Part 3

Chapter 33,868 wordsPublic domain

These were the words in which Fitz-Greene Halleck designated Cooper’s substantial precedence in American novel-writing. Apart from this mere priority in time,—he was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789, and died at Cooperstown, New York, September 14, 1851,—he rendered the unique service of inaugurating three especial classes of fiction,—the novel of the American Revolution, the Indian novel, and the sea novel. In each case he wrote primarily for his own fellow countrymen, and achieved fame first at their hands; and in each he produced a class of works which, in spite of their own faults and of the somewhat unconciliatory spirit of their writer, have secured a permanence and a breadth of range unequaled in English prose fiction, save by Scott alone. To-day the sale of his works in his own language remains unabated; and one has only to look over the catalogues of European booksellers in order to satisfy himself that this popularity continues, undiminished, through the medium of translation. It may be safely said of him that no author of fiction in the English language, except Scott, has held his own so well for half a century after death. Indeed, the list of various editions and versions of his writings in the catalogues of German booksellers often exceeds that of Scott. This is not in the slightest degree due to his personal qualities, for these made him unpopular, nor to personal manœuvring, for this he disdained. He was known to refuse to have his works even noticed in a newspaper for which he wrote, the “New York Patriot.” He never would have consented to review his own books, as both Scott and Irving did, or to write direct or indirect puffs of himself, as was done by Poe and Whitman. He was foolishly sensitive to criticism, and unable to conceal it; he was easily provoked to a quarrel; he was dissatisfied with either praise or blame, and speaks evidently of himself in the words of the hero of “Miles Wallingford,” when he says: “In scarce a circumstance of my life that has brought me in the least under the cognizance of the public have I ever been judged justly.” There is no doubt that he himself—or rather the temperament given him by nature—was to blame for this, but the fact is unquestionable.

Add to this that he was, in his way and in what was unfortunately the most obnoxious way, a reformer. That is, he was what may be called a reformer in the conservative direction,—he belabored his fellow citizens for changing many English ways and usages, and he wished them to change these things back again, immediately. In all this he was absolutely unselfish, but utterly tactless; and inasmuch as the point of view he took was one requiring the very greatest tact, the defect was hopeless. As a rule, no man criticises American ways so unsuccessfully as an American who has lived many years in Europe. The mere European critic is ignorant of our ways and frankly owns it, even if thinking the fact but a small disqualification; while the American absentee, having remained away long enough to have forgotten many things and never to have seen many others, may have dropped hopelessly behindhand as to the facts, yet claims to speak with authority. Cooper went even beyond these professional absentees, because, while they are usually ready to praise other countries at the expense of America, Cooper, with heroic impartiality, dispraised all countries, or at least all that spoke English. A thoroughly patriotic and high-minded man, he yet had no mental perspective, and made small matters as important as great. Constantly reproaching America for not being Europe, he also satirized Europe for being what it was.

As a result, he was for a time equally detested by the press of both countries. The English, he thought, had “a national propensity to blackguardism,” and certainly the remarks he drew from them did something to vindicate the charge. When the London “Times” called him “affected, offensive, curious, and ill-conditioned,” and “Fraser’s Magazine,” “a liar, a bilious braggart, a full jackass, an insect, a grub, and a reptile,” they clearly left little for America to say in that direction. Yet Park Benjamin did his best, or his worst, when he called Cooper (in Greeley’s “New Yorker”) “a superlative dolt and the common mark of scorn and contempt of every well-informed American”; and so did Webb, when he pronounced the novelist “a base-minded caitiff who had traduced his country.” Not being able to reach his English opponents, Cooper turned on these Americans, and spent years in attacking Webb and others through the courts, gaining little and losing much through the long vicissitudes of petty local lawsuits. The fact has kept alive their memory; but for Lowell’s keener shaft, “Cooper has written six volumes to show he’s as good as a lord,” there was no redress. The arrow lodged and split the target.

Like Scott and most other novelists, Cooper was rarely successful with his main characters, but was saved by his subordinate ones. These were strong, fresh, characteristic, human; and they lay, as I have already said, in several different directions, all equally marked. If he did not create permanent types in Harvey Birch the spy, Leather-Stocking the woodsman, Long Tom Coffin the sailor, Chingachgook the Indian, then there is no such thing as the creation of characters in literature. Scott was far more profuse and varied, but he gave no more of life to individual personages, and perhaps created no types so universally recognized. What is most remarkable is that, in the case of the Indian especially, Cooper was not only in advance of the knowledge of his own time, but of that of the authors who immediately followed him. In Parkman and Palfrey, for instance, the Indian of Cooper vanishes and seems wholly extinguished; but under the closer inspection of Alice Fletcher and Horatio Hale, the lost figure reappears, and becomes more picturesque, more poetic, more thoughtful, than even Cooper dared to make him. The instinct of the novelist turned out more authoritative than the premature conclusions of a generation of historians.

It is only women who can draw the commonplace, at least in English, and make it fascinating. Perhaps only two English women have done this, Jane Austen and George Eliot; while in France George Sand has certainly done it far less well than it has been achieved by Balzac and Daudet. Cooper never succeeded in it for a single instant, and even when he has an admiral of this type to write about, he puts into him less of life than Marryat imparts to the most ordinary midshipman. The talk of Cooper’s civilian worthies is, as Professor Lounsbury has well said,—in what is perhaps the best biography yet written of any American author,—“of a kind not known to human society.” This is doubtless aggravated by the frequent use of _thee_ and _thou_, yet this, which Professor Lounsbury attributes to Cooper’s Quaker ancestry, was in truth a part of the formality of the old period, and is found also in Brockden Brown. And as his writings conform to their period in this, so they did in other respects: describing every woman, for instance, as a “female,” and making her to be such as Cooper himself describes the heroine of “Mercedes of Castile” to be when he says, “Her very nature is made up of religion and female decorum.” Scott himself could also draw such inane figures, yet in Jeanie Deans he makes an average Scotch woman heroic, and in Meg Merrilies and Madge Wildfire he paints the extreme of daring self-will. There is scarcely a novel of Scott’s where some woman does not show qualities which approach the heroic; while Cooper scarcely produced one where a woman rises even to the level of an interesting commonplaceness. She may be threatened, endangered, tormented, besieged in forts, captured by Indians, but the same monotony prevails. So far as the real interest of Cooper’s story goes, it might usually be destitute of a single “female,” that sex appearing chiefly as a bundle of dry goods to be transported, or as a fainting appendage to the skirmish. The author might as well have written the romance of an express parcel.

His long introductions he shared with the other novelists of the day, or at least with Scott, for both Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth are more modern in this respect and strike more promptly into the tale. His loose-jointed plots are also shared with Scott, but Cooper knows as surely as his rival how to hold the reader’s attention when once grasped. Like Scott’s, too, is his fearlessness in giving details, instead of the vague generalizations which were then in fashion, and to which his academical critics would have confined him. He is indeed already vindicated in some respects by the advance of the art he pursued; where he led the way, the best literary practice has followed. The “Edinburgh Review” exhausted its heavy artillery upon him for his accurate descriptions of costume and localities, and declared that they were “an epilepsy of the fancy,” and that a vague general account would have been far better. “Why describe the dress and appearance of an Indian chief, down to his tobacco-stopper and button-holes?” We now see that it is this very habit which has made Cooper’s Indian a permanent figure in literature, while the Indians of his predecessor, Charles Brockden Brown, were merely dusky spectres. “Poetry or romance,” continued the “Edinburgh Review,” “does not descend into the particulars,” this being the same fallacy satirized by Ruskin, whose imaginary painter produced a quadruped which was a generalization between a pony and a pig. Balzac, who risked the details of buttons and tobacco pipes as fearlessly as Cooper, said of “The Pathfinder,” “Never did the art of writing tread closer upon the art of the pencil. This is the school of study for literary landscape painters.” He says elsewhere: “If Cooper 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.” Upon such praise as this the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper may well rest.

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

When, in 1834, the historian Jared Sparks undertook the publication of a “Library of American Biography,” he included in the very first volume—with a literary instinct most creditable to one so absorbed in the severer paths of history—a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown by W. H. Prescott. It was an appropriate tribute to the first imaginative writer worth mentioning in America,—he having been born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1771, and died there of consumption on February 22, 1810,—and to one who was our first professional author. He was also the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence, concealed doors opened in lonely houses, fatal epidemics laid cities desolate, secret plots were organized, unknown persons from foreign lands died in garrets, usually leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent women was constantly endangered, though usually saved in time; people were subject to somnambulism and general frenzy; vast conspiracies were organized with small aims and smaller results. His books, published between 1798 and 1801, made their way across the ocean with a promptness that now seems inexplicable; and Mrs. Shelley, in her novel of “The Last Man,” founds her whole description of an epidemic which nearly destroyed the human race, on “the masterly delineations of the author of ‘Arthur Mervyn.’”

