first appearance has long been a stock example of critical blindness,
conceit, and malignity. And yet, if we look at the position now
claimed for "The Excursion" by competent authorities, the error of the
first critics is seen to be not in their indictment of faults, but in
the prominence they gave to the faults, and their generally
disrespectful tone toward a poet of Wordsworth's greatness. Jeffrey's
petulant "This will never do," uttered, professedly, at least, more in
sorrow than in anger, because the poet would persist, in spite of all
friendly counsel, in misapplying his powers, has become a byword of
ridiculous critical cocksureness. But the curious thing is that "The
Excursion" has not "done," and that the Wordsworthians who laugh at
Jeffrey are in the habit of repeating the substance of his criticism,
though in more temperate and becoming language.
There can be little doubt that adverse criticism had a depressing
influence on Wordsworth's poetical powers, notwithstanding his nobly
expressed defiance of it, and his determination to hold on in his own
path undisturbed. Its effect in retarding the sale of his poems, and
thus depriving him of the legitimate fruits of his industry, was a
favorite topic with him in his later years; but the absence of general
appreciation, and the ridicule of what he considered his best and most
distinctive work, contributed in all probability to a still more
unfortunate result--the premature depression and deadening of his
powers. He schooled himself to stoical endurance, but he was not
superhuman, and in the absence of sympathy not only was any
possibility of development checked, but he ceased to write with the
spontaneity and rapture of his earlier verse. His resolute industry
was productive of many wise, impressive, and charitable reflections,
and many casual felicities of diction, but the poet very seldom
reached the highest level of his earlier inspirations.
Wordsworth was appointed poet-laureate on the death of Southey, in
1843. His only official composition was an ode on the installation of
the prince consort as chancellor of Cambridge University, in 1847.
This was his last writing in verse. He died at Rydal Mount, after a
short illness, on April 23, 1850, and was buried in Grasmere
Churchyard.
WASHINGTON IRVING
(1783-1859)
[Illustration: Washington Irving.]
Washington Irving, the first American who obtained a European
reputation merely as a man of letters, was born at New York, April 3,
1783. Both his parents were immigrants from Great Britain, his father,
originally an officer in the merchant service, but at the time of
Irving's birth a considerable merchant, having come from the Orkneys
and his mother from Falmouth. Irving was intended for the legal
profession, but his studies were interrupted by an illness
necessitating a voyage to Europe, in the course of which he proceeded
as far as Rome and made the acquaintance of Washington Allston. He was
called to the Bar upon his return, but made little effort to practice,
preferring to amuse himself with literary ventures. The first of these
of any importance, a satirical miscellany entitled "Salmagundi,"
written in conjunction with his brother William and J. K. Paulding,
gave ample proof of his talents as a humorist. These were still more
conspicuously displayed in his next attempt, "Knickerbocker's History
of New York" (1809). The satire of "Salmagundi" had been principally
local, and the original design of "Knickerbocker's History" was only
to burlesque a pretentious disquisition on the history of the city in
a guide-book by Dr. Samuel Mitchell. The idea expanded as Irving
proceeded, and he ended by not merely satirizing the pedantry of local
antiquaries, but by creating a distinct literary type out of the solid
Dutch burgher whose phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the
mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's
productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is
the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very
tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully made to heighten
the humorous effect. The next few years were unproductive. Upon the
death of his father, Irving had become a sleeping partner in his
brother's commercial house, a branch of which was established at
Liverpool. This, combined with the restoration of peace, induced him
to visit England in 1815, when he found the stability of the firm
seriously compromised. After some years of ineffectual struggle it
became bankrupt. This misfortune compelled Irving to resume his pen as
a means of subsistence. His reputation had preceded him to England,
and the curiosity naturally excited by the then unwonted apparition of
a successful American author procured him admission into the highest
literary circles, where his popularity was insured by his amiable
temper and polished manners. As an American, moreover, he aroused no
jealousy and no competition, and stood aloof from the political and
literary disputes which then divided England. Campbell, Jeffrey,
Moore, Scott were counted among his friends, and the last-named
zealously recommended him to the publisher Murray, who, after at first
refusing, consented (1820) to bring out "Geoffrey Crayon's
Sketch-book," which was already appearing in America in a periodical
form. The most interesting part of this work is the description of an
English Christmas, which displays a delicate humor not unworthy of the
writer's evident model, Addison. Some stories and sketches on American
themes contribute to give it variety; of these Rip Van Winkle is the
most remarkable. It speedily obtained the greatest success on both
sides of the Atlantic. "Bracebridge Hall," a work purely English in
subject, followed in 1822, and showed to what account the American
observer had turned his experience of English country life. The humor
is, nevertheless, much more English than American. "Tales of a
Traveller" appeared in 1824, and Irving, now in comfortable
circumstances determined to enlarge his sphere of observation by a
journey on the Continent. After a long course of travel he settled
down at Madrid, in the house of the American consul, Rich. His
intention at the time was to translate Navarrete's recently published
work on Columbus. Finding, however, that this was rather a collection
of valuable materials than a systematic biography, he determined to
compose a biography of his own by its assistance, supplemented by
independent researches in the Spanish archives. His work appeared in
1828 and obtained a merited success. It is a finished representation
of Columbus from the point of view of the nineteenth century,
affecting neither brilliancy nor originality, but a model of tasteful
elegance, felicitous in every detail and adequate in every respect.
"The Companions of Columbus" followed; and a prolonged residence in
the south of Spain gave Irving materials for two highly picturesque
books, "The Conquest of Granada," professedly derived from the MSS. of
an imaginary Fray Antonio Agapida, and "The Alhambra." Previous to
their appearance he had been appointed secretary to the embassy at
London, an office as purely complimentary to his literary ability as
the legal degree which he about the same time received from the
University of Oxford. Returning to the United States in 1832, after
seventeen years' absence, he found his name a household word, and
himself universally honored as the first American who had won for his
country recognition on equal terms in the literary republic. After the
rush of _fetes_ and public compliments had subsided, he undertook a
tour in the Western prairies, and returning to the neighborhood of New
York built for himself a delightful retreat on the Hudson, to which he
gave the name of Sunnyside. His acquaintance with the New York
millionaire, John Jacob Astor, prompted his next important work,
"Astoria," a history of the fur-trading settlement founded by Astor in
Oregon, deduced with singular literary ability from dry commercial
records, and, without labored attempts at word-painting, evincing a
remarkable faculty for bringing scenes and incidents vividly before
the eye. "Captain Bonneville," based upon the unpublished memoirs of a
veteran hunter, was another work of the same class. In 1842 Irving was
appointed ambassador to Spain. He spent four years in the country,
without this time turning his residence to literary account; and it
was not until two years after his return that Forster's "Life of
Goldsmith," by reminding him of a slight essay of his own which he now
thought too imperfect by comparison to be included among his collected
writings, stimulated him to the production of his own biography of his
favorite author. Without pretensions to original research, the book
displays an admirable talent for employing existing material to the
best effect. The same may be said of "The Lives of Mahomet and his
Successors," published two years subsequently. Here, as elsewhere,
Irving has correctly discriminated the biographer's province from the
historian's, and leaving the philosophical investigation of cause and
effect to writers of Gibbon's calibre, has applied himself to
represent the picturesque features of the age as embodied in the
actions and utterances of its most characteristic representatives. His
last days were devoted to a biography of Washington, undertaken in an
enthusiastic spirit, but which the author found exhausting and his
readers tame. His genius required a more poetical theme, and indeed
the biographer of Washington must be at least a potential soldier and
statesman. Irving just lived to complete this work, dying of heart
disease at Sunnyside, on November 28, 1859.
Although one of the chief ornaments of American literature, Irving is
not characteristically an American author. Like most of the
transatlantic writers of his generation, he disappointed expectation
by a scrupulous conformity to acknowledged European standards. The
American vine had not then begun to produce the looked-for wild
grapes. Irving, however, is one of the few authors of his period who
really manifests traces of a vein of national peculiarity which might
under other circumstances have been productive. "Knickerbocker's
History of New York," although the air of mock solemnity which
constitutes the staple of its humor is peculiar to no literature,
manifests nevertheless, a power of producing a distinct national type.
Had circumstances taken Irving to the West and placed him amid a
society teeming with quaint and genial eccentricity, he might possibly
have been the first Western humorist, and his humor might have gained
in depth and richness. In England, on the other hand, everything
encouraged his natural fastidiousness; he became a refined writer, but
by no means a robust one. At the same time he is too essentially the
man of his own age to pass for a paler Addison or a more decorous
Sterne. He has far more of the poet than any of the writers of the
eighteenth century, and his moralizing, unlike theirs, is unconscious
and indirect. The same poetical feeling is shown in his biographies;
his subject is invariably chosen for its picturesqueness, and whatever
is unessential to portraiture is thrown into the background. The
result is that his biographies, however deficient in research, bear
the stamp of genuine artistic intelligence, equally remote from
compilation and disquisition. In execution they are almost faultless;
the narrative is easy, the style pellucid, and the writer's judgment
nearly always in accordance with the general verdict of history. They
will not, therefore, be easily superseded, and indeed Irving's
productions are in general impressed with that signet of classical
finish which guarantees the permanency of literary work more surely
than direct utility or even intellectual power. This refinement is the
more admirable for being in great part the reflection of his own moral
nature. Without ostentation or affectation, he was exquisite in all
things, a mirror of loyalty, courtesy, and good taste in all his
literary connections, and exemplary in all the relations of domestic
life which he was called upon to assume. He never married, remaining
true to the memory of an early attachment blighted by death.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER[12]
[Footnote 12: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
By PRESIDENT CHARLES F. THWING
(1789-1851)
[Illustration: James Fenimore Cooper.]
