Part 4

This is flat contradiction of the idea that entirely self-conscious and self-controlled art can avail to move the reader. Bryant pleads for deepest feeling in exercise of the poetic function; it is more than important, it is indispensable. Of that striking poem ‘The Tides,’ he said ‘it was written with a certain awe upon me which made me hope that there might be something in it.’ The poem proved to be one of Bryant’s noblest conceptions. Yet a lady of ‘judgment’ told one of Bryant’s friends, who of course told him, that she did not think there was much in it.

Nature appeals to Bryant in her broad and massive aspects. ‘The Prairies’ is an illustration. Gazing on the ‘encircling vastness’ for the first time, the heart swells and the eye dilates in an effort to comprehend it:--

Lo! they stretch, In airy undulations, far away, As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, And motionless forever.

As the poet looks abroad over the vast and glowing fields, there sweeps by him a vision of the races that have peopled these solitudes and perished to make room for races to come. It is magnificent even if it is not scientific. In the sense it gives of the spaciousness of the prairies with the myriad sounds of life projected on the great elemental silence, it is a true American poem.

‘A Hymn of the Sea’ is another illustration of that largeness of view characteristic of Bryant. Each thought is lofty and far-reaching. The cloud that rises from the ‘realm of rain’ shadows whole countries, the tornado wrecks a fleet, whirling the vast hulks ‘like chaff upon the waves:’--

These restless surges eat away the shores Of earth’s old continents; the fertile plain Welters in shallows, headlands crumble down, And the tide drifts the sea-sand in the streets Of the drowned city.

He conveys the idea not only of spaciousness but of endless duration in the lines describing the coral worm laying his ‘mighty reefs,’ toiling from ‘age to age’ until

His bulwarks overtop the brine, and check The long wave rolling from the southern pole To break upon Japan.

Certain lines in ‘A Forest Hymn’ are also remarkable for the sense they give of vast reaches of time, stretching not forward but backward into eternity:--

These lofty trees Wave not less proudly that their ancestors Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost One of earth’s charms: upon her bosom yet, After the flight of untold centuries, The freshness of her far beginning lies And yet shall lie.

The ‘Song of the Stars,’ though not one of Bryant’s happiest poems,--the hypercritical reader feeling that the ‘orbs of beauty’ and ‘spheres of flame’ might have made a more appropriate metrical choice for their song,--shows none the less the poet’s strength in dealing with nature in the large. The lines ‘To a Waterfowl’ are magical in part by virtue of the impression they make of immense distance. With the poet’s penetrating vision we can see the solitary way through the rosy depths, the pathless coast, and the one bit of life in

The desert and illimitable air.

Bryant’s mind readily lifts itself from the minute to the massive, as in the poem ‘Summer Wind,’ a fine example of the crescendo effects he knew so well how to produce. In a few lines he gives the sensation of heat, closeness, exhaustion, and pictures the plants drooping in a stillness broken only by the ‘faint and interrupted murmur of the bee.’ His thought then sweeps upward to the wooded hills towering in scorching heat and dazzling light, and then still higher to the bright clouds,

Motionless pillars of the brazen heaven-- Their bases on the mountains--their white tops Shining in the far ether....

The poet never wearies of this majestic pageantry of the natural world. In ‘The Firmament,’ in ‘The Hurricane’ (imitated from Heredia), in ‘Monument Mountain,’ his chief thought is to translate the reader to his own lofty vantage-ground.

But Nature is not merely a spectacle, it has a power to heal and invigorate. Life loses its pettiness when one leaves the city and seeks the forest. The holy men who hid themselves ‘deep in the woody wilderness’ perhaps did not well--

But let me often to these solitudes Retire, and in thy presence reassure My feeble virtue. Here its enemies, The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink And tremble and are still.

The poet finds inspiration not alone in the terror of the storm, the majesty of the forest, the gray waste of ocean, the mystery of the night of stars, but in the humbler things, the rivulet by which he played as a child, the violet growing on its bank, the hum of bees, the notes of hang-bird and wren, the gossip of swallows, and the gay chirp of the ground squirrel. ‘The Yellow Violet’ and the lines ‘To the Fringed Gentian’ spring from this love of the unobtrusive charms of Nature. Less familiar than these, but a faultless example of Bryant’s art, is ‘The Painted Cup:’--

... tell me not That these bright chalices were tinted thus To hold the dew for fairies, when they meet On moonlight evenings in the hazel bowers, And dance till they are thirsty.

The poet will not call up ‘faded fancies of an ‘elder world.’ If the fresh savannahs must be peopled with creatures of imagination, it may be done without borrowing European elves:--

Let then the gentle Manitou of flowers, Lingering among the bloomy waste he loves, Though all his swarthy worshippers are gone-- Slender and small, his rounded cheek all brown And ruddy with the sunshine; let him come On summer mornings, when the blossoms wake, And part with little hands the spiky grass, And touching, with his cherry lips, the edge Of these bright beakers, drain the gathered dew.

Bryant wrote poems of freedom. The earlier of these, ‘The Song of the Greek Amazon,’ the ‘Massacre at Scio,’ the ‘Greek Partisan,’ and ‘Italy,’ voice his sympathy with the oppressed nations of the Old World, the ‘struggling multitude of states,’ that ‘writhe in shackles.’

Among his later poems on the same theme, ‘Earth,’ ‘The Winds,’ ‘The Antiquity of Freedom,’ and ‘The Battle Field’ are representative. The first three with their many stately lines show how spontaneously his thought, even when nature is not the subject, grows out of the contemplation of nature and then returns to such contemplation as to a resting place. ‘The Battle Field,’ the expression of a noble faith in the outcome of ‘a friendless warfare,’ contains the most inspiring of his quatrains, as it is one of the best contributions made by an American poet to the stock of quotable English verse:--

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers.

His patriotic poems are few in number, but Bryant’s reticence must be taken into account. Coming from him, the verses mean more than if they came from another. Two of the best are ‘Oh Mother of a mighty Race’ and ‘Not Yet.’ The second of these, written in July, 1861, has a finely imaginative stanza in which are pictured the dead monarchies of the past eager to welcome another broken and ruined land among their number:--

Not yet the hour is nigh when they Who deep in Eld’s dim twilight sit, Earth’s ancient kings, shall rise and say, “Proud country, welcome to the pit! So soon art thou like us brought low!” No, sullen group of shadows, No!

To the same year belong the spirited verses ‘Our Country’s Call:’--

Strike to defend the gentlest sway That Time in all his course has seen.

* * * * *

Few, few were they whose swords of old Won the fair land in which we dwell; But we are many, we who hold The grim resolve to guard it well. Strike, for that broad and goodly land, Blow after blow, till men shall see That Might and Right move hand in hand, And glorious must their triumph be!

Such was the temper of men who had looked with philosophic composure and curiosity on the movements of the sometimes well-nigh frenzied abolitionists. The blow at the integrity of the nation fired their cool patriotism to white heat.

What lightness of touch Bryant had is shown in that exquisite lyric ‘The Stream of Life.’ He could be conventional, as in the love poem where he celebrates ‘the gentle season’ when ‘nymphs relent,’ and very sensibly advises the young lady ’ere her bloom is past, to secure her lover.’ He was not strong in wit or humor. The verses ‘To a Mosquito’ might have been read with good effect to a party of well-fed clubmen after dinner, but finding them in the same volume with ‘A Forest Hymn’ gives one an uncomfortable surprise, like finding a pun in Lowell’s _Cathedral_. That Bryant could write agreeable narrative verse, ‘The Children of the Snow’ and ‘Sella’ bear witness. That he is at his best in meditative poems, lofty characterizations of Nature, grand visions of Life and Death, is proved by hundreds of felicitous verses which have become an inalienable part of our young literature.

