Recent Biographies

To call the volumes in the series of American Men of Letters biographies is merely to avoid a more refined description. So far as they fulfill the avowed purpose of the series they are not biographies, but critical studies based upon biographic and historic material. The lives of literary men resolve themselves so easily into this class of literature that one may easily think the distinction a forced one ; yet it is true that the life of no man, whether of action or of letters, can fairly be read until we can reach some middle ground of judgment, which is made up of both exterior and interior views. We need to see the man as the world in which he lived saw him, and we need also to see him from the nearer cover of his home, and if possible to look upon the world from his side.

Mr. Lounsbury, in his study of Cooper,¹ started under the disadvantage of having no access to the private Cooper. The filial obedience of his children to their father’s wish has kept the shutters up in the great novelist’s house, and Mr. Lounsbury had no opportunity of knowing the man beyond what any student of literature and character might have. He has used this common opportunity, however, as no one else has used it, and by his diligence and critical acumen has really rescued the personality of Cooper from oblivion. It cannot, indeed, be said that Cooper’s best known novels excite a strong desire to become acquainted with the author. This is, in part, because the time when one reads them most enthusiastically is not the time of personal curiosity ; but the chief reason is in the nature of the works themselves, which create an interest in the object, not the subject. If there was an original of Leatherstocking, one would be zealous in his effort to get at him; but the creator of Leatherstocking has kept himself detached from the character.

We may take it almost as a piece of good fortune for Cooper that he has been compelled to wait for Mr. Lounsbury, and the generation which will first read Mr. Lounsbury’s book. Of all men, Cooper demands the judgment of a scientific mind, and that Mr. Lounsbury has ; while the temper of the reading public is favorable to a just, impartial measure of a writer who holds a conventional eminence in the annals of American literature. More than this, Cooper’s fervid, almost apoplectic patriotism stands a far better chance of generous appreciation now than it did when he was alive, because the criticism which his patriotic nature vented upon his country can be regarded in a historic, and not a personal, view.

At all events, Mr. Lounsbury has given us in detail the grounds for a clear understanding of Cooper’s nature, as it was revealed in writing, speech, and action to the public. We repeat that the understanding would probably have been corrected, had the material been possible for a disclosure of his family life; but the very scrupulousness with which Cooper secluded this forms a silent but powerful witness to the strength of his affection and the integrity of his character in the innermost relations. It is every way probable that Cooper’s injunction, forbidding his family to authorize any life of him, grew out of his sense of the sanctity of the person, reinforced by his experience of the coarseness and vulgar insolence of many of his contemporaries. They stopped short of nothing in their slander, and he who had been fighting them bitterly in life would give them no advantage by his death.

The circumstances of Cooper’s life which resulted from his literary occupation have afforded Mr. Lounsbury the largest field for his biographic activity, because they called for the most diligence in a historical student. Thus the purely literary history and the literary criticism are somewhat slight, and we are a little disappointed that Mr. Lounsbury should have contented himself with a few generalizations, all the more that these frequently afford acute comments on Cooper’s genius. As a quiet illustration of Cooper’s weaknesses, the following passage is singularly happy: “ Cooper, indeed, exemplified in his literary career a story he was in the habit of telling of one of his early adventures. While in the navy he was traveling in the wilderness bordering upon the Ontario. The party to which he belonged came upon an inn, where they were not expected. The landlord was totally unprepared, and met them with a sorrowful countenance. There was, he assured them, absolutely nothing in his house that was fit to eat. When asked what he had that was not fit to eat, he could only say, in reply, that he could furnish them with venison, pheasant, wild duck, and some fresh fish. To the astonished question of what better he supposed they could wish, the landlord meekly replied that he thought they might have wanted some salt pork. The story was truer of Cooper himself than of his innkeeper. Nature he could depict, and the wild life led in it, so that all men stood ready and eager to gaze on the pictures he drew. He chose too often to inflict upon them, instead of it, the most commonplace of moralizing, the stalest disquisitions upon manners and customs, and the driest discussions of politics and theology.”

Thus, again, he gives an insight into Cooper’s method when he savs of him, “ He had a full artistic appreciation of the impressiveness of the unknown. For in stories of this kind [sea-tales] the vagueness of the reader’s knowledge adds to the effect upon his mind, because, while he sees that mighty agencies are at work in perilous situations, his very ignorance of their exact nature deepens the feeling of awe they are of themselves calculated to produce.” We wish that here, or in the admirable summary in the last chapter, Mr. Lounsbury had made more of that essential attribute of Cooper’s power which consists in the dominance of the great forces of nature, — the sea, the storm, the woods, the prairie. It was the expression of this power in literature which made Cooper justly great, and rendered his petty slips in English ineffectual to turn men’s attention away from his work.

In connection with this, there was opportunity for an interesting study of the causes of Cooper’s popularity in Europe, and, by comparison with Irving, a criticism upon the impact of America upon European life and thought. There is a distinct reference to Cooper, we are sure, in such work as that of Châteaubriand and his school, and the philosophic succession is in the relation subsisting between Walt Whitman and the English poets of the day. The contrast between an overwrought civilization and a savagery which has physical freedom is one which has more than once left its impress upon literature.

It is, however, as we have said, upon the circumstances of Cooper’s literary life that Mr. Lounsbury has expended his greatest care; and these circumstances were of such unceasing warfare that we are really obliged to the industrious student for leading us safely through the recital of the separate conflicts. The humorous side of the fight is recognized by Mr. Lounsbury, and thus we are saved from the dreariness which might otherwise have been our fate. These wrangles, though starting often from petty occasions, frequently involved interesting questions of manners and politics, and by means of the narrative one gets a novel glimpse of society in America, when it was in its most crude and formative condition. The conflict between Cooper’s democratic principles and his aristocratic tastes is extremely interesting, and the battle of frogs and mice which we are invited to witness is much more than a burlesque upon a greater Iliad. The reader rises from Mr. Lounsbury’s book with an admiration for Cooper and an interest which lead him to regret strongly that the opportunity for an intimate acquaintance cannot be granted. The book, indeed, excites a stronger desire to know Cooper familiarly than do the novels themselves. In the absence of this familiar knowledge, we have, at any rate, the outlines of a most interesting character, and the clue to an important literary study.

To pass from Cooper to Ole Bull is to change all the circumstances of life, and yet to keep some of the common phases of character. The literary artist in the one case, the musical artist in the other, possessed an individuality in which a stout self-assertion was a very positive element. Even on the artistic side a nice comparison might be made; for Cooper was scarcely more the interpreter, through literature, of a large, forceful nature than was Ole Bull, with his violin, a singer of the wild, rushing, and impending nature of Norway. Each was a passionate patriot, though the conditions of the two countries rendered the forms which the patriotism assumed somewhat divergent. In a subtle yet entirely frank way, the great Norwegian musician is made, in the volume devoted to his memory,² to appeal to the reader, not simply through his musical genius, but through his generous Norse spirit, which was identified in a striking manner with the hopes and purposes of modern Norway. To the American, the figure of Ole Bull was that of an improvisatore, who appeared suddenly and unexpectedly in this city or that, and kept great audiences under a magic spell. A poetic haze surrounded him, which was deepened and colored by the popular identification of him with the “rapt musician ” of Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn. How many recognized at once the picture which the poet drew! —

Never was there seen here so poetic a figure, and the public were entirely indifferent to the criticisms with which Ole Bull was assailed by members of the musical profession. The charm of his presence, and of what seemed his improvisation, was acknowledged and obeyed.

It is much, therefore, that this charm returns through the paler medium of a book, and that there is added a new presentation in the vigorous, enthusiastic Norse patriot. There is a certain thinness about the life of a musician who is only or chiefly an artist, but the warm current of national feeling which pervades this history gives a robustness to the figure of the great artist. Indeed, this Norwegian spirit appears to have possessed the writer of the book; and she has so completely effaced herself in her labor that there is even an accent, so to speak, in the style of the memoir, and the reader half suspects that he is reading a translation from the Norwegian. We have rarely seen a biography so wholly reflective of the subject, and in the entire subordination of herself Mrs. Bull has achieved the highest results. Greater praise we cannot give than to say that the writer never once makes us think of her; but when the book is ended we wish to turn and thank her warmly.

The naïveté which we are so apt to find in any native expression of Northern life characterizes this book, and the reader is admitted to the most delightful knowledge of Ole Bull’s childhood, with its instinctive musical tone, to his struggling youth, and to his generous manhood. The anecdotes, which follow one another with a careless grace, are felicitous interpreters of the life ; and by examples, rather than by cold analysis, Mrs. Bull permits us to get glimpses of her husband’s nature. The accumulation of these illustrations leaves at length a fairly complete picture of the man ; and this method is especially suited to display the character of a person so unique as Ole Bull, — a man who refuses to be classified, but maintains a singular integrity. There is only one omission which we note: if more could have been said of Ole Bull’s disastrous attempt at establishing a Norwegian colony in America, the story would have had a special interest for American readers.

As it is, the book will be especially welcome here, because the musician, who was an ardent Norseman, and yet by his art and career a citizen of the world, may almost be said to have taken out his naturalization papers in this country. In spite of the disagreeable encounters which he had with individual Americans, and of the experience which he had with the country when it was in the uncouth condition which maddened Cooper, he had a poet’s vision of America, and saw here the unbounded opportunities for the realization of dreams which he had for his little Norway. The hearty faith which he had in America was repaid by the genuine admiration which Americans showed for him, and this delightful memoir, which does so much because it attempts so little, will help to keep his memory green.

It chances that the same season brings us the life of another European,³ who became even more identified with American life than Ole Bull. Francis Lieber was born in 1800, and was a boy soldier in a Prussian regiment at the battle of Waterloo, where he was severely wounded. He went afterward with some young German enthusiasts to fight the battles of Greece, but was thoroughly disenchanted, and, making his way back to Rome, had the good fortune to fall into the hands of Niebuhr, who received him into his house as tutor to his son Marcus. He returned to Berlin, but met with so much tyrannical treatment at the hands of his government, which seemed determined to regard him with suspicion, and even to deny him the education and service which were to make him a worthy citizen, that he broke away in despair from his country, and sought refuge in England. There he led a precarious life as teacher, but made a great gain in the person of his faithful wife, and after a brief stay turned his face to these shores. He opened a swimming-school in Boston; but quickly becoming known to the best men, he received aid and encouragement which led to an engagement as translator and editor in charge of the Encyclopædia Americana. This work and other literary enterprises gave him substantial reputation, and he was invited to the chair of history and political economy in the University of South Carolina. He went to South Carolina in 1835, and in spite of the uncongeniality of his surroundings — for Dr. Lieber was a man who hungered for large intellectual intercourse with men — he remained there more than twenty years. He hated slavery with a philosophical hatred, and his professional teaching was in direct opposition to the institution : but he was a German, and thus less obnoxious than a Northern citizen would have been who should have held the same views ; and he was a large man, of genial nature, who attached his pupils and associates to himself. He was, besides, recognized as an eminent man, and policy as well as personal regard forbade open hostility toward him.

He was always an exile there, however, in his own mind, and he breathed more freely and naturally when he left South Carolina, in 1857, and accepted a similar position in connection with Columbia College. He now made his residence in New York, where he remained until his death, in 1872. His life in the South, so difficult to interpret fully, brought a terrible affliction upon him ; for his eldest son died in the service of the Confederacy, a name which stood for a serious offense against history in the father’s eyes. His younger sons served in the Union army, and he himself lent his pen and counsel vigorously to the same cause.

This life, so varied and romantic, is told in the letters, which form, almost exclusively, the contents of the volume of life and letters. Mr. Perry’s work has been to select from a large and most interesting correspondence such passages as would tell Dr. Lieber’s fortunes and convey a clear idea of his political principles. In this he has succeeded; for, whatever material he may have been forced to omit, that which remains is abundantly illustrative of a great man, not only in his public aspect, but in many of the more private relations of life. In the earlier part of the work Mr. Perry has supplied context for the letters, and out of the full store of his own information has put the reader into clearer possession of the facts requisite for an intelligent apprehension of Lieber’s youth. We regret that he has not continued this excellent course throughout the volume. While the letters largely interpret themselves, the reader has a right to the directer statement of a biographer. He is left too often to guess at matters which a few words from Mr. Perry would have made intelligible. What was the mission to Europe, of which he writes in his diary, September 19, 1834? What is the “ inclosed ” to which he refers in a letter to Hillard, October 4, 1854. as filling him with bitterness of heart and a sense of utter helplessness ? Was there nothing to be said regarding the temporary estrangement from Sumner except what Dr. Lieber himself reports? What was the vote of which Sumner wrote him in 1864? Lieber appears to have held some post in connection with the archive office of the war department. Exactly what was it, and what was the nature of his work ? Did the bill, prepared by Lieber at General Garfield’s instance, to establish a record of naturalization, become a law ? These and other questions are raised by the book, and ought to have been answered in their places by Mr. Perry.

In spite of this defect, the narrative of Lieber’s life is so graphically related by the letters that we are grateful to the editor for withholding any formal biography. It was a scholar who underwent the varied experience recorded in the book, and the strange union of activity and thought renders Lieber’s life exceptional among the lives of scholars. Above all, the generous proportions of the man rise before the reader. There was something so Continental in his political speculations that they have a fascination for the student. He carried two countries in his head and his heart ; for America and Germany found ample room in his affections and interest. The great lines on which his thought moved made him a welcome companion for statesmen and publicists, while the predominant ethical cast of his mind rendered his counsel especially valuable. There was, besides, so practical a use of his principles that they did not discharge themselves in mere intellectual vapor, but were constantly employed in settling questions of expediency.

The letters which fill the volume are addressed to persons who in the main were in public life, and they are rich in illustration of our history. It gives one a curious sense of the simplicity of our early national life to find President Adams visiting Dr. Lieber’s swimmingschool, and taking a header; and one comes almost to know Lieber’s correspondents through his letters to them. The absence of mere tattle and the presence of personal references of a higher order make the volume one in which the reader will find entertainment without the loss of his own self-respect. He is not obliged, as some one has said, to shut the doors of his room when he reads it. He will get a little glimpse also of Dr. Lieber’s own generous weaknesses, and come to look with an amused feeling for the unfailing pamphlet which Dr. Lieber wrote a definite number of years ago, whenever any public question arises.

It is more to the purpose that the reader will find in these animated letters a fragmentary yet forcible presentation of those great political principles which were elaborated in Dr. Lieber’s writings, especially his Political Ethics and Civil Liberty ; and many, doubtless, will lay aside this work with a resolution to attack the somewhat formidable volumes, which represent high thoughts of the greatest value. Much that Dr. Lieber wrote has become inwrought in the political writings of other men, and his ideas are found in current speculations ; his correspondence served to make these ideas known, and he was the teacher of thousands of young men. That these ideas should be studied in the very form in which they were cast is desirable; but after all, even though the volumes may stand unopened, the life of Dr. Lieber has entered American history, and this volume will preserve the record for a grateful people.