A History of American Literature

It would, of course, be forcing the issue absurdly far to insist or even suggest that so broad a comparison would apply without exception to the writers of a hundred years ago and of to-day, but in general there is a fair deduction to be drawn. Irving belonged to a group who were still addressing an eighteenth-century audience, an audience made up of “gentle readers” – men who enjoyed the rhythmical flow of a courtly and elegant style, who felt that there was a virtue in purity and beauty of diction apart from any idea the diction was supposed to express; but the modern reader esteems literature as a means rather than an end. It must catch and hold his attention; it must be clear and forcible first, and elegant as a secondary matter; and its words and sentences must be chosen and put together as a challenge to a reader in the midst of a restless, driving, twentieth-century world. With these facts in mind one may say, if he will, that Washington Irving was stiff and formal, but he should say this as marking a difference and not a necessary inferiority in Irving.

Irving lived until 1859, but the richly fruitful part of his life was from 1819, the year in which the serial publication of “The Sketch Book” began, to 1832, the year of his return from abroad. In this period he published ten books and all the best known of his works but the lives of Goldsmith and Washington. When he came back after seventeen years’ absence he was known and admired in England, France, and Germany, and the most popular of American authors. Irving was one of the first to profit, American fashion, by a European reputation reflected and redoubled at home. At the dinner of welcome tendered him soon after his arrival he showed how absence had made the heart grow fonder:

I come from gloomier climes to one of brilliant sunshine and inspiring purity. I come from countries lowering with doubt and danger, where the rich man trembles and the poor man frowns – where all repine at the present and dread the future. I come from these to a country where all is life and animation; where I hear on every side the sound of exultation; where everyone speaks of the past with triumph, the present with delight, the future with growing and confident anticipation.

And here, he went on to say, he proposed to remain as long as he lived. These last twenty-seven years were filled with honors. He had already received the gold medal from the Royal Society of Literature and the degree of Doctor of Laws from Oxford University. Now he was to have the refusal of a whole succession of public offices and the leadership of a whole “school” of writers. Diedrich Knickerbocker had become a household word, which was applied to the Knickerbocker school of Irving’s followers and used in the christening of the Knickerbocker Magazine (1833–1865). Irving was in truth a connecting link between the century of his birth and the century of his achievements. He carried over the spirit and the manners of Addison and Goldsmith into the New World and into the age of steam. With him it was a natural mode of thought and way of expression, but with his imitators it was affected and superficial – so much so that the Knickerbocker school declined and the Knickerbocker Magazine went out of existence shortly after Irving’s death.

The leading figure in the Knickerbocker school was Fitz-Greene Halleck, who was born in Connecticut in 1790 but spent his active life in New York. When he came up to the city, at the age of twenty-one, he fell in with the literary people of the town and shared their eager interest in the current English output. According to his biographer they were absorbed in “The Lady of the Lake” and “Marmion,” in Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope,” Rogers’s “Pleasures of Memory,” Moore’s “Melodies,” Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs” and “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” and, a little later, in “Waverley,” “Guy Mannering,” and “The Antiquary” – works that in Halleck’s opinion produced “a wide-spread enthusiasm throughout Great Britain and this country which has probably never been equalled in the history of literature.”

Halleck (as already cited on page 113) was uncomfortably conscious of the prosaic commercial drive of American life and disposed to lament the wane of romance. His regret for the passage of “the good old days” he frequently expressed in the poems he wrote between the ages of twenty-five and thirty – “Alnwick Castle,” “Red-Jacket,” “A Sketch,” “A Poet’s Daughter”; and in “Wyoming” he sometimes grieved for the old and sometimes protested at the new. When in 1823 he wrote “Marco Bozzaris,” he lived up to his own thesis, taking an heroic episode of immediate interest – August 20, 1823 – and putting it into a ballad for freedom that has probably been declaimed as often as “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.”

