History of American Literature Part 12

KNICKERBOCKER'S HISTORY OF NEW YORK.--The New York _Evening Post_ for December 28, 1809, said: "This work was found in the chamber of Mr.

Diedrich Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind." This disguise, however, was too thin to deceive the public, and the work was soon popularly called Irving's _Knickerbocker's History of New York_.

Two hundred years before its publication, Hendrick Hudson, an explorer in the service of Holland, had sailed into New York Bay and discovered Manhattan Island and the Hudson River for the Dutch. They founded the city of New Amsterdam and held it until the English captured it in 1664. Irving wrote the history of this settlement during the Dutch occupation. He was led to choose this subject, because, as he tells us, few of his fellow citizens were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam, and because the subject, "poetic from its very obscurity," was especially available for an American author, since it gave him a chance to adorn it with legend and fable. He states that his object was "to embody the traditions of our city in an amusing form" and to invest it "with those imaginative and whimsical a.s.sociations so seldom met with in our country, but which live like charms and spells about the cities of the old world."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OFFICIAL WEIGHT]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A ONE-PIPE JOURNEY]

Irving achieved his object and produced an entertaining compound of historical fact, romantic sentiment, exaggeration, and humor. He shows us the contemplative Dutchmen on their first voyage in the _Half Moon_, sailing into New York Bay, prohibited by Hudson "from wearing more than five jackets and six pair of breeches." We see the scrupulously "honest"

Dutch traders buying furs from the Indians, using an invariable scale of avoirdupois weights, a Dutchman's hand in the scale opposite the furs weighing one pound, his foot two pounds. We watch the puzzled Indians trying to account for the fact that the largest bundle of furs never weighed more than two pounds. We attend a council of burghers at Communipaw, called to devise means to protect their town from an English expedition. While they are thoughtfully smoking, the English sail by without seeing the smoke-enveloped town. Irving shows us the Dutchmen estimating their distances and time by the period consumed in smoking a pipe,--Hartford, Connecticut, being two hundred pipes distant. He allows us to watch a housewife emptying her pocket in her search for a wooden ladle and filling two corn baskets with the contents. He takes us to a tea party attended by "the higher cla.s.ses or n.o.blesse, that is to say such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons," where we can see the damsels knitting their own woolen stockings and the vrouws serving big apple pies, bushels of doughnuts, and pouring tea out of a fat Delft teapot. He draws this picture of Wouter Van Twiller, Governor of New Amsterdam:--

"The person of this ill.u.s.trious old gentleman was formed and proportioned as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circ.u.mference. His head was a perfect sphere....

"His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WOUTER VAN TWILLER]

THE SKETCH BOOK GROUP.--The only one of his productions to which Irving gave the name of _The Sketch Book_ was finished in 1820, the year in which Scott's _Ivanhoe_, Keats's _Eve of St. Agnes_, and Sh.e.l.ley's _Prometheus Unbound_ appeared. Of the same general order as _The Sketch Book_ are Irving's _Bracebridge Hall_ (1822) and _Tales of a Traveller_ (1824). These volumes all contain short stories, essays, or sketches, many of which are suggestive of Addison's _Spectator_. _The Sketch Book_ is the most famous of Irving's works of this cla.s.s. While it contains some excellent essays or descriptions, such as those ent.i.tled _Westminster Abbey_ and _Stratford-on-Avon_, the book lives to-day because of two short stories, _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. These were not equaled by Addison, and they have not been surpa.s.sed by any English writers of the nineteenth century. Both stories take their rise from the "Knickerbocker Legend," and they are thoroughly American in coloring and flavor, even if they did happen to be written in England. No story in our literature is better known than that of Rip Van Winkle watching Hendrick Hudson and his ghostly crew playing ninepins in the Catskill Mountains and quaffing the magic liquor which caused him to sleep for twenty years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ICHABOD CRANE]

For nearly one hundred years Ichabod Crane's courtship of Katrina Van Ta.s.sel, in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, has continued to amuse its readers. The Indian summer haze is still resting on Sleepy Hollow, our American Utopia, where we can hear the quail whistling, see the brook bubbling along among alders and dwarf willows, over which amber clouds float forever in the sky; where the fragrant buckwheat fields breathe the odor of the beehive; where the slapjacks are "well b.u.t.tered and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Ta.s.sel," where a greeting awaits us from the sucking pigs already roasted and stuffed with pudding; where the very tea tables of the Dutch housewives welcome us with loads of crisp crumbling crullers, honey cakes, and "the whole family of cakes," surrounded by pies, preserves, roast chicken, bowls of cream, all invested with a halo from the spout of the motherly Dutch teapot.

_The Alhambra_, a book of tales of the old Moorish palace in Granada, Spain, has been aptly termed "The Spanish Sketch Book." This has preserved the romance of departed Moorish glory almost as effectively as the Knickerbocker sketches and stories have invested the early Dutch settlers of New York with something like Homeric immortality. A traveler in Spain writes of _The Alhambra_: "Not Ford, nor Murray, nor Hare has been able to replace it. The tourist reads it within the walls it commemorates as conscientiously as the devout read Ruskin in Florence." [Footnote: Introduction to Pennell's ill.u.s.trated edition of _The Alhambra_.]

In his three works, _The Sketch Book_, _The Tales of a Traveller_, and _The Alhambra_, Irving proved himself the first American master of the short tale or sketch, yet he is not the father of the modern short story, which aims to avoid every sentence unless it directly advances the narrative or heightens the desired impression. His description and presentation of incident do not usually tend to one definite goal, after the fashion theoretically prescribed by the art of the modern short story. The author of a modern short tale would need to feel the dire necessity of recording the sage observation of a Dutch housewife, that "ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves." Irving, however, in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, has sufficient leisure to make this observation and to stop to listen to "the pensive whistle of the quail," or to admire "great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty puddings."

Some have even proposed that his stories be called "narrative-essays," but they show a step beyond Addison in the evolution of the short story because they contain less essay and more story. It is true that Irving writes three pages of essay before beginning the real story in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, but the most of this preliminary matter is very interesting description. The quiet valley with its small brook, the tapping woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the drowsy shade of the trees, the spots haunted by the headless Hessian,--all fascinate us and provide an atmosphere which the modern short-story teller too seldom secures. The novice in modern short-story writing should know at the outset that it takes more genius to succeed with a story like _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ than with a tale where the writer relies on the more strait-laced narration of events to arouse interest.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.--Of _The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus_ (1828), Irving said "it cost me more toil and trouble than all my other productions." While the method of scientific historical study has completely changed since his time, no dry-as-dust historian has yet equaled Irving in presenting the human side of Columbus, his ideals, his dreams, and his mastery of wind and wave and human nature in the greatest voyage of the ages. Others have written of him as a man who once lived but who died so very long ago that he now has no more life than the portraits of those old masters who made all their figures look like paralytics. Irving did not write this work as if he were imagining a romance. He searched for his facts in all the musty records which he could find in Spain, but he then remembered that they dealt with a living, enthusiastic human being, sometimes weak, and sometimes invested with more than the strength of all the generations that had died without discovering the New World. It was this work which, more than any other, brought Irving the degree of D.C.L.

from Oxford University. And yet, when he appeared to take his degree, the undergraduates of Oxford voiced the judgment of posterity by welcoming him with shouts of "Diedrich Knickerbocker!" "Ichabod Crane!" "Rip Van Winkle!"

_The Conquest of Granada_ (1829) is a thrilling narrative of the subjugation by Ferdinand and Isabella of the last kingdom of the Moors in Spain. In this account, royal leaders, chivalrous knights, single-handed conflicts, and romantic a.s.saults make warfare seem like a carnival instead of a tragedy.

The life of _Oliver Goldsmith_ (1849) ranks among the best biographies yet written by an American, not because of its originality, but for its exquisitely sympathetic portraiture of an English author with whom Irving felt close kinship.

His longest work, the _Life of George Washington_ (1855-1859), lacks the imaginative enthusiasm of youth, but it does justice to "the magnificent patience, the courage to bear misconstruction, the unfailing patriotism, the practical sagacity, the level balance of judgment combined with the wisest toleration, the dignity of mind, and the lofty moral nature," which made George Washington the one man capable of leading a forlorn army in the Revolution, of presiding over the destinies of the young Republic, and of taking a sure place among the few great heroes of all time. This work is also an almost complete history of the Revolutionary War. It is unfortunate that the great length of this _Life_ (eight volumes) has resulted in such a narrowing of its circle of readers.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Washington Irving is the earliest American whose most popular works are read for pure pleasure and not for some historical or educational significance. His most striking qualities are humor and restrained sentiment. The work by which he will be longest known is his creation of the "Knickerbocker Legend" in the _History of New York_ and his two most famous short stories, _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. Although he is not the father of the modern short story, which travels like an airship by the shortest line to its destination, he is yet one of the great nineteenth-century story tellers. Some of his essays or papers, like _Westminster Abbey_, _Stratford-on-Avon_, and _Christmas_ do not suffer by comparison with Addison's writings.

Much of Irving's historical work and many of his essays do not show great depth or striking originality. He did some hack writing, dealing with our great West, but the work by which he is best known is so original that no other American writers can for a moment compare with him in his special field. He gave us our own Homeric age and peopled it with Knickerbockers, who are as entertaining as Achilles, Priam, or Circe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IRVING'S GRAVE IN THE SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY]

His best work is a product of the romantic imagination, but his romanticism is of a finer type than that of Charles Brockden Brown and the English Gothic school (p. 88), for Irving's fondness for Addison and Goldsmith, in conjunction with his own keen sense of humor, taught him restraint, balance, and the adaptation of means to ends.

Irving has an unusual power of investing his subjects with the proper atmosphere. In this he resembles the greatest landscape painters. If he writes of early settlers of New York, we are in a Dutch atmosphere. If he tells the legends of the Alhambra, the atmosphere is Moorish. If he takes us to the Hudson or the Catskills or Sleepy Hollow or Granada, he adds to our artistic enjoyment by enveloping everything in its own peculiar atmosphere.

His clear, simple, smooth prose conceals its artistic finish so well and serves as the vehicle for so much humor, that readers often pa.s.s a long time in his company without experiencing fatigue. His style has been criticized for lack of vigor and for resemblance to Goldsmith's. Irving's style, however, is his own, and it is the style natural to a man of his placid, artistic temperament.

America takes special pride in Washington Irving, because he was the first author to invest her brief history with the enduring fascination of romance. We shall the better appreciate our debt to him, if we imagine that some wizard has the power to subtract from our literature the inimitable Knickerbocker, Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, and our national romantic river, the storied Hudson.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1789-1851

[Ill.u.s.tration: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER]

YOUTH.--Cooper's place in American literature is chiefly based on his romantic stories of the pioneer and the Indian. We have seen how Captain John Smith won the ear of the world by his early story of Indian adventure, how Charles Brockden Brown in _Edgar Huntly_ deliberately selected the Indian and the life of the wilderness as good material for an American writer of romance. Cooper chose these very materials and used them with a success attained by no other writer. Let us see how his early life fitted him to write of the Indian, the pioneer, the forest, and the sea.

He was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, the year made memorable by the French Revolution. While he was still an infant, the Cooper family moved to the southeastern sh.o.r.e of Otsego Lake and founded the village of Cooperstown, at the point where the Susquehanna River furnishes an outlet for the lake. In this romantic place he pa.s.sed the most impressionable part of his boyhood.

At the close of the eighteenth century, Cooperstown was one of the outposts of civilization. Few clearings had been made in the vast mysterious forests, which appealed so deeply to the boy's imagination, and which still sheltered deer, bear, and Indians. The most vivid local story which his young ears heard was the account of the Cherry Valley ma.s.sacre, which had taken place a few miles from Cooperstown only eleven years before he was born. Cooper himself felt the fascination of the trackless forests before he communicated it to his readers.

He entered Yale in 1802, but he did not succeed in eradicating his love of outdoor life and of the unfettered habits of the pioneer, and did not remain to graduate. The faculty dismissed him in his junior year. It was unfortunate that he did not study more and submit to the restraints and discipline of regular college life; for his prose often shows in its carelessness of construction and lack of restraint his need for that formal discipline which was for the moment so grievous to him.

After Cooper had left college, his father decided to have him prepare for the navy. As there was no naval academy, he adopted the usual course of having the boy serve a year on a merchant vessel. After this apprenticeship, Cooper entered the navy as a midshipman. From such experiences he gained sufficient knowledge of the ocean and ships to enable him to become the author of some of our best tales of the sea. He resigned from the navy, however, in 1811, when he married.

BECOMES AN AUTHOR.--Cooper had reached the age of thirty without even attempting to write a book. In 1820 he remarked one day to his wife that he thought he could write a better novel than the one which he was then reading to her. She immediately challenged him to try, and he promptly wrote the novel called _Precaution_. He chose to have this deal with English life because the critics of his time considered American subjects commonplace and uninteresting. As he knew nothing of English life at first hand, he naturally could not make the pages of _Precaution_ vivid with touches of local color.