In the churchyard of Christ's Church, in the town bearing his name, in
the State of New York, rests all that is mortal of James Fenimore
Cooper. It is now more than two score of years since he died. The spot
is marked by a simple slab of marble. In the public cemetery of
Cooperstown stands a noble monument to Leather Stocking. It is crowned
with a figure of this immortal character. The personality of Cooper
himself must, like the human body, gradually fade away; but certain
personalities which he brought into literature are lasting. Cooper the
man dies; Cooper the novelist lives.
Cooper the man and Cooper the author are singularly united and yet
singularly distinct. His boyhood was spent in scenes which figure in
his novels, and certain of the novels seem in certain respects to be
only the projection of early experiences through which he passed or of
which he constantly heard. Yet there are many qualities manifest in
his writings which do not seem to belong to his personality and many
elements exhibited in his personality which are not suggested by his
stories.
Born in Burlington, N. J., September 15, 1789, he was taken, at the
age of about a year, to that part of the State of New York which has
since become lastingly associated with his life and work. His early
home was one of a considerable degree of affluence. His father, near
the close of the Revolution, had become possessed of large tracts of
land about the sources of the Susquehanna, and on the borders of the
endless forests of Central New York the Cooper family established a
home. In this wilderness James Fenimore Cooper spent his boyhood. This
settlement was not unlike the ordinary new settlements which are, at
various stages of their history, found in many of the States of the
American Union. It was picturesque in the richness and diversity of
the gifts of nature. Game abounded in water and wood. The years he
here lived deeply affected his character and influenced his career. It
is reported that in later life he said "he might have chosen for his
subject happier periods, more interesting events, and possibly more
beauteous scenes, but he could not have taken any that would lie so
close to his heart."[13] Apparently the education of books and of
formal teachers was less influential than the education of nature. In
the schools of Cooperstown and under the tuition of the rector of St.
Peter's Church, Albany--a graduate of an English university--and at
Yale College, he received whatever of intellectual training he
received in his youth. A frontier town, however, offered few
facilities in education, and his career at New Haven was cut short in
the midst by his dismission for some sort of a college frolic, and
even while he was at Yale he confesses that he played the first year
and did not work much the rest of the time. The discipline he
received, however, from his English master at Albany seems to have
been one of the formative factors of his early life.
[Footnote 13: "James Fenimore Cooper," by Thomas R.
Lounsbury, page 5. To this, the only biography of Cooper, and
an admirable work, the writer acknowledges his great
obligations. On his death-bed Cooper instructed his family to
publish no life of himself.]
In the autumn of 1806, at the age of seventeen, Cooper found himself a
seaman before the mast in the ship Sterling, endeavoring to secure the
training necessary for entering the United States Navy; for to this
career it was decided he should devote himself. His entrance to the
navy as midshipman in 1808, his marriage to a Miss De Lancey at
Mamaroneck, Westchester County, N. Y., in 1811, his retirement from
the navy a few months after his marriage, and a somewhat migratory
life distinguished by a "gentlemanly" and unprofitable pursuit of
agriculture for eight years, represent the chief facts and conditions
of his career from the age of nineteen to the age of thirty.
Describing the last years of this period Professor Lounsbury says:
"His thoughts were principally directed to improving the little estate
that had come into his possession. (His father died in 1809.) He
planted trees, he built fences, he drained swamps, he planned a lawn.
The one thing which he did not do was to write."
On November 10, 1820, in New York, was published a novel in two
volumes, bearing the title "Precaution." Its author was James Fenimore
Cooper. He was thirty-one years old. He had had no special literary
training. But this novel was the beginning of the career of one of the
most prolific of American authors. Accident brought this career to
this apparently rather unsuccessful man. Reading to his wife one day a
novel dealing with English society, and displeased by it, he made the
remark, "I believe I could write a better story myself." His wife
challenged him; the challenge he accepted; the book followed.
There were no novelists at the close of the second and the beginning
of the third decade of our century. Hawthorne was a shy youth fitting
for college. John P. Kennedy, by whose side Cooper appears in the
picture of Washington Irving and his friends, was entering the
Maryland House of Delegates, and twelve years were to elapse before
the issue of his story of Virginia country life, "Swallow Barn."
Irving and Paulding were writing sketches. Charles B. Brown was dead.
Cooper was alone as a novelist.
Destiny thus found Cooper rather than Cooper his destiny. In the next
thirty years he wrote no less than seventy books, or important review
articles, and not a few of the books were published in two volumes.
So prolific a power of authorship is unique enough, and when
considered in the light of the absence of literary associations of the
first half of his life seems absolutely unique in the history of men
of letters. It is, of course, in and through this latter half of his
life that Cooper, both as a man and as an author, made his
contribution to the common possessions of mankind.
The larger part of this period he lived in either New York or
Cooperstown. Seven years of it (1826-1833), however, were spent in
Europe with his family. The whole of it was, till at least the last
years, a pretty stormy time to Cooper personally, as well as a busy
one in his writing. From the memory of most people now living the
recollection of the lawsuits in which Cooper became involved has
faded. They were about as numerous as the books he wrote, and they
were of an irritating character which would have wearied out a man
less bold and enduring. Of this sort of defence and offence he had had
a foretaste during his European residence, when he was often called on
to defend his native country from an ignorant and depreciative
criticism, which was sixty years ago far more common than now. But he
who was the defender of his country when abroad, seems to have become
the severe critic of his country when at home. "Condescension in
foreigners" is bad enough, but condescension in a native who has lived
abroad is far worse. On returning Cooper found an America, as he
believed, vastly deteriorated. Morals had become base; manners coarse;
commerce fallen into speculation. He was not the man to keep his
sentiments locked up in his heart. He wrote, and wrote with fulness
and severity of his country and of his countrymen. Thurlow Weed, in
1841, wrote of him: "He has disparaged American lakes, ridiculed
American scenery, burlesqued American coin, and even satirized the
American flag." He also was so foolish as to reply to certain adverse
criticisms made on "The Bravo," and in seeking to bring down the
lightning on the head of his reviewer, he brought down both thunder
and lightning on his own head and about his ears. It must be added,
too, that he did not live at peace with his neighbors. Discussion and
litigation as to a piece of land which the people of Cooperstown
believed had been given by Cooper's father for public uses was
peculiarly exasperating. The citizens, in a public meeting, resolved,
"That we recommend and request the trustees of the Franklin Library,
in this village, to remove all books of which Cooper is the author
from said library." That Cooper was legally right did not at all
lessen the bitterness. He attacked the newspapers and the newspapers
attacked him. Libel suits followed, which, too, he usually won.
Criticism of his "History of the United States Navy" aroused his
indignation, and a trial which is a _cause celebre_ was the result. A
time of storm all these years were for Cooper.
All this gives the impression of a man who was constantly "spoiling
for a fight." The impression is hardly just, however. He was not
quarrelsome; but he was proud, possessed of strong passions and of a
deep sense of his own rights. Whenever, therefore, what he regarded as
his rights were struck at, he struck back. For one blow received
another was given, till what was simply a continued litigation seemed
to be his normal condition. But these troublesome scenes have to be
read in the books, and are not lingering in the minds of his few
remaining contemporaries.
In this period he was constantly engaged in writing. Not only was the
number of volumes he produced great, but the variety of subject and
treatment was no less great. He even wrote a drama. Yet it is to his
novels that one turns as the most precious result of these years.
Cooper is, above all other Americans, the writer of the novel of
adventure. In his own day, at home and abroad, he was often called the
American Scott. The metaphor is true in several senses, besides the
one point of both the American and the Scotchman standing for the
story of objective life and daring. Like Scott, Cooper wrote a
tremendous amount; like Scott, he wrote with great rapidity; like
Scott, he burdened his books with long introductions; like Scott, he
was careless in literary expression; like Scott, too, into the novel
of adventure he put a mighty literary power. It must be said that,
unlike the Waverley Novels, Cooper's romances have little of
development, and that to the cultivated reader Scott is more
attractive. One cannot forbear saying that the women of Cooper's
creation are far inferior to Scott's--they are women usually narrow in
knowledge, weak in brain and heart, and gentle, if not even insipid,
in character. They are as proper as well-draped statues, and almost as
lifeless. When Cooper, however, passes from this point of weakness to
nature herself, he shows himself a master. His descriptions of nature
represent his finest work, and are among the finest to be found
anywhere. His sea tales are properly named; they are rather tales of
the sea than tales of seamen. The closer, too, is the association of
his characters with the scenes of nature the more life-like are they.
No one has painted the Indian character, with all its varieties of
intellectual and emotional contrasts, with its honor and shame, its
tenderness and its severity, as has the author of "The Last of the
Mohicans." No one has created a character in American fiction more
original, more certain of immortality, or combining more elements
worthy of the novelist's best skill than Leather-Stocking.
Among his many stories is large range of excellence. It is usually
considered that of his sea tales "The Red Rover" is the best, the
product of his early career, and that of the Indian stories "The
Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" represent his highest achievement, as
they are the work of the last years. But in thus distinguishing
certain books, no one can forget that in "The Spy," his second work,
or "The Pioneers," or "The Pilot," or "The Last of the Mohicans,"
Cooper has written books which are among the most popular and most
powerful of their kind.