He never really excelled the work of his youth. Bryant will always be known as the author of ‘Thanatopsis.’ This great vision of Death is his stateliest poem and his best, the most felicitous of phrase and the loftiest in imagery. Written by a stoic, magnificently stoical in tone, it offers but a stoic’s comfort after all. Perhaps this is a secret of its popularity, on the theory that while professed pagans are few the instinct towards paganism still exists, and most among those who say least about it.

V

LATEST POETICAL WORK

_THE ILIAD_ AND _THE ODYSSEY_

The collected edition of Bryant’s poems of 1854 contains a handful of translations, twelve from the Spanish, four from the German, one each from the French, the Provençal, the Portuguese, and the Greek. In 1864 a translation of the fifth book of the _Odyssey_ was printed in the volume entitled _Thirty Poems_. The praise which it called out gave Bryant the impulse to further experiments of the same sort; and after the death of his wife (in 1866), when the necessity was upon him of forgetting his grief so far as possible in some engrossing work, he undertook a version of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ entire.

He gave himself methodically to the task, translating about forty lines a day. Later he increased the daily stint to seventy-five lines. He chose blank verse because ‘the use of rhyme in a translation is a constant temptation to petty infidelities.’

Bryant retained the misleading Latin forms of proper names. Worsley says: ‘Not even Mr. Gladstone’s example can now make Juno, Mercury, and Venus admissible in Homeric story.’ But Worsley confessed his own inability to write Phoibos, Apollôn, and Kirké. Bryant’s argument for his course looks specious: ‘I was translating from Greek into English, and I therefore translated the names of the gods, as well as the other parts of the poem.’ Probably he had an affection for the old nomenclature, a sentiment like Macaulay’s, who ‘never could reconcile himself to seeing the friends of his boyhood figure as Kleon, and Alkibiadês, and Poseidôn, and Odysseus.’[6]

An enthusiastic admirer of Bryant declares that in the opinion of ‘competent critics’ his versions of Homer ‘will hold their own with the translations of Pope, Chapman, Newman, or the late Earl Derby.’ Much depends on the question of what a ‘competent critic’ is, and which one of several competent critics is to be taken as final authority. Competent critics, who, by the way, seldom agree, have a habit of agreeing on anything sooner than the merits of a version of Homer. And when one remembers the fearful attack made by Matthew Arnold on Newman (‘Any vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely regret’)--he may well hesitate to take as a compliment the statement that Bryant will ‘hold his own’ with Newman.

The question of the higher merit of the poem rests with the experts at last. Pessimists all, they are discouragingly hostile to metrical versions of the _Iliad_. Yet the most uncompromising of them would hardly deny a lay reader the privilege of enjoying Homer, in so far as possible, through the medium of Bryant’s blank verse. They might even be persuaded to admit that this version has a peculiar adaptability to the needs of the public; that the clarity and beauty of the English, the dignified ease of the measure, the sustained energy and vigor of the performance as a whole, fit Bryant’s Homer in a high degree to the use for which it was intended. The argument from popularity, that always unsafe and often vicious argument, has a measure of force here. Granting that Homer in any honest translation is better than no Homer at all, may not the uncompromising scholars be called on to rejoice that this more than honest, nay, this admirable translation of the _Iliad_ has sold to the extent of many thousands of copies? Where there are so many buyers, there must be readers not a few.

* * * * *

Bryant was one of those unusual men who have two distinct callings. Much surprise has been expressed at his apparent ability to carry on his functions of journalist and poet without clash. But is it true, or more than superficially true, that he did so carry them on? To be sure, he wrote his editorial articles at the newspaper office and his verses elsewhere, but this is a mere mechanical distinction. A man of Bryant’s depth of conviction and passionate temperament does not throw off care when he boards a suburban train for his country home.

The history of Bryant’s inner life has not been written, perhaps cannot be. This is not to imply that his character was enigmatic and mysterious, but merely to emphasize the fact of his extraordinary reserve. More than most self-contained men he kept his own counsel. Such a history would show how deep his experience of the world had ploughed into him, and it might explain in a degree the remote and stoical character of his verse.

Bryant’s poetical work as a whole has an impassive quality often described as coldness. Partly due to his genius and accentuated by the excessive retouching to which he subjected his verse, it grew in still larger measure out of his determination not to impart to his verse any of the feverishness of spirit consequent upon a life of political warfare. The poet held himself wonderfully in check, as a man of iron will allows no mark of the strong passion under which he labors to show in his face. Bryant was rarely betrayed into so much of personal feeling as flashed out in that bitter stanza of ‘The Future Life:’--

For me the sordid cares in which I dwell, Shrink and consume my heart, as heat the scroll; And wrath has left its scar--that fire of hell Has left its scar upon my soul.

While the detachment was not complete, Bryant undoubtedly kept his poetic apart from his secular life in a way to command admiration. This he accomplished by extraordinary self-restraint. As a part of the varied and long-continued discipline to which he subjected himself, the self-restraint made for character. The question, however, arises whether the poetry did not, in certain ways, suffer under the very discipline by which the character developed.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Bryant’s contributions were the stories entitled ‘Medfield’ and ‘The Skeleton’s Cave.’ As originally planned the book was to have been called _The Sextad_, but Verplanck, who would have made the sixth author, withdrew.

[2] John Bigelow.

[3] W. C. Bronson.

[4] Bryant’s apology to the public for his course, together with Leggett’s statement as an eye-witness, will be found in the ‘Evening Post’ of Thursday, April 21, 1831. Neither the guarded account of the episode in Godwin’s _Bryant_, nor the brief notice in Haswell’s _Reminiscences of an Octogenarian_ is quite accurate.

[5] As in an ironical leader commending journalists who refuse to say that a man ‘was drowned,’ a dangerous innovation, and, ‘to preserve the purity of their mother tongue,’ stick to time-honored metaphors and say that the man ‘found a watery grave.’--‘Evening Post,’ August 17, 1831.

[6] G. O. Trevelyan.

III

_James Fenimore Cooper_

REFERENCES:

=W. C. Bryant=: _A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper_, 1852.

=T. R. Lounsbury=: _James Fenimore Cooper_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ fourth edition, 1884.

=W. B. Shubrick Clymer=: _James Fenimore Cooper_, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1900.

I

HIS LIFE

James Cooper was the eleventh of the twelve children of William and Elizabeth (Fenimore) Cooper, of Burlington, New Jersey. He was born in that picturesque town by the Delaware on September 15, 1789. The name James, given him in honor of his grandfather, had also been borne by his first American ancestor, who is said to have come from Stratford-on-Avon, in 1679. In fulfilment of a promise to his mother (whose family had become extinct in the male line), the novelist, in 1826, changed his name to Fenimore-Cooper.

At the close of the Revolutionary War, William Cooper acquired large tracts of land on Otsego Lake in New York, settled there in 1790, founded the village still known as Cooperstown, and built for himself a stately home to which he gave the name of Otsego Hall. He was the first judge of the county and a member of Congress, a man of strong character and agreeable address.[7]

Cooper’s boyhood was passed amid picturesque natural surroundings, on the edge of civilization, the scene of _The Deerslayer_ and _The Pioneers_. He attended the village school, prepared for college with the rector of St. Peter’s Church, Albany, entered Yale in the second term of the Freshman year (Class of 1806), and was dismissed in the Junior year for some boyish escapade the nature of which is unexplained.

It was decided that he should enter the navy. There was then no training school, and boys took the first lessons in seamanship in the merchant marine. Cooper spent a year before the mast in the ‘Sterling,’ sailing from New York to London, thence to Gibraltar, back to London, and from London to Philadelphia. His experiences are set forth in the early chapters of _Ned Myers_. The ‘Sterling’ lost two of her best hands by impressment as soon as she reached English waters. Cooper’s indignation at these outrages afterwards found voice through the lips of Ithuel Bolt in the story entitled _Wing-and-Wing_.

