Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/235

Rh an imaginary Englishman, in which there is an attempt to rectify prevailing European and British misconceptions of America, and to show the Americans how to be more refined, and how to suppress their self-satisfaction. A middle course pleased neither English nor Americans; nor did the criticism in Homeward Bound and Home as Found tend to pacify Cooper's fellow-countrymen. The turmoil of his later years did not prevent him from writing two of his most popular novels, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, which again disclose his conception of the forest and frontier.

Few have depicted that life with more truth and spirit than Irving. From the noisy disputes between John Bull and Jonathan we come back to him as to a contemplative traveller of some previous generation ; and in truth he carries on the tradition of Carver, and of Lewis and Clark. Returning in 1832, after an absence in Europe of seventeen years, Irving found his countrymen expecting him to vindicate his patriotism, and American letters, by some work on a native theme. Instead of directly yielding to the call, he made “a wide and varied tour," joining a Government expedition to the Arkansas River, exploring the hunting-grounds of the stealthy Pawnees, witnessing the pursuit of the buffalo, and sharing the spoils of bee-hunters. The result was A Tour on the Prairies (1835), which represents but a part of the journey. "It is," he says, “a simple narrative of every-day occurrences”; but it describes the motley life of the border with fidelity—Osage Indians, "stern and simple in garb and aspect," with "fine Roman countenances, and broad deep chests"; gaily dressed Creeks, "quite Oriental" in appearance; and “a sprinkling of trappers, hunters, half-breeds, Creoles, negroes of every hue, and all that other rabble rout of nondescript beings that keep about the frontiers, between civilized and savage life, as those equivocal birds, the bats, hover about the confines of light and darkness." Irving's next task was to write the history of John Jacob Astor's development and consolidation of the fur-trade in the North-west (after the Lewis and Clark expedition), in Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains, which appeared in 1836. The literary method here employed is characteristic of so many books of travel, beginning with Carver's, that Irving may be allowed to explain it in his own words: