Early American Novelists

THE problem of writing American novels, about which it has of late years become the fashion to talk with a great deal of artificial profundity and useless intricacy, is not a new one. Some of the prevalent theories about it are fortunately new; but the attempt to solve the difficulty began more than three quarters of a century ago.

In the colonial period of our literature, which may be called the period of unconscious beginnings, we find nothing of fiction. This is noticeable, but natural. A nation cannot know itself until, looking into imaginative writings, it suddenly catches the gleam of its own eyes, the responsive tracing of its own features there, and is uncertain how much the novelty of the sight depends upon itself, how much it may be due to the reflected image. Therefore, while men were laying in this country the foundations of a structure they did not dream of, and were still only dimly aware of the differences between themselves and other English, original fiction could hardly find a place among their productions.

Our first native novelist, Brockden Brown, did not appear until after the swift and thorough awakening which came with the Revolution. Before that, those gentlemen of the colonies who had a mind to adorn life for themselves with a decent literary style had learned to hold their pens in the manner of the Queen Anne wits, and that of the Georgian prosaists. They gracefully changed their fashion of expression to suit the London modes, and for a time were quite content with this genteel exercise. But suddenly they had occasion to make known ideas of their own, and the fashions were dropped promptly enough, giving way to the stately and simple utterance of political writing which has seldom been equaled. But pure literature lagged far behind political. As the people of the colonies were themselves reluctant to believe that total separation must come, so the finer forms of literature, in spite of their protests and their independent spirit, still paid deference to British example, for many years after the Union had been formed. After the war, society in this country, like a person whose will and reason have thrown off certain inherited traits, strove to bring the same blood which had filled its veins before the revolt into obedience to the newly established intellectual rule. But the process was slow. Ardent democracy and lingering toryism persisted together, while a stately republican element, careful of distinctions and countenancing slavery, held the balance of power, and for a time imposed its tiewig on the teeming head of the young nationality with a picturesque enough result. Similar conflicts were represented by the contents of the book - shelf. Now this incongruity, this dispute between new ideas and old manners, was sure to make itself strongly felt in fiction, for, the period of national consciousness having arrived, certain people were dissatisfied at the bad sort of mirror of life furnished by foreign novels.

At first the dissonance of imported fiction with the tone of our new life was not so much attended to, for novels, though used in good measure “ in our sea-ports,”— according to Royall Tyler’s preface to The Algerine Captive, in 1797,—“ if known in the country, were read only by the families of clergymen, physicians, and lawyers, while certain funeral discourses, the Last Dying Speeches of Bryan Shaneen and Levi Ames, or some dreary somebody’s Day of Doom, formed the most diverting part of the farmer’s library.” But the taste for romances spread until this same authority felt compelled to speak up boldly. He thus describes the influence of alien fiction upon the New England woman: “ It paints the manners, customs, and habits of a strange country, excites a fondness for false splendor, and renders the homespun habits of her own country disgusting. . . . There are two things wanting,” said a friend to the author: “ that we write our own books of amusement, and that they exhibit our own manners.” Perfectly wholesome advice, no doubt; and Mr. Tyler attempted to follow it, by giving the world, in his Algerine Captive, an account of a fictitious Doctor ——, who travels about the country a good deal (possibly in search of the name his historian’s imagination failed to supply), goes abroad, is captured by the Algerine pirates, and eventually escapes and returns home. But the book is a failure as a novel; the effort to “exhibit our own manners ” results in certain generalized sketches of little merit; and the most entertaining thing between the covers is the preface. This dry little volume was printed at Walpole, New Hampshire, a place not greatly suspected of being a literary centre at the present day; but the locality was favorable to a sanguineness of temperament which looked forward to rescuing readers, by so slight an expedient, from destruction at the hands of the British novelists. The Algerine Captive, indeed, was nothing more than a blank cartridge fired off as a signal of approaching danger; but it alarmed the camp. At all events, the very next year, 1798, brought to the front Brockden Brown, with his first novel, Wieland.