In the meanwhile he had become the intimate of the talented young Joseph Rodman Drake. Their friendship had sprung from a common love of romantic poetry, but the joint work which they undertook was a series of contemporary satires. These were printed in The National Advocate and the New York Evening Post between March and July, 1819. Thirty-five of them appeared over the signature of “Croaker,” from which they became known as the “Croaker Papers.” They were both pertinent and impertinent, aided by the mystery of their authorship and accumulating in interest through the uncertainty as to when the next would appear and whom it would assail. The more general in theme had the same underlying good sense which belonged to the earlier Salmagundis (see p. 116), and in their simple and often brutal directness they must have offered then, as they do now, a relief from the fashionable echoes of secondary English poets. Later in 1819 Halleck resumed the same strain in “Fanny” – the account in about a thousand lines of the rise and fall of Fanny and her father in New York finance and society.11 Among many efforts of the sort Stedman’s “Diamond Wedding” and Butler’s “Nothing to Wear” have been the only later approach, and all have been true not merely of New York but of the same stage in most quick-growing American cities.

In 1820 Drake died at the age of twenty-five, leaving as his literary bequest the inspiration for Halleck’s memorial verses, as well as his share in the “Croaker Papers,” and “The Culprit Fay,” and certain shorter poems which give promise of things much greater than this overrated attempt. The “Fay,” according to a letter by Halleck, was a three-day production of 1816, written to demonstrate that the Hudson River scenery could be turned to literary account. Whether or no the anecdote is true, Drake wrote to this point in his “To a Friend,” and in “Niagara” and “Bronx.” Yet the fact is worth remark that nothing in “The Culprit Fay” is any more explicitly true of the Hudson region than of the Rhine country or the Norwegian fiords. The poem reads like a pure fantasy, hurriedly and carelessly written by an inexperienced hand. Nevertheless, when published it was extravagantly praised. Halleck said, “It is certainly the best thing of the kind in the English language, and is more strikingly original than I had supposed it was possible for a modern poem to be.”12

Green be the turf above theeFriend of my better days!

In Halleck’s exclamatory surprise at originality in any modern poem is to be found the vital difference between the two friends. Halleck seemed to believe that the final canons for art had been fixed, and could hardly conceive of originality in a nineteenth-century poet; but Drake tried new things and rebelled at the old. His best efforts, however qualified their success, were strainings at the leash of eighteenth-century convention.

Go! kneel a worshipper at nature’s shrine!For you her fields are green, and fair her skies!For you her rivers flow, her hills arise!And will you scorn them all, to pour forth tameAnd heartless lays of feigned or fancied sighs?And will you cloud the muse? nor blush for shameTo cast away renown, and hide your head from fame?

As “The Culprit Fay” shows, Drake’s idea was to escape from the drawing-room into the open, but when in the open to weave, as it were, Gobelin tapestries for drawing-room use. He saw no gleam of essential poetry in democracy or the crowded town, yet in his vague craving for something better than Georgian iterations he showed that the revival of individualism was at work in him. The story is told that his intimacy with Halleck began in his accord with the latter’s wish that he could “lounge upon the rainbow, and read ‘Tom Campbell.’” In his aspirations he seems to have been nearer to the spirit of Keats and Shelley.

As fate would have it, the more independent of the two was taken off before his prime, and Halleck, the survivor, settled down into complacent Knickerbockerism. With his nicety of taste, his keen eye, his fund of humor, and his frankness, he was an established literary and social favorite. He was the kind of handsome and courtly gentleman of the old school, as Irving was also, who became a friend and associate of the leading financier of the day. There was nothing restless or disconcerting about him. He was a critic of manners, but not of the social order. He probably knew little of Emerson, and he certainly disapproved of Whitman. In 1848, when less than sixty years of age, he went back to his native town in Connecticut and lived there till after the Civil War, totally unaffected as a man of letters, except as the conflict seems to have silenced him. But he was not alone, for when he sank into eclipse all the Knickerbockers disappeared with him. Their vogue was over.

BOOK LIST

Individual Authors

Washington Irving. First posthumous complete edition. New York, 1860–1861. 21 vols. These appeared originally as follows: Salmagundi, 1807–1808; History of New York, 1809; The Sketch Book, 1819; Bracebridge Hall, 1822; Jonathan Oldstyle, 1824; Tales of a Traveller, 1824; Columbus, 1828; Conquest of Granada, 1829; Companions of Columbus, 1831; The Alhambra, 1832; The Crayon Miscellany, 1835; Astoria, 1836; Captain Bonneville, 1837; Goldsmith, 1849; Mahomet, 1839–1850; Wolfert’s Roost, 1855; Washington, 1855–1859; Uncollected Miscellanies, 1866.

Bibliography

Compiled by Shirley V. Long for Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 510–517.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life of Washington Irving is by P. M. Irving, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving. 1862–1864. 1864, 1879, 1883. 4 vols.

Boynton, H. W. Washington Irving. Boston, 1901.

Bryant, W. C. A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of Washington Irving, 1860.

Curtis, G. W. Irving’s Knickerbocker. Critic, Vol. III. 1883.

Curtis, G. W. Washington Irving, in Literary and Social Essays. 1894.

Hazlitt, William. Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon, in The Spirit of the Age. 1825.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Irving’s Power of Idealization. Critic, Vol. III. 1883.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Tribute to Irving. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings. 1858–1860.

Howells, William Dean. My Literary Passions. 1895.

Longfellow, H. W. Tribute to Irving. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings. 1858–1860.

Lowell, J. R. A Fable for Critics. 1848.

Payne, W. M. Leading American Essayists. 1910.

Poe, E. A. Irving’s Astoria. Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. III. 1837.

Putnam, G. H. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap. iv.

Thackeray, W. M. Nil Nisi Bonum. Cornhill Magazine, Vol. I. 1860. Harper’s, Vol. XX. 1860.

Warner, C. D. American Men of Letters Series. 1881.

Warner, C. D. Irving’s Humor. Critic, Vol. III. 1883.

Warner, C. D. Washington Irving. Atlantic, Vol. XLV. 1880.

Warner, C. D. The Work of Washington Irving. 1893.

Fitz-Greene Halleck, The Poetical Works of. New York, 1847, 1850, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1858, 1859. Poetical writings with extracts from those of Joseph Rodman Drake. J. G. Wilson, editor. 1869, 1885. (These editions include the Croaker Papers.) These appeared originally as follows: Fanny, 1819; Alnwick Castle with Other Poems, 1827; Fanny and Other Poems, 1839; Young America, a Poem, 1865; Lines to the Recorder, 1866.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is The Life and Letters of Fitz-Greene Halleck. J. G. Wilson. 1869.

Bryant, W. C. Some Notices on the Life and Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck. 1869.

Dennett, J. R. The Knickerbocker School. Nation, Dec. 6, 1867.

Duyckinck, E. A. Fitz-Greene Halleck, in Putnam’s Magazine. 1868.

Leonard, W. E. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, Bk. II, in chap. v.

Poe, E. A. Fitz-Greene Halleck, in Complete Works, Vol. VIII. 1902.

Tuckerman, H. T. Reminiscences of Fitz-Greene Halleck, in Lippincott’s Magazine. 1868.

Wilson, J. G. Bryant and his Friends. 1886.

Collections

Boynton, Percy H. American Poetry, pp. 147–168, 626–629.

Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 207–212.

Griswold, R. W. Poets and Poetry of America. 1842.

Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. V, pp. 216–225.

Joseph Rodman Drake. Poems by Croaker, Croaker and Co., and Croaker, Jr. First printed in the New York Evening Post. 1819. Reprinted as a pamphlet, 1819. The Culprit Fay and Other Poems. 1835. The American Flag. 1861.

Biography and Criticism

Corning, A. L. Joseph Rodman Drake. Bookman. 1915.

Howe, M. A. DeW. American Bookmen. 1898.

Poe, E. A. Fancy and Imagination. Complete Works, Vol. VII. 1902.

Wells, J. L. Joseph Rodman Drake Park. 1904.

Wilson, J. G. Bryant and his Friends. 1886.

Wilson, J. G. Joseph Rodman Drake, in Harper’s Magazine. June, 1874.

Collections

Boynton, Percy H. American Poetry, pp. 136–153, 624–626.

Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 201–207.

Griswold, R. W. Poets and Poetry of America. 1842.

Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. V, pp. 363–379.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read the “Salmagundi Papers” and “The Citizen of the World” for evident influences. Close attention will reveal obligations not merely in the use of a foreign observer, a slight narrative thread, and the kind of topics treated, but also in actual detail passages.

Read passages covering the education of Goldsmith in Irving’s Life, in Macaulay’s essay, and in Thackeray’s “English Humourists,” and compare the degrees of sympathy with which Goldsmith is presented.

In connection with the problems of international copyright, see passages indicated in the table of contents or index of the following volumes: “Matthew Carey, Publisher,” by E. L. Bradsher; “Letters of Richard Watson Gilder” (edited by Rosamond Gilder, 1916); “These Many Years,” by Brander Matthews, 1917; “Memories of a Publisher” and “The Question of Copyright,” by George Haven Putnam, 1915; “Mark Twain, a Biography,” by A. B. Paine, 1912.

Read “John Bull” in “The Sketch Book” for the passages in specific reference to the English government.

Read “Rural Life” in “The Sketch Book” for a further obligation to Goldsmith – the influence of “The Deserted Village.”

Read “Bracebridge Hall” for a further development of English life and character begun in the “Sketch Book” essays discussed in the text.

Read “The Alhambra” for a comparison in subject matter, method, and tone with the three stories in “The Sketch Book.”

Pick out the five essays in literary criticism in “The Sketch Book” for the light they throw on Irving’s literary likings and critical acumen.

Read in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” the description of the domestic group at the Van Tassels for comparison with similar pictures in the English sketches.

Compare the “Croaker Papers” with the “Salmagundi Papers.”

Read Halleck’s “Fanny” (see Boynton, “American Poetry,” pp. 154–158) for comparison in method with the “Croaker Papers.”

Read Joseph Rodman Drake’s “To a Friend” for an appeal for originality characteristic of the period and then read “The Culprit Fay” (“American Poetry,” pp. 136–146) for a nonfulfillment of the authors’ own appeal.

CHAPTER X

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

Cooper’s life (1789–1851) was inclosed by Irving’s, for he was born six years later and died eight years earlier. When he was a little more than a year old his father took his large family – Cooper was the eleventh of twelve children – to the shore of Otsego Lake, New York, where he had bought a tract, after the Revolution. It was uncleared country, but here Judge Cooper laid out what developed into Cooperstown, established a big estate, and built a pretentious house. His scheme of life was aristocratic, more like that of the first Virginia settlers than like that of the Massachusetts Puritans. Here the boy grew up in an ambitious home, but among primitive frontier surroundings, until he needed better schooling than Cooperstown could offer. To prepare for Yale College he was sent to Albany and put in charge of the rector of St. Peter’s Church. Under this gentleman he gained not only the “book learning” for which he went but also a further sense of the gentry’s point of view – a point of view which throughout his life made him frankly critical of the defects in America even while he was passionately loyal to it. At thirteen he was admitted to Yale. This sounds as if he were a precocious child, but there was nothing unusual in the performance, for the colleges were hardly more than advanced academies where most of the students received their degrees well before they were twenty. This was the institution which John Trumbull – who had passed his examinations at seven! – had held up to scorn in his “Progress of Dulness,” and where his hero, Tom Brainless, but even from here Cooper’s unstudious and disorderly ways caused his dismissal in his second year. His formal education was now ended, and in his development as a writer it was doubtless much less important than his earlier years in the wilderness west of the Hudson River or those that were to follow on the ocean. In 1806 he was sent to sea for a year on a merchant vessel, and on his return was commissioned a midshipman in the United States Navy. His service lasted for three years, from January 1, 1808, to May, 1811, and was ended by his marriage to the daughter of a Tory who had fought on the British side in the Revolutionary War. Then for nine years he settled down to what seemed like respectable obscurity, living part of the time at his father-in-law’s home, part of the time at Cooperstown, and the last three years at Scarsdale, New York.