He was commissioned midshipman on January 1, 1808, and served awhile on the ‘Vesuvius.’ In the following winter he was one of the party sent to Oswego to build a brig for the defence of the lake, and became acquainted with the regions described in _The Pathfinder_. In the summer of 1809 he had charge of the gun-boats on Lake Champlain, and in the autumn was ordered to the sloop of war ‘Wasp.’

He left the service on his betrothal with Miss Susan DeLancey of Mamaroneck, New York, whom he married on January 1, 1811. For a few years he lived the life of a landed proprietor, dividing his time between Cooperstown, Scarsdale, and Mamaroneck. The dulness of a novel he was reading aloud to his wife provoked him to say that he could write a better one himself. Challenged to prove it, he produced _Precaution_ (1820), a story of English life, following conventional lines. It was apprentice work. The effort of composition taught Cooper that he could write, but not that he could write well. He had no conceit of the book, and refused it a place in his collected writings.

In 1821 _The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground_, was published; its unqualified good fortune made Cooper a professed man of letters. From that time on until his death, twenty-nine years later, he produced books with uninterrupted regularity.

_The Spy_ was followed by _The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna_, 1823; _The Pilot, a Tale of the Sea_, 1824; _Lionel Lincoln, or the Leaguer of Boston_, 1825; _The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757_, 1826. But one of this group of four can be pronounced a failure and two have had a success almost phenomenal in the history of letters.

Cooper shared the American passion for seeing foreign lands. The proceeds of authorship enabled him to carry out a plan he had formed of spending some time abroad. With his family and servants (a party of ten in all), he set sail from New York on June 1, 1826. He proposed to be gone five years. He overstayed that time by two years and five months. From May, 1826, to about January, 1829, he held the ‘nominal position’ of American consul at Lyons. His journeyings were made in a leisurely way after the fashion of the time. Eighteen months were spent in Paris and the vicinity, four months in London, and a few weeks in Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland. The winter of 1828–29 was passed in Florence, and was followed by a voyage to Naples. After spending some months at Sorrento and Naples, he settled in Rome for the winter of 1829–30. Thence to Venice, Munich, Dresden, and finally back to Paris.

He published while abroad _The Prairie_, 1827; _The Red Rover_, 1828; _Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor_, 1828; _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_, 1829; _The Water-Witch, or the Skimmer of the Seas_, 1830; _The Bravo_, 1831; _The Heidenmauer, or the Benedictines_, 1832; _The Headsman, or the Abbaye des Vignerons_, 1833.

In November, 1833, Cooper returned to America. That and several ensuing winters were passed in New York, the summers in Cooperstown. Later he made Otsego Hall his permanent home.

He soon became embroiled in quarrels with the press. While in Paris his defence of Lafayette’s position in what is known as the ‘Expenses Controversy’ had provoked from his native land criticism which Cooper resented. He angered a part of the inhabitants of Cooperstown by making clear to them that Three Mile Point (a wooded tract on the lake, long used by the villagers as a picnic ground) was not theirs, as they maintained, but a part of the Cooper estate. With no thought of robbing them of their pleasure park, he insisted on their understanding that they enjoyed its use by favor and not by right.

For this the country papers assailed him. Combative by nature, Cooper brought suits for libel and recovered damages. The novel spectacle of an author baiting the newspapers ‘caused remark.’ The city press joined in the attack, the ‘Courier and Enquirer,’ the ‘New York Tribune,’ the ‘Albany Evening Journal,’ edited by Thurlow Weed, who once said apropos of his skill in stirring up litigation: ‘There is something in my manner of writing that makes the galled jades wince.’ Verdicts were given in Cooper’s favor. More libels followed, more suits were brought, more damages recovered. A cry arose that the liberty of the press was endangered. Cooper did not think so. He was a bulldog; when he had once fastened his teeth in a Whig editor, nothing could make him let go. He continued his prosecutions until he made his detractors respect him. It took about six years to do it. Bryant has described with grim humor the novelist’s warfare with that leviathan the Press: ‘He put a hook into the nose of this huge monster,’ said Bryant admiringly.[8]