Part 6

In _The Headsman_ we follow the story of a highborn girl who has given her heart to a young soldier of fortune only to discover in him the son of that most loathed of beings, the official executioner of Berne. The office is hereditary, and were the youth’s real condition known the odious duties would in time fall on him. It is a foregone conclusion that Sigismund shall be found to be of noble birth, and Adelheid’s reward proportioned to the greatness of her soul. This is but one thread of a fairly complicated and romantic plot. The interest of the narrative is well sustained and the denouement unanticipated. None of these three romances is, strictly speaking, a novel of purpose, and the least attractive deserves friendlier critical treatment than is commonly accorded it.

In the same group may be placed _Mercedes of Castile_, which, if it cannot hold the attention by reason of the loves of Don Luis de Bobadilla and Mercedes, and the fate of the unfortunate Ozema, may be read (by whoever can take history well diluted with fiction) for the story of Columbus’s first voyage.

_The Monikins_ contrasts the ways of men with the ways of monkeys, much to the disadvantage of men. Really it is no duller than some of the professed satire of the present day; it is merely longer and more desperately serious.

_Homeward Bound_ and _Home as Found_ form two parts of a single novel. The satire of the first part is forgotten in the movement of the narrative, the sea-chase, the wreck off the African coast, the fight with the Arabs. The second part is a diatribe on New York and Cooperstown in particular, and America in general. The chief characters, the Effinghams, mean well, but ‘they have an unfortunate manner,’ and their disagreeable traits are not so piquant as to be entertaining. Steadfast Dodge, the editor, is almost as unreal as the Effinghams. Captain Truck is a genuine brother man, resourceful as master of the ‘Montauk,’ and not helpless when figuring (without his connivance) as a great English author, at Mrs. Legend’s literary soirée.

Horatio Greenough had the ‘Effingham’ books in mind when he wrote to Cooper: ‘I think you lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats as you do.’

VIII

TRAVELS, HISTORY, POLITICAL WRITINGS AND LATEST NOVELS

Cooper was a giant of productivity. Some brief comment has been made on twenty-three of his novels. It is impossible in the limits of this study to do much beyond giving the titles of his remaining books.

_The History of the Navy of the United States of America_ begins with ‘the earliest American sea-fight’ (May, 1636), when John Gallop in a sloop of twenty tons captured a pinnace manned by thieving Indians, and closes with the War of 1812. The noteworthy features of the book are accuracy, independence, severity of style, and freedom from spread-eagleism. The brief _Chronicles of Cooperstown_, written in a plain way, has the natural interest attaching to the subject and the author.

_A Letter to his Countrymen_, partly autobiographical, is absorbing in its bitter earnestness. _The Travelling Bachelor_ purports to be the letters of a cosmopolite, a man of fifty, to various members of his club, recounting his travels in the United States. The book is historical, statistical, argumentative. It treats of government, manners, art, literature, of fashions in dress and of peculiarities of speech. As an attempt on the part of a man of strong prejudices to take an objective view of his own country, it is singularly interesting. Were its seven hundred closely printed pages lightened with humor or relieved by any grace of expression, _The Travelling Bachelor_ would be a vastly entertaining work.

_The American Democrat_ is a collection of short essays, forty-five in number, on the American republic, liberty, parties, public opinion, property, the press, demagogues, the decay of manners, individuality, aristocrat and democrat, pronunciation, slavery, etc., etc. The tone of the comments is intentionally censorious, and often proves exasperating. Having been long absent from America, Cooper found himself to a certain degree ‘in the situation of a foreigner in his own country.’ On this account he was prepared to note peculiarities. Praise and blame are mingled. _The American Democrat_ sets forth high ideals, as may be seen, for example, in the suggestive essay on party. The book is courageous but wanting in suavity.

_Sketches of Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_, comprising ten volumes in the original editions, are studies of Continental and English life. They contain a multitude of spirited, pungent, and true observations. Lacking the ‘antiseptic of style,’ the books are no longer read.