Shelley himself recognized his obligations to Brown; and it is to be remembered that Brown himself was evidently familiar with Godwin’s philosophical writings, and that he may have drawn from those of Mary Wollstonecraft his advanced views as to the rights and education of women, a subject on which his first book, “Alcuin,” offered the earliest American protest. Undoubtedly his books furnished a point of transition from Mrs. Radcliffe, of whom he disapproved, to the modern novel of realism, although his immediate influence and, so to speak, his stage properties, can hardly be traced later than the remarkable tale, also by a Philadelphian, called “Stanley; or the Man of the World,” first published in 1839 in London, though the scene was laid in America. This book was attributed, from its profuse literary quotations, to Edward Everett, but was soon understood to be the work of a very young man of twenty-one, Horace Binney Wallace. In this book the influence of Bulwer and Disraeli is palpable, but Brown’s concealed chambers and aimless conspiracies and sudden mysterious deaths also reappear in full force, not without some lingering power, and then vanish from American literature forever.

Brown’s style, and especially the language put by him into the mouths of his characters, is perhaps unduly characterized by Professor Woodberry as being “something never heard off the stage of melodrama.” What this able critic does not sufficiently recognize is that the general style of the period at which they were written was itself melodramatic; and that to substitute what we should call simplicity would then have made the picture unfaithful. One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech. Even a comparatively terse writer like Prescott, in composing Brown’s biography only sixty years ago, shows traces of the earlier period. Instead of stating simply that his hero was a born Quaker, he says of him: “He was descended from a highly respectable family, whose parents were of that estimable sect who came over with William Penn, to seek an asylum where they might worship their Creator unmolested, in the meek and humble spirit of their own faith.” Prescott justly criticises Brown for saying, “I was _fraught with the apprehension_ that my life was endangered”; or “his brain seemed to swell beyond its _continent_”; or “I drew every bolt that _appended_ to it”; or “on recovering from _deliquium_, you found it where it had been dropped”; or for resorting to the circumlocution of saying, “by a common apparatus that lay beside my head I could produce a light,” when he really meant that he had a tinder-box. The criticism on Brown is fair enough, yet Prescott himself presently takes us halfway back to the florid vocabulary of that period, when, instead of merely saying that his hero was fond of reading, he tells us that “from his earliest childhood Brown gave evidence of studious propensities, being frequently noticed by his father on his return from school poring over some heavy tome.” If the tome in question was Johnson’s dictionary, as it may have been, it would explain both Brown’s style of writing and the milder amplifications of his biographer. Nothing is more difficult to tell, in the fictitious literature of even a generation or two ago, where a faithful delineation ends and where caricature begins. The four-story signatures of Micawber’s letters, as represented by Dickens, go but little beyond the similar courtesies employed in a gentlewoman’s letters in the days of Anna Seward. All we can say is that within a century, for some cause or other, English speech has grown very much simpler, and human happiness has increased in proportion.

In the preface to his second novel, “Edgar Huntley,” Brown announces it as his primary purpose to be American in theme, “to exhibit a series of adventures growing out of our own country,” adding, “That the field of investigation opened to us by our own country should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe may be readily conceived.” He protests against “puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras,” and adds: “The incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness are far more suitable.” All this is admirable, but unfortunately the inherited thoughts and methods of the period hung round him to cloy his style, even after his aim was emancipated. It is to be remembered that almost all his imaginative work was done in early life, before the age of thirty, and before his powers became mature. Yet with all his drawbacks he had achieved his end, and had laid the foundation for American fiction.

