the essayists than with the novelists; but his stories and tales must
be considered here. They have contributed largely if not chiefly to
his enduring reputation. His first book, “Knickerbocker’s History
of New York” (1809), in which he works out a grotesquely humorous
drama of the Dutch fathers wrestling with the weighty problems of
statecraft, is of course in the main fictitious. No doubt it is at
times pretentious or overdone, and the humour is occasionally a little
too broad for the decorum of to-day; but the irrepressible spirit
of comedy, the delightfully burlesqued descriptions of stolid Dutch
character, the vivid though leisurely narrative, give it a supreme
place in our humorous literature. “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow” are doubtless the most read parts of “The Sketch Book”
and have long since become classics; no more faithful narratives of
quaint old Dutch life have ever been written. In them the boisterous
exuberance of the “History” gives way to a more graceful, refined,
and mature style, which invests the homely simplicity and contentment
of colonial Dutch life with a kind of idyllic charm. Only a little
less successful were Irving’s other stories of early New Amsterdam
life--notably “The Money-Diggers” in “Tales of a Traveller,” and “Dolph
Heyliger” in “Bracebridge Hall.” Inferior because more conventional
and less spontaneous are the first three parts of the “Tales”; yet
even here, in dealing with the sentimental and the terrible, Irving
compares favourably with other story-tellers of his day. In the stories
scattered through “The Alhambra,” Irving showed clearly that he had
found another source of inspiration in the romantic legends of Spain
and the Moors--legends full of Oriental mystery and of the splendid
glories of old Spain, so charmingly and truthfully set forth that the
Spaniards themselves spoke of him as “the poet Irving.” And “poet”
he is in the large sense that he has created imperishable scenes and
characters in that realm of romance in which we delight to wander, far
from the prosaic world and the madding crowd.
_James Kirke Paulding._--A contrast with Irving in more than one
respect is afforded by James K. Paulding (1778-1860), the friend and
collaborator of Washington Irving and the brother-in-law of William
Irving. The author of “The Sketch Book” gave his whole life to the
profession of letters; for Paulding, on the other hand, literary
composition was only an avocation. The genial humour of Irving, too,
differs from the satirical and ironical vein too often indulged in by
his friend. Born in Dutchess County, New York, Paulding went to New
York City while a young man and became associated with the Irvings in
writing _Salmagundi_, the success of which gave Paulding confidence in
himself and led him to further literary efforts. “The Diverting History
of John Bull and Brother Jonathan” (1812), a loosely constructed and
amateurish satire in the style of Arbuthnot, became very popular both
in America and in England. “Koningsmarke, the Long Finne” (1823), now
remembered only for the familiar assertion that “Peter Piper picked
a peck of pickled peppers,” was a burlesque on Cooper’s “Pioneers.”
Paulding’s most successful work, which deserves to live, was “The
Dutchman’s Fireside” (1831), in which are charming descriptions of
quaint Dutch customs and personages, of the picturesque scenery of the
Hudson, and of the vast expanse of wilderness that stretched to the
westward. In general, however, Paulding’s work was characterised by
a too harsh and obstreperous Americanism, an immoderate and amusing
hostility to foreigners, and a carelessness of workmanship which
prevented it from enduring long.
_Samuel Woodworth._--As a curiosity must here be mentioned the
long-forgotten “Champions of Freedom” (1816) of Samuel Woodworth
(1785-1842). It was his one essay in fiction; a history of the War
of 1812 in the style of a romance. It must be described as a chaotic
miscellany, blending wild romance with commonplace realism, and
conducting the reader from ballroom to battlefield and back again with
the least possible suspicion of method or motive.