In the previous year Brown had published Alcuin, or A Dialogue on the Rights of Women, in which the same questions of marriage and divorce that are to-day so frequently and freely agitated were brought up for discussion. He thus began his career of authorship with dialectics, just as William Godwin, whom Brown took for his model in novel-writing, had done. Godwin’s Inquiry concerning Political Justice was a stepping-stone to his Caleb Williams. But here Brown’s course differed; he had chosen a difficult theme in Alcuin, and did not pursue it in his novels; prudently, perhaps, though the subjects of his fictions need a coherence which some sustained course of ideas might have supplied. We get an amusing but pathetic glimpse of literary conditions in the liberated colonies through the obstacles which met Brown’s wish to make authorship his profession. He was born in 1771, and his uncle, Charles Brockden, had drawn up, just forty years before, the constitution of the old Philadelphia Library Company, as if with a vague sense of obligation toward his non-existent nephew; books, too, were early made familiar to him in his father’s house. Yet his family and friends all cherished a strong dislike for the scheme of his writing books himself. “ Libraries,” reflected they, “ are all very well, as long as your own sons or near relatives do not attempt adding to their contents from their own inkstands.” This objection was a part of the incredibly superficial respectability which then reigned in this country in matters of the arts. One finds plenty of wealthy people, at this day, who profess, and make their children profess, the utmost reverence for books and pictures, people who read with relish and indignation about the struggles of noted poets and painters against poverty or parental stupidity; but nothing could be more dreadful to them than to have their children seriously and generously devote themselves to either art in question. When Brown was still an infant, his biographer Dunlap tells us, a book was sufficient amusement to him even when left for some time alone. His parents allowed him to study much more than was good for him; at ten he was “a sort of gazetteer ” to his father; at eleven, on the threshold of Latin and Greek, his health gave out. Returning from boarding-school at the age of sixteen, he very naturally set about planning three great epic poems founded on the discovery of America, Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, and Cortes’ campaigns in Mexico. Fortunately, they were never executed. It was now that he began the study of law, in which he distinguished himself; but the needful books having been read, and dry practice coming in view, his docile ardor failed him, and he openly resolved on giving his life to literature. It must be said for Brown that, in addition to his natural bent, he had a clear perception of the need for an American school of writers, and wished to do something toward founding one. His friends represented his desire as being lawless and impetuous, as conflicting with filial and social duties. He was sensitive, and their harangues reduced him to a morbid and deeply wretched state of mind, ending in broken health. But he had been given books to play with, when a child, and children, from the small eminence of a quarto, often catch sight of strange things. I think Brown had seen a vision of himself enshrined somewhere far off, as an American classic. He went to New York, found two congenial friends there with names as easy to remember as his own, Smith and Johnson, to wit, and became an author. I am afraid he did not become an American classic, though his works are still kept on the shelves of certain book-preserving institutions, and a little mortuary heap of dust, a handful of the author’s native soil, fell from the long - slumbering volumes when lately exhumed and examined for the benefit of readers of this article. All unconscious of predestined oblivion, nevertheless, Wieland came forth, and was successful, though only after surmounting many perplexities of printer and publisher, owing to the prevalent indifference for American-born romance at the time. Even Cooper at the beginning of his career, stuck for several years upon the harbor-bar of reluctant type.

Wieland is, on the whole, the best of Brown’s novels, and possesses a sort of phosphorescent impressiveness. Yet it is a preposterous book. Opening with a terrible case of spontaneous combustion, gloomier but less powerful than Dickens’s similar disaster in Bleak House, it proceeds with a chain of terrifying and shocking circumstances which end in madness and murder, but prove to have been occasioned merely by the pranks of a ventriloquist. One feels a sort of shame at participating in such wanton and wasteful horrors. But considered simply as a literary performance, the work has undoubted strength, though of an unhealthy sort. It gives evidence of ability, hardly of genius, and cannot be called original in any sense. Clearly patterned after Caleb Williams, it smacks of the unearthliness of Frankenstein, and is founded on machinery of the Radcliffe kind. Still, it has a species of keeping with itself. The atmosphere which it generates is sombre, dank, miasmatic; a single ray of the fine humor belonging to all highest genius would have dispersed and destroyed the entire unhealthful exhalation. Neither is there any character in the story, as we now understand the development of character. This is true of all his books excepting Ormond, in which Constantia appears, — a heroine of some force. Arthur Mervyn, Brown’s second novel, is a formless farrago of horrors, — the yellow fever, fraud, seduction,—with no redeeming trait in it. Edgar Huntly, another tale, deals in the adventures of a somnambulist, and Indian maraudings. Finally, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot are stories of love and misunderstanding, which are absurdly overwrought and excessively dull. Besides these, Brown wrote The Memoirs of Carwin (the ventriloquist in Wieland), with some singular imitation histories called The Carrills and Ormes, and Sketches of a History of Carsol, which are unutterably dry, and are filled with details about the ground-plans of huge royal abodes — the result of a passion which Brown is said to have had for architectural drawing. The meaning of these strange fantasies in sham fact no one has been able to divine. Such are the meagre and melancholy fruits of this man’s life, aside from sundry volumes of The Monthly Magazine and Literary Review, and of a subsequent Literary Magazine and American Register, which he edited and mostly wrote, between 1799 and 1810. In the latter year, he died of consumption. Apparently he had accomplished nothing substantial of that which he aimed for: he had originated no new point of view in fiction; he had demonstrated that novels could be written in America, but not that there could be novels distinctively American. Nor did he in any way reproduce the characteristics of the period in which he lived. What magnificent materials lay at his elbow ! — the courtly life and splendid festivities of the Morrises, the Binghams, the Shippens, in Philadelphia; the conflict of English and French manners and ideas in our communities, the reflex action of the French Revolution on society in the States; or, had he reached back a little farther, there was the time of our own Revolution at command, with its manifold passionate situations, its dramatic contrasts: Washington’s ragged and halfsuccessful army beating about the country while Sir William Howe was entertained in Philadelphia with a tournament between the knights of the Burning Mountain and those of the Blended Rose. All this, and the dissensions that disturbed the new nation, also the clashing of honest and earnest democracy with the new aristocracy of wealth, combined with numberless picturesque details of period, place, and costume, supplies material worthy of a Thackeray and a Hugo united in one. But perhaps Brown stood too close to what looks so enticing in perspective, to perceive its pictorial value. Moreover, novel-writing was in its infancy, and his mind was fettered by Godwin’s. One thing is noteworthy: in his novels the women are the strongest characters, and they have an air of semirevolt, of strong despair at the comfortless position they occupy. This, too, was doubtless caught from Godwin and his association with Mary Woolstonecraft, author of The Rights of Women. But we may account it a merit; it was of good omen for the tone that should characterize subsequent American fiction, and Margaret Fuller hailed the trait with enthusiasm, many years later.

“ I saw him a little before his death,” wrote the painter Sully, of Charles Brockden Brown. “ I had never known him, never heard of him, never read any of his works. He was in a deep decline. It was in the month of November, when the air was full of smoke. . . . I was caught by the sight of a man with a remarkable physiognomy, writing at a table in a dark room. The sun shone directly upon his head. . . . The dead leaves were falling.” I like this glimpse, because it makes a spot of sunshine in a somewhat dreary picture. Indeed, Brown deserves the aureole; for although none of his books are “ works of genius,” he himself was a man of genius, — genius misdirected and squandered, but not wholly wasted. He was the first man in America to lead a life of letters pure and simple; and though it was a short life, leaving no immortal results, his example was a brave one. Brown saw that a chasm was surely opening between literature and life in this country; an abyss yawned in the very market-place of the republic. Another Curtins, he leaped full-armed into the gulf, — and the ground has closed over him completely. Sometimes, in viewing more recent products of our soil, flimsy fictive growths far less deserving even than Brown’s novels, I am tempted to question the gods, and to wonder why the gulf does not still yawn a little, now and then.

But Brown’s valiant though brief and to us unsatisfactory endeavors resulted in recognition from England: one or two of his books found a place among Bentley’s Standard Novels. No amount of success which had not the sanction of the London public could have availed to encourage native literature as this reception abroad encouraged it; so great was the dependence on England in matters of taste. But we have seen that Brown was in no way a peculiar outcome of American life, and represented nothing new. His success, therefore, was not at once followed by any other noticeable attempt. It was in 1807, to be sure, that James Paulding and Washington Irving wrote their Salmagundi, a work in its whole scope and manner aping The Spectator and the essays of Goldsmith, even to the point of a kind of perversion of borrowed suggestions which was half plagiarism. But it required the intolerance of the English reviews to arouse our countrymen to a consciousness of their subordinated attitude, and it was not until 1820 that Sydney Smith, in The Edinburgh Review, kindled beacons all along our coast for a general rally of mind, by his supercilious observation, “ Thus far we are the friends and admirers of Jonathan. But he must not grow vain and ambitious;” and by his offensive inquiry, “ In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American statue? ” If one is surprised at the ignorance of Mr. Smith in putting these questions, one wonders still more that his frequently acute sense of humor did not save him from his succeeding queries: “ Who drinks out of American glasses ... or sleeps in American blankets? ” But the obtuse and insolent attack was wholesome. Precisely as the British march upon Concord had opened the eyes of the colonists forty-five years before, this literary brutishness nowcalled upon the thinking people of the country to assert a capacity for literature, similar to that which they had proved for government.

It is interesting to observe the results. Quite by accident, in the year preceding the Edinburgh article, a young United States naval lieutenant, lately married and then living in Westchester, New York, had been piqued into writing a little imitation English novel, Precaution. His next book, The Spy, was eminently patriotic, and turned out to be the first really American novel, rousing an unprecedented excitement among all native readers, and going forth into Great Britain and the European continent to gain equal acceptance there, not only as a spirited work of the imagination, but also as being freshly and adequately characteristic of this quarter of the world. The Spy was published in 1823. The change of theme and spirit in the author, after his first publication, is of course not to be ascribed solely to the Rev. Sydney Smith’s rough gibes; though the comparison of dates is suggestive. In like manner, Paulding, who had begun so meekly in the footsteps of The Spectator, came forward stormily, in 1824, with his John Bull in America; a bulky trifle written in less than a month’s time, to satirize some absurd articles in The British Quarterly, based upon Travels in this country penned by certain ignorant and prejudiced Englishmen. But in the interval since Salmagundi, Paulding also had developed the American sentiment to some degree in his attempted poem, The Backwoodsman. Indeed, the preliminaries to an entire literature had been silently arranging themselves among us since the achievement of independence; and a critic of discernment, remembering how much had been produced in the colonies before the war, would have held his peace in discussing the literary outlook of America at a time when, for many years, revolution and political agitation attendant on the formation of government, together with a couple of foreign wars, held intellectual achievement somewhat in the background. It was in 1823 that Channing published his essay on National Literature; Audubon began two years later to publish his Birds of America in folio numbers; Prescott was already in 1820 studying deeply for his first history, and Bancroft, having in the same year taken his degree at Gottingen, was enriching himself with the ripest knowledge which Europe coidd yield, before commencing his massive and brilliant History of the United States. So that the Americans, conscious of abundant intellectual vigor and of aspirations which were soon, in their fulfillment, to command universal praise, felt keenly a taunt offered at the last moment when it could have been made with any show of justice; and doubtless their efforts were quickened by it.

