speaks of it in one case as Thoreau’s “native town.”
Yet from that very familiarity, perhaps, the latter was underestimated
by many of his neighbors, as was the case in Edinburgh with Sir Walter
Scott, as Mrs. Grant of Laggan describes.
When I was endeavoring, about 1870, to persuade Thoreau’s sister to let
some one edit his journals, I invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord
of the manor in Concord, who heard me patiently through, and then said:
“Whereunto? You have not established the preliminary point. Why should
any one wish to have Thoreau’s journals printed?” Ten years later, four
successive volumes were made out of these journals by the late H. G. O.
Blake, and it became a question if the whole might not be published.
I hear from a local photograph dealer in Concord that the demand for
Thoreau’s pictures now exceeds that for any other local celebrity. In
the last sale catalogue of autographs which I have encountered, I find
a letter from Thoreau priced at $17.50, one from Hawthorne valued at
the same, one from Longfellow at $4.50 only, and one from Holmes at $3,
each of these being guaranteed as an especially good autograph letter.
Now the value of such memorials during a man’s life affords but a slight
test of his permanent standing,—since almost any man’s autograph can be
obtained for two postage-stamps if the request be put with sufficient
ingenuity;—but when this financial standard can be safely applied
more than thirty years after a man’s death, it comes pretty near to a
permanent fame.
It is true that Thoreau had Emerson as the editor of four of his
posthumous volumes; but it is also true that he had against him the
vehement voice of Lowell, whose influence as a critic was at that
time greater than Emerson’s. It will always remain a puzzle why it was
that Lowell, who had reviewed Thoreau’s first book with cordiality in
the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” and had said to me afterwards,
on hearing him compared to Izaak Walton, “There is room for three or
four Waltons in Thoreau,” should have written the really harsh attack
on the latter which afterwards appeared, and in which the plain facts
were unquestionably perverted. To transform Thoreau’s two brief years
of study and observation at Walden, within two miles of his mother’s
door, into a life-long renunciation of his fellow men; to complain of
him as waiving all interest in public affairs when the great crisis of
John Brown’s execution had found him far more awake to it than Lowell
was,—this was only explainable by the lingering tradition of that savage
period of criticism, initiated by Poe, in whose hands the thing became
a tomahawk. As a matter of fact, the tomahawk had in this case its
immediate effect; and the English editor and biographer of Thoreau has
stated that Lowell’s criticism is to this day the great obstacle to the
acceptance of Thoreau’s writings in England. It is to be remembered,
however, that Thoreau was not wholly of English but partly of French
origin, and was, it might be added, of a sort of moral-Oriental, or
Puritan Pagan temperament. With a literary feeling even stronger than
his feeling for nature,—the proof of this being that he could not, like
many men, enjoy nature in silence,—he put his observations always on the
level of literature, while Mr. Burroughs, for instance, remains more upon
the level of journalism. It is to be doubted whether any author under
such circumstances would have been received favorably in England; just
as the poems of Emily Dickinson, which have shafts of profound scrutiny
that often suggest Thoreau, had an extraordinary success at home, but
fell hopelessly dead in England, so that the second volume was never even
published.
Lowell speaks of Thoreau as “indolent”; but this is, as has been said,
like speaking of the indolence of a self-registering thermometer. Lowell
objects to him as pursuing “a seclusion that keeps him in the public
eye”; whereas it was the public eye which sought him; it was almost as
hard to persuade him to lecture (_crede experto_) as it was to get an
audience for him when he had consented. He never proclaimed the intrinsic
superiority of the wilderness, as has been charged, but pointed out
better than any one else has done its undesirableness as a residence,
ranking it only as “a resource and a background.” “The partially
cultivated country it is,” he says, “which has chiefly inspired, and
will continue to inspire, the strains of poets such as compose the mass
of any literature.” “What is nature,” he elsewhere says, “unless there
is a human life passing within it? Many joys and many sorrows are the
lights and shadows in which she shines most beautiful.” This is the real
and human Thoreau, who often whimsically veiled himself, but was plainly
enough seen by any careful observer. That he was abrupt and repressive
to bores and pedants, that he grudged his time to them and frequently
withdrew himself, was as true of him as of Wordsworth or Tennyson. If
they were allowed their privacy, though in the heart of England, an
American who never left his own broad continent might at least be allowed
his privilege of stepping out of doors. The Concord school-children never
quarreled with this habit, for he took them out of doors with him and
taught them where the best whortleberries grew.
His scholarship, like his observation of nature, was secondary to his
function as poet and writer. Into both he carried the element of whim;
but his version of the “Prometheus Bound” shows accuracy, and his
study of birds and plants shows care. It must be remembered that he
antedated the modern school, classed plants by the Linnæan system, and
had necessarily Nuttall for his elementary manual of birds. Like all
observers, he left whole realms uncultivated; thus he puzzles in his
journal over the great brown paper cocoon of the _Attacus Cecropia_,
which every village boy brings home from the winter meadows. If he
has not the specialized habit of the naturalist of to-day, neither
has he the polemic habit; firm beyond yielding, as to the local facts
of his own Concord, he never quarrels with those who have made other
observations elsewhere; he is involved in none of those contests in which
palæontologists, biologists, astronomers, have wasted so much of their
lives.