_John Neal._--Born in Portland, Maine, and beginning life as a shop-boy
in Boston, John Neal (1793-1876) became in turn a wholesale dry-goods
merchant, a lawyer, and a voluminous critic, poet, and novelist. He
boasted that in thirty-six years he had written enough altogether to
fill a hundred octavo volumes; yet to-day he is little more than a
name. His first novel, “Keep Cool,” which he afterward spoke of with
justice as a “paltry, contemptible affair,” appeared in 1817. His best
novels are “Seventy-Six” (1823), a lively story of the Revolution,
“Rachel Dyer” (1828), a story of the Salem Witchcraft, and “The
Down-Easters” (1833), an extravagant tale which deals with the ways of
steamboat passengers, and into which he manages to introduce plenty
of horrors. Neal has been well styled “the universal Yankee, whittling
his way through creation, with a half-genius for everything, a robust
genius for nothing.” He is said to have been the originator of the
woman’s suffrage movement, the first person to establish a gymnasium in
America, and the first to encourage Edgar A. Poe.[6]
_James Fenimore Cooper._--The first American to win universal
recognition as a powerful novelist was James Fenimore Cooper. Born at
Burlington, New Jersey, on September 15, 1789, of English Quaker and
Swedish parentage, he was taken, when a year old, to the Central New
York wilderness, where his father, having become the owner of large
tracts of land, had laid out the village of Cooperstown. Here, on the
shores of the beautiful Otsego Lake, in a motley frontier settlement,
the boy Cooper passed his earliest years. In due time entering the
family of an Albany clergyman as a private pupil, Cooper proceeded in
1803 to Yale College, where he became a member of the class of 1806. An
escapade in his third year led to his dismissal; after which he served
a marine apprenticeship of a year and then entered the navy, serving
as midshipman for nearly four years. In 1811, he married Susan A. De
Lancey, a lady of Huguenot and Tory family, and a sister of Bishop De
Lancey of Western New York; and at her request resigned his commission,
to become an amateur farmer, successively at Mamaroneck, on Long Island
Sound, at Cooperstown, and at Scarsdale, Westchester County, all in New
York State. Thus he arrived at the age of thirty without having even
dreamed of a career of authorship. One day, reading a novel descriptive
of English society, he impatiently threw down the book and exclaimed
that he could write a better story himself. Challenged by his wife
to do so, he wrote and published “Precaution” (1820), a dull and
conventional story of English social life, purporting to be the work of
an Englishman. Although the novel was not very successful, his friends
urged Cooper to try again, and this time to write of scenes of which
he had some personal knowledge. The publication of “The Spy, a Tale of
the Neutral Ground,” in December, 1821, marks the beginning of a long
series of successes. “The Spy” met with a large sale both in America
and in England. It was soon translated into most of the cultivated
languages of Europe; and its popularity has never greatly waned. It is
a story of the American Revolution, in which the patriotic hero, Harvey
Birch, signally aids the American cause and exhibits a rare combination
of the spy and the gentleman.
During the twenty-nine years remaining to Cooper, he produced
thirty-two further volumes, chiefly romances. Of these, many are now
rarely read, but the following have retained their popularity for
successive generations:
“The Spy,” already referred to.
“The Leatherstocking Tales,” comprising (in the chronological order not
of their production, but of the narrative):
“The Deerslayer, or The First War Path,” 1841.
“The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757,” 1826.
“The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea,” 1840.
“The Pioneers,” 1823, and “The Prairie,” 1827; and ten volumes of the
“Sea Tales”:
“The Pilot,” 1823.
“The Red Rover,” 1828.
“The Two Admirals,” 1842.
“Homeward Bound, or The Chase,” 1838.
“The Water-Witch, or The Skimmer of the Seas,” 1830.
“The Wing-and-Wing, or Le Feu-Follet,” 1842.
“Afloat and Ashore,” 1844.
“Miles Wallingford,” 1844, published in England as “Lucy Hardinge.” A
sequel to “Afloat and Ashore.”
“Jack Tier, or The Florida Reefs,” 1848.
“The Sea Lions, or The Lost Sealers,” 1849.
The popularity which Cooper achieved, and which reached its height with
the publication of “The Last of the Mohicans,” was most remarkable;
no other American has ever enjoyed anything like it. Not only were
his stories read in well-nigh every household, but they were promptly
dramatised, and furnished subjects for numerous paintings and poetical
effusions. In Europe, his fame fairly rivalled that of Scott. In
1833, Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph,
wrote: “In every city of Europe that I visited the works of Cooper
were conspicuously placed in the windows of every bookshop. They are
published, as soon as he produces them, in thirty-four different places
in Europe. They have been seen by American travellers in the languages
of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at
Ispahan.”
In 1822 Cooper removed with his family to New York, in order to be
near his publisher and to put his daughters into school. There he
founded a club, commonly known as the Bread and Cheese, to which many
of the noted men of the time belonged. The years 1826-33 he spent in
Europe, being for a part of this time United States consul at Lyons.
On his return, he lived a few winters in New York; he then took up
his permanent residence at Otsego Hall, Cooperstown, where he died in
September, 1851.
In his later years, Cooper presented the singular spectacle of a
popular novelist who was the most cordially hated man of his time.
The fact is significant and helps to account for the failure of
many of Cooper’s later stories. An ardent lover of his country and
its republican institutions, he boldly rebuked the ignorance and
supercilious condescension of European critics; he wrote “The Bravo”
(1831), “The Heidenmauer” (1832), and “The Headsman” (1833), for the
avowed purpose of assailing monarchical and praising democratic
institutions, and kept this purpose in mind much too constantly to
produce artistic work. On his return to America, contrasting the
restless exertion and bustle, the material progress which obscured
higher ideals than money-making, with the leisure and dignified culture
of European lands, he did not hesitate to speak plainly of the defects
in the American character. This naturally brought him much abuse from
the press; and an unfortunate dispute with the citizens of Cooperstown
over the ownership of Three-Mile Point on Otsego Lake, though the right
was wholly on his side, only made him more intensely disliked.
In the early ’40’s, certain issues arose in New York State between
the tenants of the old Patroons who held their large estates under
original grants, and their landlords, the tenants attempting to secure
under State legislation a title in fee to their rented lands. Cooper,
whose family interests were themselves likely to be affected by these
claims, threw himself with full force and bitterness into the contest.
In addition to a number of magazine articles and speeches, he devoted
three volumes to the presentation of the claims of the landlords,
volumes which are now read but little, excepting by special students of
the subject. They are entitled respectively:
“Satanstoe, or The Littlepage Manuscripts,” 1845;
“The Chainbearer,” 1846; and
“The Redskins, or Indian and Injin,” 1846.
“The Ways of the Hour” (1850) was also a novel with a purpose, which
overweighted its interest as a story; the purpose was the reform of
court procedure in the State of New York.
In “Homeward Bound” and its sequel, “Home as Found” (1838), the latter
being one of his worst stories, Cooper lashed the petty vices of his
countrymen and sought to show them what ought to be. As he might have
expected, he only confirmed the public in its hatred of him, while he
materially impaired his reputation as a story-teller. Had he been more
tactful, philosophical, and far-seeing, he would have saved himself
years of stormy conflict.
In Lakewood Cemetery at Cooperstown, on the hill overlooking Otsego
Lake, is a majestic monument to Fenimore Cooper, twenty-five feet
in height, and surmounted by a statue of the hunter Leatherstocking
and his dog. As enduring as bronze is this character in our American
fiction; the hero that will live longest of Cooper’s creations. In
him Lowell found “the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as
poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don
Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths
as Arthur in his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry.” The
series in which he appears, “The Deerslayer,” “The Pathfinder,” “The
Last of the Mohicans,” “The Pioneers,” and “The Prairie,” the group
which Cooper himself preferred to his other stories, is now (excepting
always “The Spy”) more read than all Cooper’s other works put together.
Drawn at first from life, Natty Bumppo becomes an idealised character,
the perfect type of the bold frontiersman and scout, who read nature
as an open book, and who was most at home when farthest from the
haunts of the civilised world. Worthy to stand by his side is the
noble Indian Chingachgook, “grave, silent, acute, self-contained,” as
Mr. James H. Morse says of him; “sufficiently lofty-minded to take in
the greatness of the Indian’s past, and sufficiently farsighted to
see the hopelessness of his future,--with nobility of soul enough to
grasp the white man’s virtues, and with inherited wildness enough to
keep him true to the instincts of his own race.” Famous among Cooper’s
sailor folk is Long Tom Coffin, of “The Pilot”--type of the rough but
honest seaman, superstitious like all seamen but devoutly religious,
faithful to the last and capable of the most heroic self-sacrifice.
Other characters scarcely less well drawn, if less famous, move through
Cooper’s pages--rough, uncouth waifs and strays of border life,
grizzled old sea-dogs, soldiers’ and sailors’ wives and sweethearts,
such as the wife of Ishmael Bush, Hetty and Judith Hutter, and
Dew-of-June.
That he exhibited marked imperfections in style and technique no one
will deny. He wrote too rapidly to attain to anything like elegance
of style, and he is not infrequently obscure. He continually repeats
words and expressions, to the great annoyance of the reader. The same
carelessness that characterises his style is occasionally seen in the
construction of his stories. Scenes are repeated. Mistakes due to
forgetfulness occur, as in “Mercedes of Castile,” where the heroine
presents her lover, on his outward voyage, with a cross of sapphire
stones, emblems, she tells him, of fidelity, which later appear as
turquoise stones. Peculiarities of habit or manner are referred to
so continually that the reader becomes weary and disgusted. Numerous
characters are, it must be admitted, conventional in the extreme.
Cooper failed signally in his fine women. They are not creatures of
flesh and blood; they are purely imaginary creatures in petticoats,
mere simulacra, invariably paragons of sweetness, discretion, and
artlessness, ever saying and doing the correct thing until the reader
longs for a little less of the angel and a good deal more of Mother
Eve. Finally, his introductions are exceedingly prolix and tedious,
though in this respect he sinned in company with Scott and many another
of the time.
But we must not let this catalogue of Cooper’s defects obscure his
virtues. In spite of occasional carelessness of construction, all
his best stories are highly interesting; he spins a good yarn. Never
straining after effects, never loading his sentences with ornaments,
when once started he moves straight ahead to his goal; one stirring
scene follows another; there is wonderful fertility of resource, set
forth with the confidence that begets faith. His was a large genius,
which, though unsuccessful at miniature work, could manage a large
canvas marvellously well. It must not be forgotten that Cooper was a
pioneer; that he was the creator of our American romance of forest and
prairie and sea. His descriptions of nature are done with the hand of
a master. “If Cooper,” remarked Balzac, “had succeeded in the painting
of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the
phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art.”
Moreover, Cooper’s stories are honest and wholesome like himself; they
breathe the same genuineness, the same sincerity and hatred of shams
and meanness; they uniformly hold up noble and worthy ideals; their
tone is always as healthful and invigorating as a breath of ozone. As
Professor Trent remarks, he “lifted the story of adventure into the
realms of poetry”; and as the poet of the primeval American forest he
has never been superseded.
Professor Lounsbury, whose Life of Cooper, in the “American Men of
Letters” Series, remains the authoritative biography, sums up the man
and his work as follows:
America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of
writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly
with their fellows than Cooper. She has had several gifted with
higher spiritual insight than he, with broader and juster views of
life, with finer ideals of literary art, and, above all, with far
greater delicacy of taste. But she counts on the scanty roll of her
men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism
or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature,
and no more heroic soul.
Mr. W. C. Brownell prepared for the Iroquois Edition of Cooper’s Works
a critical introduction which may safely be accepted as the most just,
most delicate, and most comprehensive analysis of the man and of his
work. Mr. Brownell writes:
There is a quality in Cooper’s romance, however, that gives it
as romance an almost unique distinction. I mean its solid and
substantial alliance with reality. It is thoroughly romantic, and
yet--very likely owing to his imaginative deficiency, if anything
can be so owing--it produces, for romance, an almost unequalled
illusion of life itself.... Cooper’s ... work is in no sense a
_jardin des plantes_; it is like the woods and sea that mainly form
its subject and substance. Only critical myopia can be blind to
the magnificent forest, with its pioneer clearings, its fringe of
“settlements,” its wood-embosomed lakes, its neighbouring prairie
on the one side, and on the other the distant ocean with the cities
of its farther shore--the splendid panorama of man, of nature, and
of human life unrolled for us by this large intelligence and noble
imagination, this manly and patriotic American representative in
the literary parliament of the world.