Paulding’s John Bull is a sufficiently amusing piece of exaggerative ridicule; yet I do not think we can any of us take great pride or pleasure in it now. The author had a coarse humor, which he used with equal bluntness against his own people when he thought that occasion called for it. Witness this scrap from his New Mirror, or Guide to the Springs, in which he enumerates the requisites for a young lady’s outfit in summer travel: “ Six beaux to amuse you on the journey. N. B. A poodle will do as well.” In this Guide to the Springs he was influenced by an impression quite prevalent at the time, that the witty thing to do was to satirize the manners of “ the town,” and in such writing we find another sign of the subserviency to British example which kept reappearing in one form or another through our light literature for many years. Paulding followed Cooper with several novels similar to the latter’s in construction and in literary texture, though vastly inferior to them in native strength — Koningsmarke, Westward Ho! The Old Continental, The Puritan and his Daughter; but both he and his illustrious contemporary, it seems to me, unconsciously played to the British gallery a great deal more than was well. The title of “the American Scott,” which was so repugnant to Mr. Cooper, from which we also should be glad to free him, sticks nevertheless. Irving, for his part, devoted himself with positively obsequious industry to the production of such close imitations of Addison and Goldsmith that we are reminded by them of the modern reproductions of antique furniture and gold work, often admirable in their way, but to be valued only as illustrations of what has already been done elsewhere. Goldsmiths’ work in electrotype, and reproductions of old pictures by cheap processes, are useful, because we cannot have the originals. But these books must finally fall into the place of things not needed, although excellently wrought and still much in fashion. Paulding, who enjoyed the privilege of assisting to govern the country as Secretary of the Navy and in other offices, may perhaps retain immortality in the archives of a past administration; he certainly will not do so by virtue of his novels or other writings. Yet he was a sturdier American than his friend, and in one thing he is interesting, as setting in motion in his own mind two opposing currents of feeling which are still in active play among us. He was ferocious in his castigations of John Bull, but equally satirical, as we have observed, toward his countrymen, The same conflict appears in Cooper, who, on going to Europe, at first bitterly resented the criticisms of his country which he encountered there, but ended by becoming the harshest of its critics, later. This fashion of bullying the offensive foreigner, and then seizing an early opportunity to castigate one’s fellow-citizens, has its disadvantages, for the latter process is as public as the first. The fashion, accordingly, has gone out; and along with a general perceptible amelioration of international manners, there has come a greater circumspection among writers on this subject, though we yet meet daily with a snobbish rejection of America by Americans which is no less provincial than the traditional stump-orator’s blind scorn for every other country “on the planet.” Cooper justly made this complaint: “ The governing social evil of America is provincialism; a misfortune that is perhaps inseparable from her situation. . . . The dramatist who should endeavor to delineate the faults of society would find a formidable party arrayed against him in a moment, with no party to defend.” In this respect, he declares, the nation is “ lamentably in arrears to its own principles.” But, on the other hand, one cannot now read his Home as Found without frequent vexation and laughter at the hopeless pomposity of the writer, and his vain attempt to train Americans in manners as absolutely as he would beat gunners to quarters at sea, by holding up to them his tiresome Sir George and Miss Effingham with their everlasting ‘ ‘ well - bred and concealed smiles,” and opposing to these the buffoon, Aristobulus Bragg, as a typical American.

But no writer of fiction has yet succeeded in the delicate task of effecting an understanding on this troublesome point. It can never, in fact, be done, unless by some one of sprightly instinct and sound judgment, who shall measure the deflections of society from the ideal by his own educated, honest consciousness, — not by any imported convention, however excellent in its place, — and shall then hit off his observations with wit enough to make laughter drown discontent. The reason of this is that with us there exists no social code to which readers the country through defer; it will be very long before such a code can be established, and none will ever be generally recognized among us, it is to be hoped, not based on principles more generous than those governing Old World societies. American manners in the best and broadest sense — I do not speak merely of the polished surfaces, too closely resembling European results, which appear here and there in our older communities — as yet admit of only a partial definition, yet they exist, as distinguished from those of other nations. We find in them a prevailing tone of common sense, compensating for a great deal of vulgarity, a humorous perception of propriety, a fine tact, and great faith in human nature. These are healthy traits, and to these must be made the appeal of any one who aims to “ exhibit our manners ” with radical and repaying success. It is, I believe, contended by a small number of superior persons that no “ novel of society” can be founded on American life, because we have no Society. I await with great interest and curiosity, however, novels which shall do justice to the extraordinary and thrilling situation of forty million people who unite in pining for a society, and who, meanwhile, remain absolutely destitute of emotions and in some unaccountable way deprived of their human nature. Even Cooper complains ¹ that with us “ there are no annals for the historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist ; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance;” and that “the weakest hand can extract a spark from the flint, but it would baffle the strength of the giant to attempt kindling a flame with a pudding-stone.” It is true, the exterior structure of our society recalls that of the pudding-stone; but “the giant” should be able to accomplish something even with this. Possibly, with due exertion, he might discover the granite of an untried continent lying at the bottom of this superficial appearance.

But the only novelist who has shown the manners of this country in at all the right spirit, was a mysterious German, whose stories, published under the pseudonym of Charles Sealsfield, at intervals from 1828 to 1842, attracted, it is said, a great many readers; though they have now passed into deep obscurity. Sealsfield’s supreme advantage was that of an impartial and very impressible mind, to which the immense and varied stretches of our many - chambered life were suddenly revealed. The vast range, the richness of the material, awoke an exhaustless enthusiasm in him, and his life was passed in journeying through every part of these States, and into the outlying wildernesses, and in reporting, through the medium of novels, his curious and almost limitless discoveries. Nothing escaped him; he did not close his eyes to a single foible or error, and all that he has to tell us of our manners is based on a frame of fact as unyielding and coldly certain as iron. Yet, withal, he possessed a comprehension of our entire system and the quality of our national being which would be rare in a native American. His Life in the New World is a series of novels opening one into another with a continuousness which he must have caught from the Mississippi and the Red River, along whose shores the scenery of the stories is unfolded; and rough, diffuse, ragged in plan as they are, they give a panoramic view of American character which is surely one of the most singular things in literature. I say literature; yet you are haunted, in reading him, by a suspicion that it is not fiction, but hugely agglomerated fact, that you have before you. And this is partly true. The German critic Mundt declared that Sealsfield had come nearer to reality than any previous novelist. But the author, in his preface to Morton, or The Grand Tour, admits in a measure that to secure this he incorporated fact with his work just as it presented itself; and he even sets up a theory, after reviewing the standpoints of the great novelists, that the new departure in this art should be to draw distinctly from living persons. “ The tendency of this book,” he says of Morton, “ is a higher one than that of the romance proper; it approaches the historic motive. I wish to do my share in giving to the historical romance that higher tone by means of which it may more beneficently work itself into the culture of the age; to assist in replacing, by stronger nourishment, the thousand imbecile, damaging, dull books called novels of manners, and written in order to make still more unnaturally stiff social relations which are already stretched unnaturally tense enough.” Certainly a vigorous and splendid design; and whatever we may say of the theory in itself, one cannot deny that in Morton — which treats of the scorn of an American Know-Nothing for foreignborn citizens, and the revelation to him of a power on the part of one or two of them which preserves his life and gives him great wealth, besides making him the instrument of an almost absolute money-power — he opens a gaping depth of insight into the possibilities of a single person’s command over thousands, into the subterranean reaches of society, which, with more art, would have broken into and usurped the dark territory of Balzac. In this story, or rather enormous fragment, — all his books are more or less such, — he uses a Philadelphian magnate with the scarcely masked name of Stephen G——d. In Rambleton, he tries the case of family pride in the republic, and of American flirtation; for there is something judicial in his whole treatment of his themes. We have elsewhere planter - life, and the extraordinary race of Creoles, with their luxurious squalor, depicted, and slavery discussed. The Squatter Chief is a bold, bloody, and yet unspeakably vigorous story, with a deep pathos about it; the figure of old Nathan, “ the squatter regulator,” who rules autocratically but wisely, and retires before the advance of law and civilization, abandoning the ground it has cost so much loss of life and ceaseless struggle to reclaim from the forest, — this figure rivals Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. Yet there is a rawness, a lingering exaggeration, in these powerful frescoes. Sealsfield, though a profound genius, missed being an artist. In modeling life on so large a scale, too, he loses the individuality of persons in the low relief of the whole. One peculiar trait of nearly all his people is that they constantly declare, in justification of the most absurd whims and outbursts of anger, “We live in a free country! ” — an acute piece of generalized character. Another singularity is the marking of different traits by the names of the States where they are supposed to be most frequent, as, “ The man had explained the case with real Ohio minuteness; ” “ Annoyed at the Pennsylvania coolness of the man,” etc. There is a certain resemblance between his broad way of taking things, and Walt Whitman’s enthusiasm of enumeration; and one misses in his creations that tender and intimate personality which can alone insure remembrance to the offspring of the poet’s or the novelist’s imagination. He sacrificed this to a more immediate end of rousing the German nation to unity by his pictures of our Union; and it was a wise and suggestive remark of his, in refusing to sanction a second edition of his books, that conditions changed so rapidly here that what he had written a few years before would no longer be true, and should not be perpetuated.

It is this very tenderness which puts Cooper, who succeeded in imparting it, quite above a writer like Sealsfield, superior as the latter was in breadth and variety of perception. No criticism, I imagine, however much justice it may have, will quite dislodge Cooper’s leather-stockinged hunter— Deerslayer, Pathfinder, Hawk-Eye — from his high seat in our hearts. There is deep poetry in the conception of this life, with its different divisions so aptly characterized by the different names of the man: first the Deerslayer, who has not yet been forced to stain his conscience with even Indian blood; then the Pathfinder, a man of stern and settled purposes, with a tender heart amid them all; later, Hawk-Eye; lastly the aged wanderer, in The Prairie. In The Spy, Cooper had sounded a réveille to American fiction; and in The Pioneers he awakened to the reverberations of fame our deep forests, which had so long lain silent. But it is on the Leather-Stocking tales and two or three of his sea-romances, The Red Hover, The Pilot, The Water-Witch, that his most lasting reputation will probably rest. The Pioneers, with its shadowless figures set into the topography here and there, resembles a quaint and primitive map of the frontier settlement which it describes. Yet it was from this region that the author recruited his forces for many another book. Here already stands Leather-Stocking, leaning on his rifle, that “noiseless laugh” of his in full play over “ the lineaments of his ingenuous countenance.” Near him reposes Indian John, the Chingachgook of a later time, in all the ease of a first sketch. The hearty old gentleman, the lovely young female, and the alert, romantic, and well - oiled youth who were afterward so incessantly put under requisition, are all on the stage; even the honest and useful tar lies coiled up in the person of Benjamin Penguillian. These various persons the author, finding them popular, sent off on extended scoutingexpeditions, in after years, to obtain fresh material. They invaded the prairies, endured the hardships of storms on lake or sea and the perils of war and murder in sundry places; they colonized the most distant regions, and even through some strange error got turned back through the past, and operated on the reader from behind the bulwark of centuries. Sometimes they suffered by these changes, and came before the public in a rather emaciated condition. Apart from Natty,—

as Mr. Lowell has said,

Yet the one true star lights the horizon, and everything borrows beauty from the single creature who displays in full the tenderness of heart, the lonely grandeur of imagination, that belong to Cooper. I must include another person, however; Cooper has positively made Solitude a character in these dramas of ocean and open plain. The solemn rustling of the league - losing forest, the formless murmur of the incessant Atlantic surge, entered into his spirit and found embodiment from him. The novelist of a new continent could not, had he consciously deliberated, have made a wiser choice for one of the chief players in his histories; and in the spacious theatre which Cooper has provided will be found room for a large posterity of praisers.

For myself, recognizing his numberless defects, his many absolute failures, T am still inclined to repeat, in leaving him, the epitaph which his own pious hand placed over the grave of Pathfinder: Let no wanton hand ever disturb his remains.

Curiously similar to the literary twinbirth of Cooper with Scott was that of Miss Sedgwick with Miss Edgeworth. Miss Sedgwick’s many tales might easily have been many more than they are; for of the making of such books, as they require but little genius, there is no end. Hope Leslie, containing the impossible but rather effective Indian girl, Magawisca, is the only one, perhaps, that needs even mention. In like manner, Mrs. Child’s Hobomok, The Rebels, and Philothea, having no definable character or merit, must be left to define and speak for themselves. A swarm of historical and romantic tale - tellers, and sketehers of American life have attempted to follow Cooper’s pioneering: Robert Bird; William Ware, whose Roman stories reflected Lockhart’s antique fictions; Fenno Hoffman, with his Greyslaer; J. P. Kennedy, author of the good-natured but heavy Swallow Barn, so full of negroes and fried chicken; John Esten Cooke, whose Virginia Comedians is remembered; and William Gilmore Simms, with a baggage - train of some seventy volumes of Border Beagles and the Lord knows what besides. But all these gentlemen have fared badly in the bush, and somehow the bush never gets cleared away. They may be ranked with the early novelists, because they represent an early and not a mature manner. Some of them are afflicted by an indecision between history and fiction, as even Cooper himself was, at times. Irving finally invested in history his possibilities as a novelist, and it was well that he did so. Even Mr. Motley, in Morton’s Hope and Merry Mount, hovered for a time among this light advance of historical novelists, but, fortunately falling back, he found himself a leader in the main body of the world’s chroniclers, and has remained there.