Four years at college dozed awayIn sleep, and slothfulness and play,

From these first thirty years of his life there seemed to be little prospect that he was to become a novelist of world-wide and permanent reputation. There is no record that anyone, even himself, expected him to be a writer. Yet it is quite evident, as one looks back over it, that his preparation had been rich and varied. He had lived on land and on sea, in city and country, in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He had breathed in the stories of the Revolutionary days, grown up on the frontier, and been a part of America in the making. And from his father, his tutor, and his wife and her family, as well as from his travel, he had learned to see America through critical eyes. He had the material to write with and the experience to make him use it wisely. The one apparently missing factor was the most important of all – there was not the slightest indication that he had either the will or the power to use his pen.

The story of how he began to write is a familiar one. Out of patience with the crudity of an English society novel that he had been reading, he said boastfully that he could write a better one himself. Many another novel-reader and playgoer has talked with equal recklessness after a literary disappointment in the library or the theater, but the remarkable part of the story is that in 182 °Cooper made his boast good. The resultant novel, “Precaution,” was successful in only one respect – that it started Cooper on his career. It was a colorless tale with an English plot, located in English scenes of which he had no first-hand knowledge. It made so little impression on public or publishers that when his next novel was ready, in 1821, he had to issue it at his own expense; and he made this next venture, “The Spy,” in part at least because of his friends’ comment – characteristic of that self-conscious period – that he would have been more patriotic to write on an American theme. To let Cooper tell his own story:

The writer, while he knew how much of what he had done was purely accidental, felt the reproach to be one that, in a measure, was just. As the only atonement in his power, he determined to inflict a second book, whose subject should admit no cavil, not only on the world, but on himself. He chose patriotism for his theme; and to those who read this introduction and the book itself, it is scarcely necessary to add that he [selected his hero] as the best illustration of his subject.

By means of this story of war times, involving the amazing adventures of Harvey Birch, the spy, Cooper won his public; a fact which is amply proven by the sale of 3500 copies of his third novel, “The Pioneer,” on the morning of publication. This story came nearer home to him, for the scenery and the people were those among whom he had lived as a boy at Cooperstown. Working with this familiar material, based on the country and the developing life which was a part of his very self, Cooper wrote the first of his famous “Leatherstocking” series. The five stories, taken together, complete the long epic of the American Indian to which Longfellow was later to supply the earlier cantos in “Hiawatha.” For Cooper took up the chronicle where Longfellow was to drop it (see p. 276):

Then a darker, drearier visionPassed before me, vague and cloud-like;I beheld our nation scattered,All forgetful of my counsels,Weakened, warring with each other:Saw the remnants of our peopleSweeping westward, wild and woful,Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,Like the withered leaves of Autumn.

It was not a deliberate undertaking, planned from start to finish; it was not written in the order in which the stories occurred – like the long series by Winston Churchill; it did not even conceive of the scout as the central character of the first book, much less of the four which were to follow it. Cooper did not even seem to appreciate after he had written “The Pioneer,” how rich a vein he had struck, for within the next two years he wrote “The Pilot” a sea story, and “Lionel Lincoln, or the Leaguers of Boston,” supposed to be the first of a series of thirteen colonial stories which were never carried beyond this point. However, in 1826 he came back to Leatherstocking in “The Last of the Mohicans,” second both in authorship and in order of reading, and in 1827 he wrote “The Prairie,” the last days of the scout. It was not till 1840 and 1841 that he completed the series with the first and third numbers, “The Deerslayer” and “The Pathfinder.” To summarize: the stories deal in succession with Deerslayer, a young woods-man in the middle of the eighteenth century; then Hawkeye, the hero of “The Last of the Mohicans,” a story of the French and Indian War; next, Pathfinder; fourth, Leatherstocking, the hero of “The Pioneer,” in the decade just before 1800; and finally, with the trapper, who in 1803 left the farming lands of New York to go westward with the emigrants who were attracted by the new government lands of “The Prairie.”

With the writing of the second of the series, Cooper concluded the opening period in his authorship. In a little over six years he had published six novels and had shown promise of all that he was to accomplish in later life. He had attempted four kinds: stories of frontier life in which he was always successful; sea tales, for which he was peculiarly fitted; historical novels, which he did indifferently well; and studies in social life, in which he had started his career with a failure but to which he returned again and again like a moth to the flame.