Precaution.
A Novel.
By J. Fenimore Cooper.
"Be wise to-day. It is madness to defer; To-morrow's caution may arrive
too late."
W. C. Bryant's Discourse on the Life, Genius, and Writings of James
Fenimore Cooper, Delivered at Metropolitan Hall, N.Y., February 25,
1852.
It is now somewhat more than a year, since the friends of James Fenimore
Cooper, in this city; were planning to give a public dinner to his
honor. It was intended as an expression both of the regard they bore him
personally, and of the pride they took in the glory his writings had
reflected on the American name. We thought of what we should say in his
hearing; in what terms, worthy of him and of us, we should speak of the
esteem in which we held him, and of the interest we felt in a fame which
had already penetrated to the remotest nook of the earth inhabited by
civilized man.
To-day we assemble for a sadder purpose: to pay to the dead some part of
the honors then intended for the living. We bring our offering, but he
is not here who should receive it; in his stead are vacancy and silence;
there is no eye to brighten at our words, and no voice to answer. "It is
an empty office that we perform," said Virgil, in his melodious verses,
when commemorating the virtues of the young Marcellus, and bidding
flowers be strewn, with full hands, over his early grave. We might apply
the expression to the present occasion, but it would be true in part
only. We can no longer do anything for him who is departed, but we may
do what will not be without fruit to those who remain. It is good to
occupy our thoughts with the example of great talents in conjunction
with great virtues. His genius has passed away with him; but we may
learn, from the history of his life, to employ the faculties we possess
with useful activity and noble aims; we may copy his magnanimous
frankness, his disdain of everything that wears the faintest semblance
of deceit, his refusal to comply with current abuses, and the courage
with which, on all occasions, he asserted what he deemed truth, and
combated what he thought error.
The circumstances of Cooper's early life were remarkably suited to
confirm the natural hardihood and manliness of his character, and to
call forth and exercise that extraordinary power of observation, which
accumulated the materials afterwards wielded and shaped by his genius.
His father, while an inhabitant of Burlington, in New Jersey, on the
pleasant banks of the Delaware, was the owner of large possessions on
the borders of the Otsego Lake in our own state, and here, in the newly-
cleared fields, he built, in 1786, the first house in Cooperstown. To
this home, Cooper, who was born in Burlington, in the year 1789, was
conveyed in his infancy, and here, as he informs us in his preface to
the Pioneers, his first impressions of the external world were obtained.
Here he passed his childhood, with the vast forest around him,
stretching up the mountains that overlook the lake, and far beyond, in a
region where the Indian yet roamed, and the white hunter, half Indian in
his dress and mode of life, sought his game,--a region in which the bear
and the wolf were yet hunted, and the panther, more formidable than
either, lurked in the thickets, and tales of wanderings in the
wilderness, and encounters with these fierce animals, beguiled the
length of the winter nights. Of this place, Cooper, although early
removed from it to pursue his studies, was an occasional resident
throughout his life, and here his last years were wholly passed.
At the age of thirteen he was sent to Yale College, where,
notwithstanding his extreme youth,--for, with the exception of the poet
Hillhouse, he was the youngest of his class, and Hillhouse was
afterwards withdrawn,--his progress in his studies is said to have been
honorable to his talents. He left the college, after a residence of
three years, and became a midshipman in the United States navy. Six
years he followed the sea, and there yet wanders, among those who are
fond of literary anecdote, a story of the young sailor who, in the
streets of one of the English ports, attracted the curiosity of the
crowd by explaining to his companions a Latin motto in some public
place. That during this period he made himself master of the knowledge
and the imagery which he afterwards employed to so much advantage in his
romances of the sea, the finest ever written, is a common and obvious
remark; but it has not been so far as I know, observed that from the
discipline of a seaman's life he may have derived much of his readiness
and fertility of invention, much of his skill in surrounding the
personages of his novels with imaginary perils, and rescuing them by
probable expedients. Of all pursuits, the life of a sailor is that which
familiarizes men to danger in its most fearful shapes, most cultivates
presence of mind, and most effectually calls forth the resources of a
prompt and fearless dexterity by which imminent evil is avoided.
In 1811, Cooper, having resigned his post as midshipman, began the year
by marrying Miss Delaney, sister of the present bishop; of the diocese
of Western New York, and entered upon a domestic life happily passed to
its close. He went to live at Mamaroneck, in the county of Westchester,
and while here he wrote and published the first of his novels, entitled
Precaution. Concerning the occasion of writing this work, it is related,
that once, as he was reading an English novel to Mrs. Cooper, who has,
within a short time past, been laid in the grave beside her illustrious
husband, and of whom we may now say, that her goodness was no less
eminent than his genius, he suddenly laid down the book, and said, "I
believe I could write a better myself." Almost immediately he composed a
chapter of a projected work of fiction, and read it to the same friendly
judge, who encouraged him to finish it, and when it was completed,
suggested its publication. Of this he had at the time no intention, but
he was at length induced to submit the manuscript to the examination of
the late Charles Wilkes, of this city, in whose literary opinions he had
great confidence. Mr. Wilkes advised that it should be published, and to
these circumstances we owe it that Cooper became an author.
I confess I have merely dipped into this work. The experiment was made
with the first edition, deformed by a strange punctuation--a profusion
of commas, and other pauses, which puzzled and repelled me. Its author,
many years afterwards, revised and republished it, correcting this
fault, and some faults of style also, so that to a casual inspection it
appeared almost another work. It was a professed delineation of English
manners, though the author had then seen nothing of English society. It
had, however, the honor of being adopted by the country whose manners it
described, and, being early republished in Great Britain, passed from
the first for an English novel. I am not unwilling to believe what is
said of it, that it contained a promise of the powers which its author
afterwards put forth.
Thirty years ago, in the year 1821, and in the thirty-second of his
life, Cooper published the first of the works by which he will be known
to posterity, the Spy. It took the reading world by a kind of surprise;
its merit was acknowledged by a rapid sale; the public read with
eagerness and the critics wondered. Many withheld their commendations on
account of defects in the plot or blemishes in the composition, arising
from want of practice, and some waited till they could hear the judgment
of European readers. Yet there were not wanting critics in this country,
of whose good opinion any author in any part of the world might be
proud, who spoke of it in terms it deserved. "Are you not delighted,"
wrote a literary friend to me, who has since risen to high distinction
as a writer, both in verse and in prose, "are you not delighted with the
Spy, as a work of infinite spirit and genius?" In that word genius lay
the explanation of the hold which the work had taken on the minds of
men. What it had of excellence was peculiar and unborrowed; its pictures
of life, whether in repose or activity, were drawn, with broad lights
and shadows, immediately from living originals in nature or in his own
imagination. To him, whatever he described was true; it was made a
reality to him by the strength with which he conceived it. His power in
the delineation of character was shown in the principal personage of his
story, Harvey Birch, on whom, though he has chosen to employ him in the
ignoble office of a spy, and endowed him with the qualities necessary to
his profession,--extreme circumspection, fertility in stratagem, and the
art of concealing his real character--qualities which, in conjunction
with selfishness and greediness, make the scoundrel, he has bestowed the
virtues of generosity, magnanimity, an intense love of country, a
fidelity not to be corrupted, and a disinterestedness beyond temptation.
Out of this combination of qualities he has wrought a character which is
a favorite in all nations, and with all classes of mankind.
It is said that if you cast a pebble into the ocean, at the mouth of our
harbor, the vibration made in the water passes gradually on till it
strikes the icy barriers of the deep at the south pole. The spread of
Cooper's reputation is not confined within narrower limits. The Spy is
read in all the written dialects of Europe, and in some of those of
Asia. The French, immediately after its first appearance, gave it to the
multitudes who read their far-diffused language, and placed it among the
first works of its class. It was rendered into Castilian, and passed
into the hands of those who dwell under the beams of the Southern Cross.
At length it passed the eastern frontier of Europe, and the latest
record I have seen of its progress towards absolute universality, is
contained in a statement of the International Magazine, derived, I
presume, from its author, that in 1847 it was published in a Persian
translation at Ispahan. Before this time, I doubt not, they are reading
it in some of the languages of Hindostan, and, if the Chinese ever
translated anything, it would be in the hands of the many millions who
inhabit the far Cathay.
I have spoken of the hesitation which American critics felt in admitting
the merits of the Spy, on account of crudities in the plot or the
composition, some of which, no doubt, really existed. An exception must
be made in favor of the Port Folio, which, in a notice written by Mrs.
Sarah Hall, mother of the editor of that periodical, and author of
Conversations on the Bible, gave the work a cordial welcome; and Cooper,
as I am informed, never forgot this act of timely and ready kindness.
It was perhaps favorable to the immediate success of the Spy, that
Cooper had few American authors to divide with him the public attention.
That crowd of clever men and women who now write for the magazines, who
send out volumes of essays, sketches, and poems, and who supply the
press with novels, biographies, and historical works, were then, for the
most part, either stammering their lessons in the schools, or yet
unborn. Yet it is worthy of note, that just about the time that the Spy
made its appearance, the dawn of what we now call our literature was
just breaking. The concluding number of Dana's Idle Man, a work
neglected at first, but now numbered among the best things of the kind
in our language, was issued in the same month. The Sketch Book was then
just completed; the world was admiring it, and its author was meditating
Bracebridge Hall. Miss Sedgwick, about the same time, made her first
essay in that charming series of novels of domestic life in New England,
which have gained her so high a reputation. Percival, now unhappily
silent, had just put to press a volume of poems. I have a copy of an
edition of Hallock's Fanny, published in the same year; the poem of
Yamoyden, by Eastburn and Sands, appeared almost simultaneously with it.
Livingston was putting the finishing hand to his Report on the Penal
Code of Louisiana, a work written with such grave, persuasive eloquence,
that it belongs as much to our literature as to our jurisprudence. Other
contemporaneous American works there were, now less read. Paul Allen's
poem of Noah was just laid on the counters of the booksellers. Arden
published, at the same time, in this city, a translation of Ovid's
Tristia, in heroic verse, in which the complaints of the effeminate
Roman poet were rendered with great fidelity to the original, and
sometimes not without beauty. If I may speak of myself, it was in that
year that I timidly intrusted to the winds and waves of public opinion a
small cargo of my own--a poem entitled The Ages, and half a dozen
shorter ones, in a thin duodecimo volume, printed at Cambridge.
We had, at the same time, works of elegant literature, fresh from the
press of Great Britain, which are still read and admired. Barry
Cornwall, then a young suitor for fame, published in the same year his
Marcia Colonna; Byron, in the full strength and fertility of his genius,
gave the readers of English his tragedy of Marino Faliero, and was in
the midst of his spirited controversy with Bowles concerning the poetry
of Pope. The Spy had to sustain a comparison with Scott's Antiquary,
published simultaneously with it, and with Lockhart's Valerius, which
seems to me one of the most remarkable works of fiction ever composed.
In 1823, and in his thirty-fourth year, Cooper brought out his novel of
the Pioneers, the scene of which was laid on the borders of his: own
beautiful lake. In a recent survey of Mr; Cooper's works, by one of his
admirers, it is intimated that the reputation of this work may have
been, in some degree factitious. I cannot think so; I cannot see how
such a work could fail of becoming, sooner or later, a favorite. It was
several years after its first appearance that I read the Pioneers, and I
read it with a delighted astonishment. Here, said I to myself, is the
poet of rural life in this country--our Hesiod, our Theocritus, except
that he writes without the restraint of numbers, and is a greater poet
than they. In the Pioneers, as in a moving picture, are made to pass
before us the hardy occupations and spirited, amusements of a prosperous
settlement, in, a fertile region, encompassed for leagues around with
the primeval wilderness of woods. The seasons in their different
aspects, bringing with them, their different employments; forests
falling before the axe; the cheerful population, with the first mild;
day of spring, engaged in the sugar orchards; the chase of the deer
through the deep woods, and into the lake; turkey-shooting, during the
Christmas holidays, in which the Indian marksman vied for the prize of
skill with the white man; swift sleigh rides under the bright winter
sun, and, perilous encounters with wild animals in the forests; these,
and other scenes of rural life, drawn, as Cooper knew how to draw them,
in the bright and healthful coloring of which he was master are
interwoven with a regular narrative of human fortunes, not unskilfully
constructed; and how could such a work be otherwise than popular?
In the Pioneers, Leatherstocking; is first introduced--a philosopher of
the woods, ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without
the aid of, science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and
inquiring intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and
in companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest
and most cultivated of which there is any example. But Leatherstocking
has higher qualities; in him there is a genial blending of the gentlest
virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal
tribes; all that in them is noble, generous, and ideal, is adopted into
his own kindly character, and all that is evil is rejected. But why
should I attempt to analyse a character so familiar? Leatherstocking is
acknowledged, on all hands, to be one of the noblest, as well as most
striking and original creations of fiction. In some of his subsequent
novels, Cooper--for he had not yet Attained to the full maturity of his
powers--heightened and ennobled his first conception of the character,
but in the Pioneers it dazzled the world with the splendor of novelty;
His next work was the Pilot, in which he showed how, from the
vicissitudes of a life at sea, its perils and escapes, from the beauty
and terrors of the great deep, from the working of a vessel on a long
voyage, and from the frank, brave, and generous but peculiar character
of the seaman, may be drawn materials of romance by which the minds of
men may be as deeply moved as by anything in the power of romance to
present. In this walk, Cooper has had many disciples but no rival. All
who have since written romances of the sea have been but travellers in a
country of which he was the great discoverer; and none of them all
seemed to have loved a ship as Cooper loved it, or have been able so
strongly to interest all classes of readers in its fortunes. Among other
personages drawn with great strength in the Pilot, is the general
favorite, Tom Coffin, the thorough seaman with all the virtues and one
or two of the infirmities of his profession, superstitious, as seamen
are apt to be, yet whose superstitions strike us as but an irregular
growth of his devout recognition of the Power who holds the ocean in the
hollow of his hand; true-hearted, gentle, full of resources, collected
in danger, and at last calmly perishing at the post of duty, with the
vessel he has long guided, by what I may call a great and magnanimous
death. His rougher and coarser companion, Boltrope, is drawn with
scarcely less skill, and with a no less vigorous hand.
The Pioneers is not Cooper's best tale of the American forest, nor, the
Pilot, perhaps, in all respects, his best tale of the sea; yet, if he
had ceased to write here, the measure of his fame would possibly have
been scarcely less ample than it now is. Neither of them is far below
the best of his productions, and in them appear the two most remarkable
creations of his imagination--two of the most remarkable characters in
all fiction.
It was about this time that my acquaintance with Cooper began, an
acquaintance of more than a quarter of a century, in which his
deportment towards me was that of unvaried kindness. He then resided a
considerable part of the year in this city, and here he had founded a
weekly club, to which many of the most distinguished men of the place
belonged. Of the members who have since passed away, were Chancellor
Kent, the jurist; Wiley the intelligent and liberal bookseller; Henry D.
Sedgwick, always active in schemes of benevolence; Jarvis, the painter,
a man of infinite humor, whose jests awoke inextinguishable laughter; De
Kay, the naturalist; Sands, the poet; Jacob Harvey whose genial memory
is cherished by many friends. Of those who are yet living was Morse, the
inventor of the electric telegraph; Durand, then, one of the first of
engravers, and now no less illustrious as a painter; Henry James
Anderson, whose acquirements might awaken the envy of the ripest
scholars of the old world; Halleck, the poet and wit; Verplanck, who has
given the world the best edition of Shakspeare for general readers; Dr.
King, now at the head of Columbia College, and his two immediate
predecessors in that office. I might enlarge the list with many other
names of no less distinction. The army and navy contributed their
proportion of members, whose names are on record in our national
history. Cooper when in town was always present, and I remember being
struck with the inexhaustible vivacity of his conversation and the
minuteness of his knowledge, in everything which depended upon acuteness
of observation and exactness of recollection. I remember, too, being
somewhat startled, coming as I did from the seclusion of a country life,
with a certain emphatic frankness in his manner, which, however, I came
at last to like and to admire. The club met in the hotel called
Washington Hall, the site of which, is now occupied by part of the
circuit of Stewart's marble building.
Lionel Lincoln, which cannot be ranked among the successful productions
of Cooper, was published in 1825; and in the year following appeared the
Last of the Mohicans which more than recovered the ground lost by its
predecessor. In this work, the construction of the narrative has signal
defects, but it is one of the triumphs of the author's genius that he
makes us unconscious of them while we read. It is only when we have had
time to awake from the intense interest in which he has held us by the
vivid reality of his narrative, and have begun to search for faults in
cold blood, that we are able to find them, In the Last of the Mohicans,
we have a bolder portraiture of. Leatherstocking than in the Pioneers.
This work was published in 1826, and in the same year Cooper sailed with
his family for Europe. He left New York as one of the vessels of war,
described in his romances of the sea, goes out of port, amidst the
thunder of a parting salute from the big guns on the batteries. A dinner
was given him just before his departure, attended by most of the
distinguished men of the city, at which Peter A. Jay presided, and Dr.
King addressed him in terms which some then thought too glowing, but
which would now seem sufficiently temperate, expressing the good wishes
of his friends, and dwelling on the satisfaction they promised
themselves in possessing so illustrious a representative of American
literature in the old world. Cooper was scarcely in France when he
remembered his friends of the weekly club, and sent frequent missives to
be read at its meetings; but the club missed its founder went into a
decline, and not long afterwards quietly expired.
The first of Cooper's novels published after leaving America: was the
Prairie, which appeared early in 1827, a work with the admirers of which
I wholly agree. I read it with a certain awe, an undefined sense of
sublimity, such as one experiences on entering, for the first time, upon
those immense grassy deserts from which the work takes its name. The
squatter and his family--that brawny old man and his large-limbed sons,
living in a sort of primitive and patriarchal barbarism, sluggish on
ordinary occasions, but terrible when roused, like the hurricane that
sweeps the grand but monotonous wilderness in which they dwell--seem a
natural growth of ancient fields of the West. Leatherstocking, a hunter
in the Pioneers, a warrior in the Last of the Mohicans, and now, in his
extreme old age, a trapper on the prairie, declined in strength, but
undecayed in intellect, and looking to the near close of his life, and a
grave under the long grass, as calmly as the laborer at sunset looks to
his evening slumber, is no less in harmony with the silent desert in
which he wanders. Equally so are the Indians, still his companions,
copies of the American savage somewhat idealized, but not the less a
part of the wild nature in which they have their haunts.
Before the year closed, Cooper had given the world another nautical
tale, the Red Rover, which, with many, is a greater favorite than the
Pilot, and with reason, perhaps, if we consider principally the
incidents, which are conducted and described with a greater mastery over
the springs of pity and terror.
It happened to Cooper while he was abroad, as it not unfrequently
happens to our countrymen, to hear the United States disadvantageously
compared with Europe. He had himself been a close observer of things
both here and in the old world, and was conscious of being able to
refute the detractors of his country in regard to many points. He
published in 1828, after he had been two years in Europe, a series of
letters, entitled Notions of the Americans, by a Travelling Bachelor, in
which he gave a favorable account of the working of our institutions,
and vindicated his country from various flippant and ill-natured
misrepresentations of foreigners. It is rather too measured in style,
but is written from a mind full of the subject, and from a memory
wonderfully stored with particulars. Although twenty-four years have
elapsed since its publication, but little of the vindication has become
obsolete.
Cooper loved his country and was proud of her history and her
institutions, but it puzzles many that he should have appeared, at
different times, as her eulogist, and her censor. My friends, she is
worthy both of praise and of blame, and Cooper was not the man to shrink
from bestowing either, at what seemed to him the proper time. He
defended her from detractors abroad; he sought to save her from
flatterers at home. I will not say that he was in as good humor with his
country when he wrote Home at Found, as when he wrote his Notions of the
Americans, but this I will say that whether he commended or censured, he
did it in the sincerity of his heart, as a true American, and in the
belief that it would do good. His Notions of the Americans were more
likely to lessen than to increase his popularity in Europe, inasmuch as
they were put forth without the slightest regard to European prejudices.
In 1829, he brought out the novel entitled the Wept of Wishton-Wish, one
of the few of his works which we now rarely hear mentioned. He was
engaged in the composition of a third nautical tale, which he afterwards
published under the name of the Water-Witch, when the memorable
revolution of the Three Days of July broke out. He saw a government,
ruling by fear and in defiance of public opinion, overthrown in a few
hours, with little bloodshed; he saw the French nation, far from being
intoxicated with their new liberty, peacefully addressing themselves to
the discussion of the institutions under which they were to live. A work
which Cooper afterwards published, his Residence in Europe, gives the
outline of a plan of government for France furnished by him at that
time, to La Fayette, with whom he was in habits of close and daily
intimacy. It was his idea to give permanence to the new order of things
by associating two strong parties in its support, the friends of
legitimacy and the republicans. He suggested that Henry V. should be
called to the hereditary throne of France, a youth yet to be educated as
the head of a free people, that the peerage should be abolished, and a
legislature of two chambers established, with a constituency of at least
a million and a half of electors; the senate to be chosen by the general
vote, as the representative of the entire nation, and the members of the
other house to be chosen by districts, as the representatives of the
local interests. To the middle ground of politics so ostentatiously
occupied by Louis Philippe at the beginning of his reign, he predicted a
brief duration, believing that it would speedily be merged in despotism,
or supplanted by the popular rule. His prophecy has been fulfilled more
amply than he could have imagined--fulfilled in both its alternatives.
In one of the controversies of that time, Cooper bore a distinguished
part. The Revue Britannique, a periodical published in Paris, boldly
affirmed the government of the United States to be one of the most
expensive in the world, and its people among the most heavily taxed of
mankind. This assertion was supported with a certain show of proof, and
the writer affected to have established the conclusion that a republic
must necessarily be more expensive than a monarchy. The partisans of the
court were delighted with the reasoning of the article, and claimed a
triumph over our ancient friend La Fayette, who, during forty years, had
not ceased to hold up the government of the United States as the
cheapest in the world. At the suggestion of La Fayette, Cooper replied
to this attack upon his country in a letter which was translated into
French, and, together with, another from General Bertrand, for many
years a resident in America, was laid before the people of France.
These, two letters provoked a shower of rejoinders, in which, according
to Cooper, misstatements were mingled with scurrility. He commenced a
series of letters on the question in dispute, which were published in
the National, a daily sheet, and gave the first evidence of that
extraordinary acuteness in controversy which was no less characteristic
of his mind than the vigor of his imagination. The enemies of La Fayette
pressed into their service Mr. Leavitt Harris, of New Jersey, afterwards
our chargé d'affaires at the court of France, but Cooper replied to Mr.
Harris in the National of May 2d, 1832, closing a discussion in which he
had effectually silenced those who objected to our institutions on the
score of economy. Of these letters, which would form an important
chapter in political science, no entire copy, I have been told, is to be
found in this country.
One of the consequences of earnest controversy is almost invariably
personal ill-will. Cooper was told by one who held an official station
under the French government, that the part he had taken in this dispute
concerning taxation would neither be forgotten nor forgiven. The dislike
he had incurred in that quarter was strengthened by his novel of the
Bravo, published in the year 1831, while he was in the midst of his
quarrel with the aristocratic party. In that work, of which he has
himself justly said that it was thoroughly American in all that belonged
to it, his object was to show how institutions, professedly created to
prevent violence and wrong, become, when perverted from their natural
destination, the instruments of injustice; and how, in every system
which makes power the exclusive property of the strong, the weak are
sure to be oppressed. The work is written with all the vigor and spirit
of his best novels; the magnificent city of Venice, in which the scene
of the story is laid, stands continually before the imagination; and
from time to time the gorgeous ceremonies of the Venetian republic pass
under our eyes, such as the marriage of the Doge with the Adriatic, and
the, contest of the gondolas for the prize of speed. The Bravo himself
and several of the other characters are strongly conceived and
distinguished, but the most remarkable of them all is the spirited and
generous-hearted daughter of the jailer.
It has been said by some critics, who judge of Cooper by his failures,
that he had no skill in drawing female characters. By the same process,
it might, I suppose, be shown that Raphael was but an ordinary painter.
It must be admitted that when Cooper drew a lady of high breeding, he
was apt to pay too much attention to the formal part of her character,
and to make her a mere bundle of cold proprieties. But when he places
his heroines in some situation in life which leaves him nothing to do
but to make them natural and true, I know of nothing finer, nothing more
attractive or more individual than the portraitures he has given us.
Figaro, the wittiest of the French periodicals, and at that time on the
liberal side, commended the Bravo; the journals on the side of the
government censured it. Figaro afterwards passed into the hands of the
aristocratic party, and Cooper became the object of its attacks. He was
not, however, a man to be driven from any purpose which he had formed,
either by flattery or abuse, and both were tried with equal ill success.
In 1832 he published his Heidenmauer, and in 1833 his Headsman of Berne,
both with a political design similar to that of the Bravo, though
neither of them takes the same high rank among his works.
In 1833, after a residence of seven years in different parts of Europe,
but mostly in France, Cooper returned to his native country. The welcome
which met him here was somewhat chilled by the effect of the attacks
made upon him in France, and remembering with what zeal, and at what
sacrifice of the universal acceptance which his works would otherwise
have met, he had maintained the cause of his country against the wits
and orators of the court party in France, we cannot wonder that he
should have felt this coldness as undeserved. He published, shortly
after his arrival in this country, A Letter to his Countrymen in which
he complained of the censures cast upon him in the American newspapers,
gave a history of the part he had taken in exposing the misstatements of
the Révue Britannique, and warned his countrymen against the too common
error of resorting, with a blind deference, to foreign authorities,
often swayed by national or political prejudices, for our opinions of
American authors. Going beyond this topic, he examined and reprehended
the habit of applying to the interpretation of our own constitution
maxims derived from the practice of other governments, particularly that
of Great Britain. The importance of construing that instrument by its
own principles, he illustrated by considering several points in dispute
between parties of the day, on which he gave very decided opinions.
The principal effect of this pamphlet, as it seemed to me, was to awaken
in certain quarters a kind of resentment that a successful writer of
fiction should presume to give lessons in politics. I meddle not here
with the conclusions to which he arrived, though must be allowed to say
that they were stated and argued with great ability. In 1835 Cooper
published The Monnikins, a satirical work, partly with a political aim;
and in the same year appeared his American Democrat, a view of the civil
and social relations of the United States, discussing more gravely
various topics touched upon in the former work, and pointing out in what
respects he deemed the American people in their practice to have fallen
short of the excellence of their institutions.
He found time, however, for a more genial task--that of giving to the
world his observations on foreign countries. In 1836 appeared his
Sketches of Switzerland, a series of letters in four volumes, the second
part published about two months after the first, a delightful work,
written in a more fluent and flexible style than his Notions of the
Americans. The first part of Gleanings in Europe, giving an account of
his residence in France, followed in the same year; and the second part
of the same work, containing his observations on England, was published
in April, 1837. In these works, forming a series of eight volumes, he
relates and describes with much of the same distinctness as in his
novels; and his remarks on the manners and institutions of the different
countries, often sagacious, and always peculiarly his own, derive, from
their frequent reference to contemporary events, an historical interest.
In 1838 appeared Homeward Bound and Home as Found, two satirical novels,
in which Cooper held up to ridicule a certain class of conductors of the
newspaper press in America. These works had not the good fortune to
become popular. Cooper did not, and, because he was too deeply in
earnest, perhaps would not, infuse into his satirical works that gaiety
without which satire becomes wearisome. I believe, however, that if they
had been written by anybody else they would have met with more favor;
but the world knew that Cooper was able to give them something better,
and would not be satisfied with anything short of his best, Some
childishly imagined that because, in the two works I have just
mentioned, a newspaper editor is introduced, in whose character almost
every possible vice of his profession is made to find a place, Cooper
intended an indiscriminate attack upon the whole body of writers for the
newspaper press, forgetting that such a portraiture was a satire only on
those to whom it bore a likeness We have become less sensitive and more
reasonable of late, and the monthly periodicals make sport for their
readers of the follies and ignorance of the newspaper editors, without
awakening the slightest resentment; but Cooper led the way in this sort
of discipline, and I remember some instances of towering indignation at
his audacity expressed in the journals of that time.
The next year Cooper made his appearance before the public in a new
department of writing; his Naval History of the United States was
brought out in two octavo volumes at Philadelphia, by Carey and Lea. In
writing his stories of the sea, his attention had been much turned to
this subject, and his mind filled with striking incidents from
expeditions and battles in which our naval commanders had been engaged.
This made his task the lighter; but he gathered his materials with great
industry, and with a conscientious attention to exactness, for he was
not a man to take a fact for granted, or allow imagination to usurp the
place of inquiry He digested our naval annals into a narrative, written
with spirit it is true, but with that air of sincere dealing which the
reader willingly takes as a pledge of its authenticity.
An abridgment of the work was afterwards prepared and published by the
author. The Edinburgh Review, in an article professing to examine the
statements both of Cooper's work and of The History of the English Navy,
written by Mr. James, a surgeon by profession, made a violent attack
upon the American historian. Unfortunately, it took James's narrative as
its sole guide, and followed it implicitly. Cooper replied in the
Democratic Review for January, 1840, and by a masterly analysis of his
statements, convicting James of self-contradiction in almost every
particular in which he differed from himself, refuted both James and the
reviewer. It was a refutation which admitted of no rejoinder.
Scarce anything in Cooper's life was so remarkable, or so strikingly
illustrated his character, as his contest with the newspaper press. He
engaged in it after provocations, many and long endured, and prosecuted
it through years with great energy, perseverance, and practical
dexterity, till he was left master of the field. In what I am about to
say of it, I hope I shall not give offence to any one, as I shall speak
without the slightest malevolence towards those with whom he waged this
controversy. Over some of them, as over their renowned adversary, the
grave has now closed. Yet where shall the truth be spoken, if not beside
the grave?
I have already alluded to the principal causes which provoked the
newspaper attacks upon Cooper. If he had never meddled with questions of
government on either side of the Atlantic, and never satirized the
newspaper press, I have little doubt that he would have been spared
these attacks. I cannot, however, ascribe them all, or even the greater
part of them, to personal malignity. One journal followed the example of
another, with little reflection, I think, in most cases, till it became
a sort of fashion, not merely to decry his works, but to arraign his
motives.
It is related that, in 1832, while he was at Paris, an article was shown
him in an American newspaper, purporting to be a criticism on one of his
works, but reflecting with much asperity on his personal character. "I
care nothing," he is reported to have said, "for the criticism, but I am
not indifferent to the slander. If these attacks on my character should
be kept up five years after my return to America, I shall resort to the
New York courts for protection." He gave the newspaper press of this
state the full period of forbearance on which he had fixed, but finding
that forbearance seemed to encourage assault, he sought redress in the
courts of law.
When these litigations were first begun, I recollect it seemed to me
that Cooper had taken a step which would give him a great deal of
trouble, and effect but little good. I said to myself--
"Alas! Leviathan is not so tamed!"
As he proceeded, however, I saw that he had understood the matter better
than I. He put a hook into the nose of this huge monster, wallowing in
his inky pool and bespattering the passers-by; he dragged him to the
land and made him tractable. One suit followed another; one editor was
sued, I think half-a-dozen times; some of them found themselves under a
second indictment before the first was tried. In vindicating himself to
his reader, against the charge of publishing one libel, the angry
journalist often floundered into another. The occasions of these
prosecutions seem to have been always carefully considered, for Cooper
was almost uniformly successful in obtaining verdicts. In a letter of
his, written in February, 1843, about five years, I think, from the
commencement of the first prosecutions, he says, "I have beaten every
man I have sued, who has not retracted his libels."
In one of these suits, commenced against the late William L. Stone of
the Commercial Advertiser, and referred to the arbitration of three
distinguished lawyers, he argued himself the question of the
authenticity of his account of the battle of Lake Erie, which was the
matter in dispute. I listened to his opening; it was clear, skilful, and
persuasive, but his closing argument was said to be splendidly eloquent.
"I have heard nothing like it," said a barrister to me, "since the days
of Emmet."
Cooper behaved liberally towards his antagonists, so far as pecuniary
damages were concerned, though some of them wholly escaped their payment
by bankruptcy. After, I believe, about, six years of litigation, the
newspaper press gradually subsided into a pacific disposition towards
its adversary, and the contest closed with the account of pecuniary
profit and loss, so far as he was concerned, nearly balanced. The
occasion of these suits was far from honorable to those who provoked
them, but the result was I had almost said, creditable to all parties;
to him, as the courageous prosecutor, to the administration of justice
in this country, and to the docility of the newspaper press, which he
had disciplined into good manners.
It was while he was in the midst of these litigations, that he
published, in 1840, the Pathfinder. People had begun to think of him as
a controversialist, acute, keen, and persevering, occupied with his
personal wrongs and schemes of attack and defence. They were startled
from this estimate of his character by the moral duty of that glorious
work--I must so call it; by the vividness and force of its delineations,
by the unspoiled love of nature apparent in every page, and by the fresh
and warm emotions which everywhere gave life to the narrative and the
dialogue. Cooper was now in his fifty-first year, but nothing which he
had produced in the earlier part of his literary life was written with
so much of what might seem the generous fervor of youth, or showed the
faculty of invention in higher vigor. I recollect that near the time of
its appearance I was informed of an observation made upon it by one
highly distinguished in the literature of our country and of the age,
between whom and the author an unhappy coolness had for some years
existed. As he finished the reading of the Pathfinder, he exclaimed,
"They may say what they will of Cooper; the man who wrote this book is
not only a great man, but a good man."
The readers of the Pathfinder were quickly reconciled to the fourth
appearance of Leatherstocking, when they saw him made to act a different
part from any which the author had hitherto assigned him--when they saw
him shown as a lover, and placed in the midst of associations which
invested his character with a higher and more affecting heroism. In this
work are two female characters, portrayed in a masterly manner,--the
corporal's daughter, Mabel Dunham, generous, resolute, yet womanly, and
the young Indian woman, called by her tribe the Dew of June, a
personification of female truth, affection, and sympathy, with a strong
aboriginal cast, yet a product of nature as bright and pure as that from
which she is named.
Mercedes of Castile, published near the close of the same year, has none
of the stronger characteristics of Cooper's genius; but in the
Deerslayer, which appeared in 1841, another of his Leatherstocking
tales, he gave us a work rivalling the Pathfinder. Leatherstocking is
brought before us in his early youth, in the first exercise of that keen
sagacity which is blended so harmoniously with a simple and ingenuous
goodness. The two daughters of the retired freebooter dwelling on the
Otsego lake, inspire scarcely less interest than the principal
personage; Judith, in the pride of her beauty and intellect, her good
impulses contending with a fatal love of admiration, holding us
fascinated with a constant interest in her fate, which, with consummate
skill, we are permitted rather to conjecture than to know; and Hetty,
scarcely less beautiful in person, weak-minded, but wise in the midst,
of that weakness beyond the wisdom of the loftiest intellect, through
the power of conscience and religion. The character of Hetty would have
been a hazardous experiment in feebler hands, but in his it was
admirably successful.
The Two Admirals and Wing-and-Wing were given to the public in 1842,
both of them taking a high rank among Cooper's sea-tales. The first of
these is a sort of naval epic in prose; the flight and chase of armed
vessels hold us in breathless suspense, and the sea-fights are described
with a terrible power. In the later sea-tales of Cooper, it seems to me
that the mastery with which he makes his grand processions of events
pass before the mind's eye is even greater than in his earlier. The next
year he published the Wyandotte or Hutted Knoll, one of his beautiful
romances of the woods, and in 1844 two more of his sea-stories, Afloat
and Ashore and Miles Wallingfordits sequel. The long series of his
nautical tales was closed by Jack Tier or the Florida Reef, published in
1848, when Cooper was in his sixtieth year, and it is as full of spirit,
energy, invention, life-like presentation of objects and events--
The vision and the faculty divine--
as anything he has written.
Let me pause here to say that Cooper, though not a manufacturer of
verse, was in the highest sense of the word a poet; his imagination
wrought nobly and grandly, and imposed its creations on the mind of the
reader for realities. With him there was no withering, or decline, or
disuse of the poetic faculty; as he stepped downwards from the zenith of
life, no shadow or chill came over it; it was like the year of some
genial climates, a perpetual season of verdure, bloom, and fruitfulness.
As these works came out, I was rejoiced to see that he was unspoiled by
the controversies in which he had allowed, himself to become engaged;
that they had not given to these better expressions of his genius, any
tinge of misanthropy, or appearance of contracting and closing
sympathies any trace of an interest in his fellow-beings less large and
free than in his earlier works.
Before the, appearance of his Jack Tier, Cooper published, in 1845 and
the following year, a series of novels relating to the Anti-rent
question, in which he took great interest. He thought that the
disposition manifested in certain quarters to make con cessions, to what
he deemed a denial of the rights of property was a first step in a most
dangerous path. To discourage this disposition, he wrote Satanstoe, The
Chainbearer, and The Redskins. They are didactic in their design, and
want the freedom of invention which belongs to Cooper's best novels; but
if they had been written by anybody but Cooper,--by a member of
Congress, for example, or an eminent politician of any class,--they
would have made his reputation. It was said, I am told, by a
distinguished jurist of our state, that they entitled the author to as
high a place in law as his other works had won for him in literature.
I had thought, in meditating the plan of this discourse, to mention all
the works of Mr. Cooper, but the length to which I have found it
extending has induced me to pass over several written in the last ten
years of his life, and to confine myself to those which best illustrate
his literary character. The last of his novels was The Ways of the Hour,
a work in which the objections he entertained to the trial by jury in
civil causes were stated in the form of a narrative.
It is a voluminous catalogue--that of Cooper's published works--but it
comprises not all he wrote. He committed to the fire, without remorse,
many of the fruits of his literary industry. It was understood, some
years since, that he had a work ready for the press on the Middle States
of the Union, principally illustrative of their social history; but it
has not been found among his manuscripts, and the presumption is that he
must have destroyed it. He had planned a work on the Towns of Manhattan,
for the publication of which he made arrangements with Mr. Putnam of
this city, and a part of which, already written, was in press at the
time of his death. The printed part has since been destroyed by fire,
but a portion of the manuscript was recovered. The work, I learn, will
be completed by one of the family, who, within a few years past, has
earned an honorable name among the authors of our country. Great as was
the number of his works, and great as was the favor with which they were
received, the pecuniary rewards of his success were far less than has
been generally supposed--scarcely, as I am informed, a tenth part of
what the common rumor made them. His fame was infinitely the largest
acknowledgment which this most successful of American authors received
for his labors.
The Ways of the Hour appeared in 1850. At this time his personal
appearance was remarkable. He seemed in perfect health, and in the
highest energy and activity of his faculties. I have scarcely seen any
man at that period of life on whom his years sat more lightly. His
conversation had lost none of its liveliness, though it seemed somewhat
more genial and forbearing in tone, and his spirits none of their
elasticity. He was contemplating, I have since been told, another
Leatherstocking tale, deeming that he had not yet exhausted the
character; and those who consider what new resources it yielded him in
the Pathfinder and the Deerslayer, will readily conclude that he was not
mistaken.
The disease, however, by which he was removed, was even then impending
over him, and not long afterwards his friends here were grieved to learn
that his health was declining. He came to New York so changed that they
looked at him with sorrow, and after a stay of some weeks, partly for
the benefits of medical advice returned to Cooperstown, to leave it no
more. His complaint gradually gained strength, subdued a constitution
originally robust, and finally passed into a confirmed dropsy. In
August, 1851, he was visited by his excellent and learned friend, Dr.
Francis, a member of the weekly club which he had founded in the early
part of his literary career. He found him bearing the sufferings of his
disease with manly firmness, gave him such medical counsels as the
malady appeared to require, prepared him delicately for its fatal
termination, and returned to New York with the most melancholy
anticipations. In a few days afterwards, Cooper expired, amid the deep
affliction of his family, on the 14th of September, the day before that
on which he should have completed his sixty-second year. He died,
apparently without pain, in peace and religious hope. The relations of
man to his Maker, and to that state of being for which the present is
but a preparation, had occupied much of his thoughts during his whole
lifetime, and he crossed, with a serene composure, the mysterious
boundary which divides this life from the next.
The departure of such a man, in the full strength of his faculties,--on
whom the country had for thirty years looked as one of the permanent
ornaments of its literature, and whose name had been so often associated
with praise, with renown, with controversy, with blame, but never with
death,--diffused a universal awe. It was as if an earthquake had shaken
the ground on which we stood, and showed the grave opening by our path.
In the general grief for his loss, his virtues only were remembered; and
his failings forgotten.
Of his failings I have said little; such as he had were obvious to all
the world; they lay on the surface of his character; those who knew him
least made the most account of them. With a character so made up of
positive qualities--a character so independent and uncompromising, and
with a sensitiveness far more acute than he was willing to acknowledge,
it is not surprising that occasions frequently arose to bring him,
sometimes into friendly collision, and sometimes in to graver
disagreements and misunderstandings with his fellow-men. For his
infirmities, his friends found an ample counterpoise in the generous
sincerity of his nature. He never thought of disguising his opinions,
and he abhorred all disguise in others; he did not even deign to use
that show of regard towards those of whom he did not think well, which
the world tolerates, and almost demands. A manly expression of opinion,
however different from his own, commanded his respect. Of his own works,
he spoke with the same freedom as of the works of others; and never
hesitated to express his judgment of a book for the reason that it was
written by himself: yet he could bear with gentleness any dissent from
the estimate lie placed on his own writings. His character was like the
bark of the cinnamon, a rough and astringent rind without, and an
intense sweetness within. Those who penetrated below the surface found a
genial temper, warm affections, and a heart with ample place for his
friends, their pursuits, their good name, their welfare. They found him
a philanthropist, though not precisely after the fashion of the day; a
religious man, most devout where devotion is most apt to be a feeling
rather than a custom, in the household circle; hospitable, and to the
extent of his means liberal-handed in acts of charity. They found, also,
that though in general he would as soon have thought of giving up an old
friend as of giving up an opinion, he was not proof against testimony,
and could part with a mistaken opinion as one parts with an old friend
who has been proved faithless and unworthy. In short, Cooper was one of
those who, to be loved, must be intimately known.
Of his literary character I have spoken largely in the narrative of his
life, but there are yet one or two remarks which must be made to do it
justice. In that way of writing in which he excelled, it seems to me
that he united, in a pre-eminent degree, those qualities which enabled
him to interest the largest number of readers. He wrote not for the
fastidious, the over-refined, the morbidly delicate; for these find in
his genius something too robust for their liking--something by which
their sensibilities are too rudely shaken; but he wrote for mankind at
large--for men and women in the ordinary healthful state of feeling--and
in their admiration he found his reward. It is for this class that
public libraries are obliged to provide themselves with an extraordinary
number of copies of his works: the number in the Mercantile Library in
this city, I am told, is forty. Hence it is, that he has earned a fame,
wider, I think, than any author of modern times--wider, certainly, than
any author, of any age, ever enjoyed in his lifetime. All his
excellences are translatable--they pass readily into languages the least
allied in their genius to that in which he wrote, and in them he touches
the heart and kindles the imagination with the same power as in the
original English.
Cooper was not wholly without humor; it is sometimes found lurking in
the dialogue of Harvey Birch, and of Leatherstocking but it forms no
considerable element in his works; and if it did, it would have stood in
the way of his universal popularity; since of all qualities, it is the
most difficult to transfuse into a foreign language. Nor did the effect
he produced upon the reader depend on any grace of style which would
escape a translator of ordinary skill. With his style, it is true, he
took great pains, and in his earlier works, I am told, sometimes altered
the proofs sent from the printer so largely that they might be said to
be written over Yet he attained no special felicity, variety, or compass
of expression. His style, however, answered his purpose; it has defects,
but it is manly and clear, and stamps on the mind of the reader the
impression he desired to convey. I am not sure that some of the very
defects of Cooper's novels do not add, by a certain force of contrast,
to their power over the mind. He is long in getting at the interest of
his narrative. The progress of the plot, at first, is like that of one
of his own vessels of war, slowly, heavily, and even awkwardly working
out of a harbor. We are impatient and weary, but when the vessel is once
in the open sea, and feels the free breath of heaven in her full sheets,
our delight and admiration is all the greater at the grace, the majesty,
and power with which she divides and bears down the waves, and pursues
her course, at will, over the great waste of waters.
Such are the works so widely read, and so universally admired, in all
the zones of the globe, and by men of every kindred and every tongue;
works which have made of those who dwell in remote latitudes, wanderers
in our forests, and observers of our manners, and have inspired them
with an interest in our history. A gentleman who had returned from
Europe just before the death of Cooper, was asked what he found the
people of the Continent doing. "They all are reading Cooper," he
answered; "in the little kingdom of Holland, with its three millions of
inhabitants, I looked into four different translations of Cooper in the
language of the country." A traveller, who has seen much of the middle
classes of Italy, lately said to me, "I found that all they knew of
America, and that was not little, they had learned from Cooper's novels;
from him they had learned the story of American liberty, and through him
they had been introduced to our Washington; they had read his works till
the shores of the Hudson, and the valleys of Westchester, and the banks
of Otsego lake, had become to them familiar ground."
Over all the countries into whose speech this great man's works have
been rendered by the labors of their scholars, the sorrow of that loss
which we deplore is now diffusing itself. Here we lament the ornament of
our country, there they mourn the death of him who delighted the human
race. Even now, while I speak, the pulse of grief which is passing
through the nations has haply just reached some remote neighborhood; the
news of his death has been brought to some dwelling on the slopes of the
Andes, or amidst the snowy wastes of the North, and the dark-eyed damsel
of Chile, or the fair-haired maid of Norway, is sad to think that he
whose stories of heroism and true love have so often kept her for hours
from her pillow, lives no more.
He is gone! but the creations of his genius, fixed in living words,
survive the frail material organs by which the words were first traced.
They partake of a middle nature, between the deathless mind and the
decaying body of which they are the common offspring, and are,
therefore, destined to a duration, if not eternal, yet indefinite. The
examples he has given in his glorious fictions, of heroism, honor, and
truth, of large sympathies between man and man, of all that is good,
great, and excellent, embodied in personages marked with so strong an
individuality that we place them among our friends and favorites; his
frank and generous men, his gentle and noble women, shall live through
centuries to come, and only perish with our language. I have said with
our language; but who shall say when it may be the fate of the English
language to be numbered with the extinct forms of human speech? Who
shall declare which of the present tongues of the civilized world will
survive its fellows? It may be that some one of them, more fortunate
than the rest, will long outlast them, in some undisturbed quarter of
the globe, and in the midst of a new civilization. The creations of
Cooper's genius, even now transferred to that language, may remain to be
the delight of the nations through another great cycle of centuries,
beginning after the English language and its contemporaneous form of
civilization shall have passed away. Preface to the New Edition
This book originally owed its existence to an accident, and it was
printed under circumstances that prevented the usual supervision of the
press by the author. The consequences were many defects in plot, style,
and arrangement, that were entirely owing to precipitation and
inexperience; and quite as many faults, of another nature, that are to
be traced solely to a bad manuscript and worse proof reading. Perhaps no
novel of our times was worst printed than the first edition of this
work. More than a hundred periods were placed in the middle of
sentences, and perhaps five times that number were omitted in places
where they ought to have been inserted. It is scarcely necessary to add,
that passages were rendered obscure, and that entire paragraphs were
unintelligible.
Most of the faults just mentioned have now been corrected, though it
would require more labor than would produce an entirely new work, to
repair all the inherent defects that are attributable to haste, and to
the awkwardness of a novice in the art of composing. In this respect,
the work and its blemishes are probably inseparable. Still, the reader
will now be better rewarded for his time, and, on the whole; the book is
much more worthy of his attention.
It has been said that Precaution owes its existence to fortuitous
circumstances. The same causes induced its English plot, and, in a
measure, the medley of characters that no doubt will appear a mistake in
the conception. It can scarcely be said that the work was commenced with
any view to publication; and when it was finally put into a publisher's
hands, with "all its imperfections on its head," the last thought of the
writer was any expectation that it would be followed by a series of
similar tales from the same pen.
More than this the public will feel no interest in knowing, and less
than this the author could not consent to say on presenting to the world
a reprint of a book with so few claims to notice.
Precaution.
Chapter I.
"I wonder if we are to have a neighbor in the Deanery soon," inquired
Clara Moseley, addressing herself to a small party assembled in her
father's drawing-room, while standing at a window which commanded a
distant view of the house in question.
"Oh yes," replied her brother, "the agent has let it to a Mr. Jarvis for
a couple of years, and he is to take possession this week."
"And who is the Mr. Jarvis that is about to become so near a neighbor?"
asked Sir Edward Moseley.
"Why, sir, I learn he has been a capital merchant; that he has retired
from business with a large fortune; that he has, like yourself, sir, an
only hope for his declining years in son, an officer in the army; and,
moreover, that he has couple of fine daughters; so, sir, he is a man of
family in one sense, at least, you see. But," dropping his voice,
"whether he is a man of family in your sense, Jane," looking at his
second sister, "is more than I could discover."
"I hope you did not take the trouble, sir, to inquire on my account,"
retorted Jane, coloring slightly with vexation at his speech.
"Indeed I did, my dear sis, and solely on your account," replied the
laughing brother, "for you well know that no gentility, no husband; and
it's dull work to you young ladies without at least a possibility of
matrimony; as for Clara, she is----"
Here he was stopped by his youngest sister Emily placing her hand on his
mouth, as she whispered in his ear, "John, you forget the anxiety of a
certain gentleman about a fair incognita at Bath, and a list of
inquiries concerning her lineage, and a few other indispensables." John,
in his turn, colored, and affectionately kissing the hand which kept him
silent, addressed himself to Jane, and by his vivacity and good humor
soon restored her to complacency.
"I rejoice," said Lady Moseley, "that Sir William has found a tenant,
however; for next to occupying it himself, it is a most desirable thing
to have a good tenant in it, on account of the circle in which we live."
"And Mr. Jarvis has the great goodness of money, by John's account,"
caustically observed Mrs. Wilson, who was a sister of Sir Edward's.
"Let me tell you, madam," cried the rector of the parish, looking around
him pleasantly, and who was pretty constant, and always a welcome
visitor in the family, "that a great deal of money is a very good thing
in itself, and that a great many very good things may be done with it."
"Such as paying tythes, ha! doctor," cried Mr. Haughton, a gentleman of
landed property in the neighborhood, of plain exterior, but great
goodness of heart, and between whom and the rector subsisted the most
cordial good will.
"Aye, tythes, or halves, as the baronet did here, when he forgave old
Gregson one half his rent, and his children the other."
"Well, but, my dear," said Sir Edward to his wife, "you must not starve
our friends because we are to have a neighbor. William has stood with
the dining-room door open these five minutes--"
Lady Moseley gave her hand to the rector, and the company followed them,
without any order, to the dinner table.
The party assembled around the hospitable board of the baronet was
composed, besides the before-mentioned persons, of the wife of Mr.
Haughton, a woman of much good sense and modesty of deportment: their
daughter, a young lady conspicuous for nothing but good nature; and the
wife and son of the rector--the latter but lately admitted to holy
orders himself.
The remainder of the day passed in an uninterrupted flow of pleasant
conversation, the natural consequence of a unison of opinions on all
leading questions, the parties having long known and esteemed each other
for those qualities which soonest reconcile us to the common frailties
of our nature. On parting at the usual hour, it was agreed to meet that
day week at the rectory, and the doctor, on making his bow to Lady
Moseley, observed, that he intended, in virtue of his office, to make an
early call on the Jarvis family, and that, if possible, he would
persuade them to be of the party.
Sir Edward Moseley was descended from one of the most respectable of the
creations of his order by James, and had inherited, with many of the
virtues of his ancestor, an estate which placed him amongst the greatest
landed proprietors of the county. But, as it had been an invariable rule
never to deduct a single acre from the inheritance of the eldest son,
and the extravagance of his mother, who was the daughter of a nobleman,
had much embarrassed the affairs of his father, Sir Edward, on coming
into possession of his estate, had wisely determined to withdraw from
the gay world, by renting his house in town, and retiring altogether to
his respectable mansion, about a hundred miles from the metropolis. Here
he hoped, by a course of systematic but liberal economy, to release
himself from all embarrassments, and to make such a provision for his
younger children, the three daughters already mentioned, as he conceived
their birth entitled them to expect. Seventeen years enabled him to
accomplish this plan; and for more than eighteen months, Sir Edward had
resumed the hospitality and appearance usual in his family, and had even
promised his delighted girls to take possession, the ensuing winter, of
the house in St. James's Square. Nature had not qualified Sir Edward for
great or continued exertions, and the prudent decision he had taken to
retrieve his fortunes, was perhaps an act of as much forecast and vigor
as his talents or energy would afford; it was the step most obviously
for his interests, and the one that was safest both in its execution and
consequences, and as such it had been adopted: but, had it required a
single particle more of enterprise or calculation, it would have been
beyond his powers, and the heir might have yet labored under the
difficulties which distressed his more brilliant, but less prudent
parent.
The baronet was warmly attached to his wife; and as she was a woman of
many valuable and no obnoxious qualities, civil and attentive by habit
to all around her, and perfectly disinterested in her attachments to her
own family, nothing in nature could partake more of perfection in the
eyes of her husband and children than the conduct of this beloved
relative. Yet Lady Moseley had her failings, however, although few were
disposed to view her errors with that severity which truth and a just
discrimination of character render necessary. Her union had been one of
love, and for a time it had been objected to by the friends of her
husband, on the score of fortune; but constancy and perseverance
prevailed, and the protracted and inconsequent opposition of his parents
had left no other effects than an aversion in the children to the
exercise of parental authority, in marrying their own descendents: an
aversion which, though common to both the worthy baronet and his wife,
was somewhat different in its two subjects. In the husband it was
quiescent; but in the wife, it was slightly shaded with the female
esprit de corps, of having her daughters comfortably established, and
that in due season. Lady Moseley was religious, but hardly pious; she
was charitable in deeds, but not always in opinions; her intentions were
pure, but neither her prejudices nor her reasoning powers suffered her
to be at all times consistent. Still few knew her that did not love her,
and none were ever heard to say aught against her breeding, her morals,
or her disposition.
The sister of Sir Edward had been married, early in life, to an officer
in the army, who, spending much of his time abroad on service, had left
her a prey to that solicitude to which she was necessarily a prey by her
attachment to her husband. To find relief from this perpetual and life-
wearing anxiety, an invaluable friend had pointed out the only true
remedy of which her case admitted, a research into her own heart, and
the employments of active benevolence. The death of her husband, who
lost his life in battle, caused her to withdraw in a great measure from
the world, and gave time and inducement for reflections, which led to
impressions on religion that were sufficiently correct in themselves,
and indispensable as the basis of future happiness, but which became
slightly tinctured with the sternness of her vigorous mind, and
possibly, at times were more unbending than was compatible with the
comforts of this world; a fault, however, of manner, more than of
matter. Warmly attached to her brother and his children, Mrs. Wilson,
who had never been a mother herself, yielded to their earnest entreaties
to become one of the family; and although left by the late General
Wilson with a large income, ever since his death she had given up her
own establishment, and devoted most of her time to the formation of the
character of her youngest niece. Lady Moseley had submitted this child
entirely to the control of the aunt; and it was commonly thought Emily
would inherit the very handsome sum left at the disposal of the
General's widow.
Both Sir Edward and Lady Moseley possessed a large share of personal
beauty when young, and it had descended in common to all their children,
but more particularly to the two youngest daughters. Although a strong
family resemblance, both in person and character, existed between these
closely connected relatives, yet it existed with shades of distinction
that had very different effects on their conduct, and led to results
which stamped their lives with widely differing degrees of happiness.
Between the families at Moseley Hall and the rectory, there had existed
for many years an intimacy founded on esteem and on long intercourse.
Doctor Ives was a clergyman of deep piety; and of very considerable
talents; he possessed, in addition to a moderate benefice, an
independent fortune in right of his wife, who was the only child of a
distinguished naval officer. Both were well connected, well bred, and
well disposed to their fellow creatures. They were blessed with but one
child, the young divine we have mentioned, who promised to equal his
father in all those qualities which had made the Doctor the delight of
his friends, and almost the idol of his parishioners.
Between Francis Ives and Clara Moseley, there had been an attachment,
which had grown with their years, from childhood. He had been her
companion in their youthful recreations, had espoused her little
quarrels, and participated in her innocent pleasures, for so many years,
and with such an evident preference for each other in the youthful pair,
that, on leaving college to enter on the studies of his sacred calling
with his father, Francis rightly judged that none other would make his
future life as happy, as the mild, the tender, the unassuming Clara.
Their passion, if so gentle a feeling deserve the term, received the
sanction of their parents, and the two families waited only for the
establishment of the young divine, to perfect the union.
The retirement of Sir Edward's family had been uniform, with the
exception of an occasional visit to an aged uncle of his wife's, and
who, in return, spent much of his time with them at the Hall, and who
had openly declared his intention of making the children of Lady Moseley
his heirs. The visits of Mr. Benfield were always hailed with joy, and
as an event that called for more than ordinary gaiety; for, although
rough in manner, and somewhat infirm from years, the old bachelor, who
was rather addicted to the customs in which he had indulged in his
youth, and was fond of dwelling on the scenes of former days, was
universally beloved where he was intimately known, for an unbounded
though eccentric philanthropy.
The illness of the mother-in-law of Mrs. Wilson had called her to Bath
the winter preceding the spring when our history commences, and she had
been accompanied thither by her nephew and favorite niece. John and
Emily, during the month of their residence in that city, were in the
practice of making daily excursions in its environs. It was in one of
these little drives that they were of accidental service to a very young
and very beautiful woman, apparently in low health. They had taken her
up in their carriage, and conveyed her to a farm-house where she
resided, during a faintness which had come over her in a walk; and her
beauty, air, and manner, altogether so different from those around her,
had interested them both to a painful degree. They had ventured to call
the following day to inquire after her welfare, and this visit led to a
slight intercourse, which continued for the fortnight they remained
there.
John had given himself some trouble to ascertain who she was, but in
vain. They could merely learn that her life was blameless, that she saw
no one but themselves, and her dialect raised a suspicion that she was
not English, It was to this unknown fair Emily alluded in her playful
attempt to stop the heedless rattle of her brother, who was not always
restrained from uttering what he thought by a proper regard for the
feelings of others.