With all his inflation of style, he was undoubtedly, in his way, a careful observer. The proof of this is that he has preserved for us many minor points of life and manners which make the Philadelphia of a century ago now more familiar to us than is any other American city of that period. He gives us the roving Indian; the newly arrived French musician with violin and monkey; the one-story farmhouses, where boarders are entertained at a dollar a week; the gray cougar amid caves of limestone. We learn from him “the dangers and toils of a midnight journey in a stage coach in America. The roads are knee deep in mire, winding through crags and pits, while the wheels groan and totter and the curtain and roof admit the wet at a thousand seams.” We learn the proper costume for a youth of good fortune and family,—“nankeen coat striped with green, a white silk waistcoat elegantly needle-wrought, cassimere pantaloons, stockings of variegated silk, and shoes that in their softness vie with satin.” When dressing himself, this favored youth ties his flowing locks with a black ribbon. We find from him that “stage boats” then crossed twice a day from New York to Staten Island, and we discover also with some surprise that negroes were freely admitted to ride in stages in Pennsylvania, although they were liable, half a century later, to be ejected from street-cars. We learn also that there were negro free schools in Philadelphia. All this was before 1801.

It has been common to say that Brown had no literary skill, but it would be truer to say that he had no sense of literary construction. So far as skill is tested by the power to pique curiosity, Brown had it; his chapters almost always end at a point of especial interest, and the next chapter, postponing the solution, often diverts the interest in a wholly new direction. But literary structure there is none: the plots are always cumulative and even oppressive; narrative is inclosed in narrative; new characters and complications come and go, while important personages disappear altogether, and are perhaps fished up with difficulty, as with a hook and line, on the very last page. There is also a total lack of humor, and only such efforts at vivacity as this: “Move on, my quill! wait not for my guidance. Reanimated with thy master’s spirit, all airy light. A heyday rapture! A mounting impulse sways him; lifts him from the earth.” There is so much of monotony in the general method, that one novel seems to stand for all; and the same modes of solution reappear so often,—somnambulism, ventriloquism, yellow fever, forged letters, concealed money, secret closets,—that it not only gives a sense of puerility, but makes it very difficult to recall, as to any particular passage, from which book it came.

VII

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

There has been in America no such instance of posthumous reputation as in the case of Thoreau. Poe and Whitman may be claimed as parallels, but not justly. Poe, even during his life, rode often on the very wave of success, until it subsided presently beneath him, always to rise again, had he but made it possible. Whitman gathered almost immediately a small but stanch band of followers, who have held by him with such vehemence and such flagrant imitation as to keep his name defiantly in evidence, while perhaps enhancing the antagonism of his critics. Thoreau could be egotistical enough, but was always high-minded; all was open and aboveboard; one could as soon conceive of self-advertising by a deer in the woods or an otter of the brook. He had no organized clique of admirers, nor did he possess even what is called personal charm,—or at least only that piquant attraction which he himself found in wild apples. As a rule, he kept men at a distance, being busy with his own affairs. He left neither wife nor children to attend to his memory; and his sister seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts. Yet this plain, shy, retired student, who when thirty-two years old carried the unsold edition of his first book upon his back to his attic chamber; who died at forty-four still unknown to the general public; this child of obscurity, who printed but two volumes during his lifetime, has had ten volumes of his writings published by others since his death, while four biographies of him have been issued in America (by Emerson, Channing, Sanborn, and Jones), besides two in England (by Page and Salt).

Thoreau was born in Boston on July 12, 1817, but spent most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, where he taught school and was for three years an inmate of the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson, practicing at various times the art of pencil-making—his father’s occupation—and also of surveying, carpentering, and housekeeping. So identified was he with the place that Emerson speaks of it in one case as Thoreau’s “native town.” Yet from that very familiarity, perhaps, the latter was underestimated by many of his neighbors, as was the case in Edinburgh with Sir Walter Scott, as Mrs. Grant of Laggan describes.

When I was endeavoring, about 1870, to persuade Thoreau’s sister to let some one edit his journals, I invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord of the manor in Concord, who heard me patiently through, and then said: “Whereunto? You have not established the preliminary point. Why should any one wish to have Thoreau’s journals printed?” Ten years later, four successive volumes were made out of these journals by the late H. G. O. Blake, and it became a question if the whole might not be published. I hear from a local photograph dealer in Concord that the demand for Thoreau’s pictures now exceeds that for any other local celebrity. In the last sale catalogue of autographs which I have encountered, I find a letter from Thoreau priced at $17.50, one from Hawthorne valued at the same, one from Longfellow at $4.50 only, and one from Holmes at $3, each of these being guaranteed as an especially good autograph letter. Now the value of such memorials during a man’s life affords but a slight test of his permanent standing,—since almost any man’s autograph can be obtained for two postage-stamps if the request be put with sufficient ingenuity;—but when this financial standard can be safely applied more than thirty years after a man’s death, it comes pretty near to a permanent fame.