Between 1845 and 1850 Cooper published eight novels. Three of the eight, _Satanstoe_, _The Chainbearer_, and _The Redskins_, are narratives supposed to be drawn from the ‘Littlepage Manuscripts.’ The first is not only the best, but is also one of the most genial of all Cooper’s novels. Corny Littlepage had attractive friends, such as the mettlesome youth Guert Ten Eyck, a splendid specimen of the free-handed, royally generous Dutch-American. Jason Newcome, on the other hand, embodies Cooper’s never latent hostility to New England. The pictures of old days in New York and Albany are brilliant and highly finished, and the encounter with the Indians in Cooper’s most spirited vein.

_The Crater_ is a history of the adventures of Mark Woolston of Bristol, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who was shipwrecked on a volcanic island in the Pacific, and with the able seaman Bob Betts set himself to solve the problem of existence. What with gardening, poultry-raising, boat-building, tempests, earthquakes, exploration of neighboring islands, colonization, savages, and pirates, the book resolves itself into one of the infinite variations of _Robinson Crusoe_. After twenty-nine chapters of this sort of thing comes an absurd and irrelevant conclusion.

All the later novels, _Jack Tier_, _The Sea Lions_, _Oak Openings_, and _The Ways of the Hour_, are hard reading, yet the least happy of them has passages betraying the master’s hand. _The Sea Lions_ stands out by virtue of the powerful descriptions of an Antarctic winter; but neither Captain Spike’s mission to the gulf, nor the revelation of fat, profane Jack’s true station and sex, nor yet the malapropisms of Mrs. Budd (she would say ‘It blew what they call a Hyson in the Chinese seas’), can make _Jack Tier_ more than tolerable.

* * * * *

Cooper’s greatest achievements were his stories of the sea and the forest. His real creations are sailors, backwoodsmen, old soldiers, and Indians. Whether his red men are conceived in the spirit of modern ethnological science can matter but little now. They are neither so close to Chateaubriand’s idealized savage, nor so far from the real Indian as is generally believed. That Cooper had no skill in representing contemporary society is plain enough; but the failure of _Home as Found_ need not have been as complete as it was. Haste and anger must bear the blame of that literary disaster. Where he deals with manners of the past, as in _Satanstoe_, he is often most felicitous. With his novel of _The Bravo_ he was in line with the Romantic movement. How far he comprehended that movement, or was influenced by it, is a more intricate problem.

Modern literature can show but few authors more popular than Cooper. He has been praised extravagantly; but the fact that Miss Mitford thought him as good as Scott ought not to prejudice us against him. And he has been damned without measure; but over against Mark Twain’s unchivalrous attack on his great fellow countryman may be set the royally generous tributes of Balzac and of Dumas.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Judge Cooper’s _A Guide in the Wilderness_, Dublin, 1810, was reprinted in 1897 with an introduction by J. F. Cooper [the Younger], throwing much light on the manners of the times and the character of his ancestor.

[8] One of the most extraordinary of the suits arose from criticism of the _Naval History_. Cooper had refused to take the popular side of a heated controversy and to join in assailing Elliott, Perry’s second in command at the Battle of Lake Erie. The suit, against Stone of the ‘Commercial Advertiser,’ was settled by arbitration, and in Cooper’s favor. Lounsbury’s _Cooper_, pp. 200–230.

[9] Park Theatre, New York, March, 1822.

[10] Burton’s Theatre, New York, June, 1850.

IV

_George Bancroft_

REFERENCES:

=W. M. Sloane=: ‘George Bancroft in Society, in Politics, in Letters,’ ‘The Century Magazine,’ January, 1887.

=S. S. Green=: ‘George Bancroft,’ _Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society_, April 29, 1891.

=A. McF. Davis=: ‘George Bancroft,’ _Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences_, vol. xxvi, 1891.

I

HIS LIFE

The Bancrofts have been settled in America since 1632. Among the historian’s ancestors were men of marked traits of character. Bancroft’s grandfather, a farmer of Essex County, Massachusetts, had such a reputation for piety and judgment that he was called on to act as an umpire in the bitter dispute between Jonathan Edwards and his church at Northampton.

