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.