If, then, we review the achievements in novel - writing, as distinguished from the writing of romances, during the period from Brown to Cooper and his satellites inclusive, what do we find? Noticeably, a great lack of simplicity, of naïveté, that primary charm in most dawning literatures; and secondly, with much assumption of maturity, there is to be observed a lamentable crudity, a want of ripe literary development, which gives even to the best productions, so far as workmanship goes, a universal air of amateurishness. Cooper’s books were made like kites —a great deal of paper to a small supply of stick. No one of the numerous laborers in this direction had been able to create a style. It is true, they imitated the best thing they could find to imitate, and coming into the field so suddenly as they did, all unequipped too, they had perforce to copy weapons the efficacy of which had already been proved. Yet the fact remains, and it is time to recognize it, that, in spite of the palliations of encyclopædias and the easy consciences of manual-makers, there has been, until recently, no complete originality in our fictitious literature, with the exception of that which Poe and Hawthorne secured. Of these two, and of the qualities of Irving in detail, I have written elsewhere.

Meanwhile, it was perhaps natural that a protest against this staleness of style should have been made. It was made, and in full vigor, though with a thoroughly spread-eagle air, by John Neal, of Maine, a man of power, whose strength led him into the folly of writing several novels, Errata, Seventy-Six, Logan, and Randolph, each within from twenty-seven to thirty-nine days — a rapidity of action from which, unfortunately, the public has taken a hint in forgetting them. From Mr. Neal’s wild and incoherent protest, prefacing his novel of witchcraft, Rachel Dyer (1828), I take some fragments that follow a question whether reputations like Irving’s should properly satisfy “the ambition of a lofty-minded original thinker. ”

“ No — up to the very key-stone of the broad blue firmament ! he would say, or back to the vile earth again. . . . Yes, to succeed, I must imitate nobody, I must resemble nobody. . . . That were no easy matter; nor would it be so difficult as men are apt to believe.” Then, after speaking rather dangerously of “launching forth into space ” as a good expedient for American authors to adopt, he observes, “ True, we might not be certain of finding a new world, like Columbus, nor a new heaven, like Tycho Brahe; but we should probably encounter some phenomenon in the great unvisited moral sky and ocean,—we should at least find out . . . that there remained no new world or system to be discovered.” By way of “ launching,” Mr. Neal was resolved to discard good English. “I have the modesty to believe that in some things I am unlike all the other writers of my country, both living and dead. . . . For my own part, I do not pretend to write good English. . . . I do not, and I hope to God . . . that I never shall write what is now worshiped under the name of classical English. It is no natural language; it never was, it never will be, spoken alive or dead on this earth, and therefore ought never to be written.” In conclusion, he called for a “ Declaration of Independence in the Republic of Letters. ”

In such a declaration, Mr. Neal would have had sympathizers, doubtless, if he had made it properly, and not simply uttered an unorganized howl. As it is, we have been obliged to leave him to the proud consciousness of having done his duty in so writing as to remove all inducements to worship his style. Perhaps it is not now too late for independence; and, viewing the bulky mass of early novels, one is tempted to gratitude for the fact that the writers of them have not all turned out to be immortals.

But though they no longer threaten our happiness as classics which must be read, they have served another purpose: their presence has brought reputation, criticism, opportunity. Within ten years from the scribbling of Mr. Neal’s noisy preface, there had appeared the first volume of a man destined to create a new order of fictitious writing: it was in 1837 that the Twice-Told Tales were collected. The author of them has

shown what has been recognized as a better way of doing than “launching into space.” And, with a reverent and simple spirit always characteristic of him in touching upon other men’s creations, Mr. Hawthorne wrote, on the occasion of Cooper’s death, in 1852, a sentence which seems to me to sum up the most subtle and pathetic trait of the men we have been recalling: “ It may not be too much to hope that, in the eyes of the public at large, American literature may henceforth acquire a weight and value which have not heretofore been conceded to it: time and death have begun to hallow it.”

G. P. Lathrop.