The father of the historian, Aaron Bancroft, a pioneer of American Unitarianism, was for fifty years pastor of the Second Church of Worcester. His distinguishing trait was ‘a deep-seated abhorrence of anything like mental slavery.’ He was an ardent student of American history and the author of an _Essay on the Life of George Washington_ (1807), a popular book in its own day and well worth the reading in ours. George Bancroft thought ‘that his own inclination toward history was due very much to the influence of his father.’

There is a story (probably apocryphal) that in his youth Aaron Bancroft fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill. During Shays’s Rebellion, when the insurgent officers proposed to quarter themselves in private houses at Worcester, the minister guarded his own door and told a group of officers who approached that they were rebels, and that ‘they would obtain no entrance to his house but by violence.’ The officers immediately rode away.

George Bancroft was born at Worcester on October 3, 1800. He prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and was graduated at Harvard in 1817. Edward Everett, the newly appointed professor of Greek, who was then studying at Göttingen, urged President Kirkland to send some graduate of marked powers to Germany with a view to his preparing himself to teach at Harvard. The choice fell on Bancroft. He spent two years at Göttingen and obtained his doctorate. Among his professors were Heeren, Dissen, Eichhorn, and Blumenbach; Heeren’s influence was the most profound and the most lasting. His range of studies was wide, including, as it did, history, German literature, Greek philosophy, natural history, Scripture interpretation, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian.

From Göttingen, Bancroft went to Berlin, where he heard the lectures of Savigny, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, and made the acquaintance of Voss, W. von Humboldt, and F. A. Wolf. He had the fortune to meet Goethe once at Jena, and again at Weimar. After leaving Berlin he studied for a time at Heidelberg under Von Schlosser. In Paris he met Cousin, Constant, and A. von Humboldt. He travelled in Switzerland and Italy, and spent the winter of 1821–22 at Rome, where he made the acquaintance of Niebuhr and Bunsen. At Leghorn the following spring he was one of a party of Americans who gathered to meet Byron when the poet visited the ‘Constitution,’ the flagship of the American squadron. Bancroft afterwards called on Byron at Montenero, and was presented to the Countess Guiccioli.

In the fall of 1822 Bancroft became a tutor of Greek at Harvard. The following year he resigned his position, not to enter the ministry in accordance with his father’s wishes, but to become a schoolmaster. He joined his friend, Joseph G. Cogswell (the directing spirit in the enterprise), in founding a school for boys at Round Hill, Northampton. Emerson, then a youth of twenty, heard Bancroft preach at the ‘New South’ in Boston soon after his return from Germany, and was ‘delighted with his eloquence.’ ‘He needs a great deal of cutting and pruning, but we think him an infant Hercules.’ Emerson deplored Bancroft’s new departure, ‘because good schoolmasters are as plenty as whortleberries, but good ministers assuredly are not, and Bancroft might be one of the best.’

On the eve of leaving Cambridge, Bancroft published, under the title of _Poems_, a volume of correct if not inspired verse. At Northampton his literary activity found more sober expression in text-books, in papers for the ‘North American Review’ and Walsh’s ‘American Quarterly,’ and in a careful translation of Heeren’s _Politics of Ancient Greece_ (1824). At the celebration of Independence Day at Northampton in 1826, Bancroft was the orator. He chanted the present glory of America, predicted a golden future, and declared his faith in a ‘determined uncompromising democracy.’ These notes were to be heard again and often in his great history.

Round Hill, though prosperous in many ways, was not a success financially, nor were the partners wholly congenial. After seven years Bancroft withdrew from the school and began writing the book on which his fame rests. In 1834 appeared the first volume of _A History of the United States from the discovery of the American continent to the present time_. The second volume was published in 1837, the third in 1840.

The historian removed to Springfield and became prominent in state politics. He was an ardent Democrat and a strong opponent of slavery. Elected without his knowledge to the legislature, he refused to take his seat; he also declined a nomination to the senate. It is said that he took this attitude with respect to office-holding out of deference to the feelings of his wife, Sarah (Dwight) Bancroft, who came of a prominent Whig family. Mrs. