In the second place, inextricably connected with our own. Now, as the American character of the nineteenth century has declared itself, few of its æsthetic traits are more marked than eager delight in olden splendors. Such delight, of course, has characterized the nineteenth century in Europe as well as among ourselves. A modern Londoner, however, who can walk in a forenoon from Westminster Abbey to the Temple Church and so to the Tower, can never dream what such monuments mean to an imagination which has grown up amid no grander relics of antiquity than King's Chapel or Independence Hall. Americans can still feel the romance even of modern London or Paris; and to this day there is no spot where our starved craving for picturesque traces of a human past can be more profusely satisfied than in Spain. No words have ever expressed this satisfaction more sincerely or more spontaneously than the fantastic stories of old Spain which Irving has left us. Irving's Delight in the Past. Biography. Summary. His later work was chiefly biographical. Both his Goldsmith and his Washington are written with all his charm and with vivid imagination. Irving, however, was no trained scholar. He was far even from the critical habit of the New England historians, and further still from such learning as now makes our best history something like exact science. He was almost as anxious to write Charmingly as to write truly; but in itself this desire was beautifully true. Throughout Irving wrote as well as he could, and he knew how to write better than almost any contemporary Englishman. Our hasty glance at Irving's literary career has shown what this first American who established a lasting European reputation really accomplished. His greatest merits are artistic conscience and purity of style. If we ask ourselves, however, what he used his style to express, we find in the first place a quaintly extravagant humor growing more delicate with the years; next we find romantic sentiment set forth in the literary manner of a past English generation whose temper had been not romantic, but classical; then we find a deep delight in the splendors of a romantic past; and finally we come to pleasantly vivid romantic biographies. Clearly Irving had no message; he was animated by no profound sense of the mystery of existence. All he did was to set forth delicate, refined, romantic sentiment in delicate, refined, classic style. This was the first recognized literary revelation of the New World to the Old. In a previous generation, Edwards had made American theology a fact for all Calvinists to reckon with. The political philosophers of the Revolution had made our political and legal thought matters which even the Old World could hardly neglect. When we come to pure literature, however, in which America should at last express to Europe what life meant to men of artistic sensitiveness living under the conditions of our new and emancipated society, what we find is little more than greater delicacy of form than existed in contemporary England. Irving is certainly a permanent literary figure. What makes him so is not novelty or power, but charming refinement. Life. III JAMES FENIMORE COOPER REFERENCES WORKS: Novels (Mohawk Edition), 32 vols., New York: Putnam, 1896. Cooper's other works are out of print; for their titles, see the bibliographies mentioned below. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: T. R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper, Boston: Houghton, 1882 (AML); W. B. S. Clymer, James Fenimore Cooper, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1900. (B.B.) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 59-63; Lounsbury's Cooper, 290–299. SELECTIONS: Carpenter, 153-171; Duyckinck, II, 113-117; *Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 138–183. IN 1820, American literature, so far as it has survived, consisted of the novels of Brockden Brown, then ten years dead, and of Irving's Sketch Book, which had begun to appear the year before. Apart from these works, what had been produced in this country was obviously so imitative as to express only a sense on the part of our numerous writers that they ought to copy the eminent authors of England. In 1820 appeared the first work of a new novelist, soon to attain not only permanent reputation in America, but also general European recognition. This was JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851). He was born in New Jersey. When he was about a year old his father, a gentleman of means, migrated to that region in Central New York where Cooperstown still preserves his name. Here the father founded the settlement where for the rest of his life he main tained a position of almost feudal superiority. Here, in a country so wild as to be almost primeval, Cooper was brought up. Before he was fourteen years old he went to Yale College; but some academic trouble brought his career there to a premature end. The years between 1806 and 1810 he spent at sea, first on a merchant vessel, afterwards as an officer in the navy. In 1811, having married a lady of the Tory family of De Lancey, he resigned his commission. Novel. After several years of inconspicuous life-he was living at the time in the country near New York City-he read some now forgotten English novel; and stirred by the notion that he could write a better, he rapidly produced the novel Precaution (1820). This was a tale of life in Eng- His First land, of which at the time Cooper knew very little. It had a measure of success, being mistaken for the anonymous work of some English woman of fashion. In the following year Cooper produced The Spy, an historical novel of the American Revolution, then less than fifty years past. In 1823 came The Pioneers, the first in publication of his Leather-Stocking tales; and just at the beginning of 1824 appeared The Pilot, the first of his stories of the sea. The Last of the Mohicans, perhaps his masterpiece, was published in 1826. In that year he went abroad, where he remained for seven years. He then came home, and thereafter resided mostly on the ancestral estate at Cooperstown. Peculiarities of temper kept him throughout his later years in chronic quarrels with the public, with his neighbors, and with almost everybody but some of his personal friends, who remained strongly attached to him. At the age of thirty, as we have seen, Cooper had never |