This book was soon forgotten, and Cooper might never have written another, had not some sensible friends insisted that it was his patriotic duty to make American subjects fashionable. A friend related to him the story of a spy of Westchester County, New York, who during the Revolution served the American cause with rare fidelity and sagacity. Cooper was then living in this very county, and, being attracted by the subject, he soon completed the first volume of _The Spy_, which was at once printed. As he still doubted, however, whether his countrymen would read "a book that treated of their own familiar interests," he delayed writing the second volume for several months. When he did start to write it, his publisher feared that it might be too long to pay, so before Cooper had thought out the intervening chapters, he wrote the last chapter and had it printed and paged to satisfy the publisher. When _The Spy_ was published in 1821, it immediately sold well in America, although such was the bondage to English standards of criticism that many who read the book hesitated to express an opinion until they had heard the verdict from England. When the English received the book, however, they fairly devoured it, and it became one of the most widely read tales of the early nineteenth century. Harvey Birch, the hero of the story, is one of the great characters of our early fiction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN]

Cooper now adopted writing as a profession. In less than thirty years, he wrote more than thirty romances, in most cases of two volumes each. When he went to Europe in 1826, the year of the publication of _The Last of the Mohicans_, he found that his work was as well known abroad as at home. Sir Walter Scott, who met Cooper in Paris, mentions in his diary for November 6, 1826, a reception by a French princess, and adds the note, "Cooper was there, so the American and Scotch lions took the field together."

LATER YEARS.--After Cooper's return from Europe in 1833, he spent the most of the remaining seventeen years of his life in writing books at his early home, known as Otsego Hall, in Cooperstown. Here in the summer of 1837 there occurred an unfortunate incident which embittered the rest of his life and for a while made him the most unpopular of American authors. Some of his townspeople cut down one of his valuable trees and otherwise misused the picnic grounds on a part of his estate fronting the lake. When he remonstrated, the public denounced him and ordered his books removed from the local library. He then forbade the further use of his grounds by the public. Many of the newspapers throughout the state misrepresented his action, and he foolishly sued them for libel. From that time the press persecuted him. He sued the Albany _Evening Journal_, edited by Thurlow Weed, and received four hundred dollars damage. Weed thereupon wrote in the New York _Tribune_:--

"The value of Mr. Cooper's character has been judicially determined. It is worth exactly four hundred dollars."

Cooper promptly sued _The Tribune_, and was awarded two hundred dollars. In the heat of this controversy Thurlow Weed incautiously opened Cooper's _The Pathfinder_, which had just appeared, and sat up all night to finish the book. During the progress of these suits, Cooper unfortunately wrote a novel, _Home as Found_, satirizing, from a somewhat European point of view, the faults of his countrymen. A friend, trying to dissuade him from publishing such matter, wrote, "You lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats, as you do." Cooper, however, published the book in 1838, and then there was a general rush to attack him. A critic of his _History of the Navy of the United States of America_ (1839), a work which is still an authority for the time of which it treats, abused the book and made reflections on Cooper's veracity. The author brought suit for libel, and won his case in a famous trial in which he was his own lawyer. These unfortunate incidents, which would have been avoided by a man like Benjamin Franklin, diminished the circulation of Cooper's books in America during the rest of his life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUE OF LEATHERSTOCKING OVERLOOKING OTSEGO LAKE]

Even on his deathbed he thought of the unjust criticism from which he had suffered, and asked his family not to aid in the preparation of any account of his life. He died in 1851 at the age of sixty-two, and was buried at Cooperstown. Lounsbury thus concludes an excellent biography of this great writer of romance:--

"America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper.... But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature and no more heroic soul."

GREATEST ROMANCES.--Cooper's greatest achievement is the series known as _The Leatherstocking Tales_. These all have as their hero Leatherstocking, a pioneer variously known as Hawkeye, _La Longue Carabine_ (The Long Rifle), and Natty b.u.mppo. A statue of this great original creation of American fiction now overlooks Otsego Lake. Leatherstocking embodies the fearlessness, the energy, the rugged honesty, of the worthiest of our pioneers, of those men who opened up our vast inland country and gave it to us to enjoy. Ulysses is no more typically Grecian than Leatherstocking is American.

_The Leatherstocking Tales_ are five in number. The order in which they should be read to follow the hero from youth to old age is as follows:--

[Footnote: The figures in parenthesis refer to the date of publication.]

_The Deerslayer; or The First War Path_ (1841).

_The Last of the Mohicans; a Narrative of 1757_ (1826).

_The Pathfinder; or the Inland Sea_ (1840).