Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/769

Rh AMERICAN LITERATURE 725 In this, as in other points of view, versatility and grace are his prevailing characteristics. He belonged historically to both worlds, and was equally at home in each; he reflected the quiet philosophy of the Taller and Spectator, adding to it the pathos which dims the eye of the reader over his &quot; Wife,&quot; and &quot; Widow and Son,&quot; and &quot; Broken Heart,&quot; and &quot; Pride of the Village.&quot; He started the vein of burlesque that has run through his country s literature, but under the restraints of taste and temperance that have unfortunately been often discarded. The even grace of his manner ovten leads hasty critics to do scant justice to the range of his sympathy. His manly but gentle style is at home in Spanish history, English essay, and American legend ; in the Alhambra and among the slopes of &quot; Sleepy Hollow,&quot; where, as in the famous &quot; Rip Van Winkle,&quot; we have some of the earliest models of amuse ment with grave faces and the melancholy parties of pleasure that are, under various forms of buffoonery, still typical of American humour. Associated with Irving in his Salmagundi, the name of J. K. Paulding deserves a distinct place for the humorous vigour of his character sketches, and his vivid pictures of early colonial life, in the Dutch man s Fireside and Westward Ho! where the features of the contest between the new settlers and the aborigines are brought before us in clear relief. His apologue of &quot; Bull and Jonathan,&quot; and the thirteen good farms over which they squabbled founded on Swift s Tale of a Tub pre sents us, in a satire which lies on the border of irony and a rougher form of wit, with an early American view of the relations between his own and the mother country. Some of the same themes have been handled with superior richness of illustration and force by the greatest, with one exception, of transatlantic novelists J. Fenimore Cooper (1789-18?!) a man remarkable no less for the somewhat defiant independence of his character, which led him to defend his countrymen in Europe, where he travelled from 1827-33, and to assail their foibles in America, than by the marked originality of his genius. His first consider able work, The Spy, appeared in 1821, and from its fresh treatment of a patriotic theme obtained a European reputa tion. His second, The Pioneers (1823), with a vivid repre sentation of the scenery of the author s early life, introducing for the first time his ever-recurring hero the famous Natty Bumpo, or Leather-Stocking, established his place as a new actor on a crowded stage. Then followed The Pilot, in which he first asserted his claim to an empire since indisputably made his own among novelists that of the sea; and -somewhat later The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie, in which he asserted a similar sway over the &quot; gardens of the desert &quot; and the hills of the remoter West. While abroad he wrote his Red Rover and The Bravo a graphic tale of Venice, and flung on the aspersors of his country the American in Europe. Shortly after his return he issued his satirical assault on newspaper editors and other delinquents his Homeward Bound, which led him into several actions for libel, in which he claims to have been almost invariably successful The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer ( 1840-4 1 ). The latter, perhaps the best of the Leather-Stocking series, completes the list of his great novels; to which must be added another important work The History of the American Navy published in 1839. There is a certain severity about Cooper s genius, showing itself in a hardness in his style, which restricts the range of _ his readers. He wastes perhaps too many words on descriptions, is exhaustive where he might have been suggestive, and his plots are apt to be deficient in interest The Red Rover conspicuously excepted. But, deducting the echoes of Scott, to which we have referred, he is American to the core ; he needs no slang or affectation to establish his originality, but moves on his own way with something like disdain of comment. His best descriptions as, for example, those of the prairie on fire, of the &quot;Ariel among the shoals, of the capture of the whale and the panther in The Pioneers, of the last sea-fight in The Rover, of the regatta in The Bravo are unsurpassed. His ships move over the seas like things of life. His hunters traverse the prairies with a sense of possession. His best characters are few ; but Natty Bumpo, Bob Yarn, Nightingale, Long Tom Coffin, Hetty Hunter, and Brand Merideth are undying creations. The earliest American romancer of note, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), Brockdei who came before the world (1797) in Alcuin, a Dialogue Brown. on the Rights of Women (first of a mob of tracts on the same theme), set the example on his side of the Atlantic of that love of the anomalous, fantastic, and horrible, repre sented on our own by Beckford, Walpole, and Godwin, and later by Mrs Radcliffe and Mrs Shelley. His main works Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Iluntly are unmistakably the productions of a man of genius. None are wanting in passages of thrilling interest, striking situations, and subtle analysis of character. But they dwell too prevailingly on the night-side of nature on such themes as insanity and somnambulism, and all the repulsive anatomy of mental disease. Brown s account of the yellow fever in Arthur Mervyn may be compared with the corresponding narratives in Thucydides, Lucretius, and Defoe; and Wieland s confession of the murder of his wife (a favourite subject of Western fiction) is hideously vivid ; but the author s plots as a whole are wanting in method, his bursts of passion are dulled by intervening tediousness, and his style deformed by pedantic circumlocutions. Brown must be credited with considerable originality of con ception, and blamed for introducing a morbid vein of thox:ght. His influence is apparent in two novels of Richard Dana to whom we have before referred Tom Thornton and Paul Felton, in which a more graceful style is employed with almost equal vigour to illustrate similar monstrosities of character on the basis of incidents almost equally unnatural. Of the same school are many of the sketches of Charles F. Hoffmann, as &quot;Ben Blower s Story &quot;Hoffman of being immured in a steam-boiler, and the &quot; Flying Head ;&quot; but alongside of these are others, as his &quot; Winter in the West,&quot; &quot;Romance of the Mohawks,&quot; and &quot;Adiron- dacks,&quot; that are steeped in the fresh atmosphere of the green fields and hills. Hoffmann is also the author of three deservedly popular songs, &quot; Myrtle and Steel,&quot; &quot;Sparkling and Bright,&quot; and &quot;Rosalie Clare.&quot; The influence of those writers, along with that of a profounder analyst, the French Balzac, is apparent in the works ofp oe. the most morbid genius the modern world of letters has known. In the regions of the strangely terrible, remotely phantastic, and ghastly, Edgar Allan Poe reigns supreme. For clearness of style, aptness of illustration, and subtilty of thought, he distances in this field all his predecessors except Balzac, who in the mental dissecting-room is his only master. But while the Frenchman deals with, anomalous realities, the power of the American consists in making unrealities appear natural. One of his great charms is his perpetual interest. Confining his imagina tion within limited bounds of space, he is never dull, save in his acridly jealous criticisms and miserable attempts at humour. Criticism would hardly strike a line from the longest and perhaps the most thrilling of his narratives, that of &quot; Arthur Gordon Pym.&quot; In fictitious verisimilitude it io only equalled by De Quincey s &quot;Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars.&quot; With the &quot;Adventure of Hans Pfaall&quot; in his balloon, and the &quot; Descent into the Maelstrom,&quot; it is the obvious source of the ingenious pseudo-scientific romances of Jules Verne, which have lately attained so ,-ide a popularity. Poe s most hideous tales, as &quot; Thou art the