_The Elder Dana._--Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879), lawyer, politician,
poet, critic, and novelist, was one of the group of Boston writers
that laid the foundations of New England literature. His tales, “Tom
Thornton” and “Paul Felton,” are romantic stories of villainy and
insanity, and give evidence of the influence of Brockden Brown. The
narrative has at times an impetuous sweep that hurries the reader along
in spite of himself; and the characterisation is wrought with powerful
strokes. A collective edition of his “Poems and Prose Writings”
appeared in 1833.
_Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Child._--Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867)
was the daughter of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and was born at
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she was principal of a young
ladies’ school for half a century. Her duties as a teacher did not
prevent her from becoming a voluminous novelist. Her first story was
“A New England Tale” (1822), which at once found favour. “Redwood”
(1824) was translated into three or four Continental languages; on
the title-page of the French translation, the novel was ascribed to
Fenimore Cooper. Other novels which achieved great popularity for their
faithful portraiture of early and contemporary New England life were
“Hope Leslie, or Early Times in Massachusetts” (1827), “Clarence, a
Tale of Our Own Times” (1830), “The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in
America” (1835), and “Married or Single” (1857). While Miss Sedgwick
never rises to the height of absorbing interest, she is rarely dull,
and some of her women, if we allow for the difference in time, do not
suffer in comparison with those of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman.
Her descriptions of simple country life were superior to any that had
hitherto appeared. Mrs. Child, born Lydia Maria Francis (1802-1880),
who likewise spent her life in Massachusetts, began writing early,
producing her first novel, “Hobomok,” in 1824 and her second, “The
Rebels,” a year later. The former deals with Salem life in colonial
times; the latter is a story of the Revolution, describing the sack
of Governor Hutchinson’s house and the Boston massacre. Although they
give true pictures of early Puritan customs, they are not powerful as
fiction. In 1836 she essayed a more ambitious flight in “Philothea,”
a romance of the days of Pericles, which, in spite of its stilted
rhetoric, reveals some imaginative power and deserves mention as a
pioneer attempt to interpret Greek life to America.
_Timothy Flint._--A voluminous writer and in his day a well-known
figure was Timothy Flint (1780-1840), a native of Reading,
Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1800. Becoming
a Congregational minister, in 1815, in search for health, he crossed
the Alleghany Mountains with his family, and after travelling in Ohio,
Indiana, and Illinois, became a missionary, first at St. Charles,
Missouri, and then in Arkansas. The success of his “Recollections
of the Last Ten Years” (1826) led him to publish a novel, “Francis
Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot” (1826), dealing with adventures with
the Comanche Indians, and with the Mexican struggle of 1821, which
resulted in the fall of Iturbide. The story was crude and improbable,
but some of its descriptions found favour. “Arthur Clenning,” his
second novel, published in 1828, includes a shipwreck in the Southern
Ocean, after which the hero and heroine arrive in New Holland and later
settle in Illinois. He wrote some other novels, but none has survived.
For a time (1833), Flint edited _The Knickerbocker_; and in 1835 he
contributed some “Sketches of the Literature of the United States” to
the London _Athenæum_.
_William Austin_ (1788-1841) a lawyer of Charlestown, Massachusetts,
deserves to be noticed for the remarkable story of “Peter Rugg,
the Missing Man,” which he wrote for _The New England Galaxy_
(1827-8; reprinted in “The Boston Book,” 1841, and in other books
and papers). The theme is the same as that of “The Wandering Jew.”
While “originating in the inventive genius of its author,” as Joseph
Buckingham says of it, it doubtless owed something also to German
romance.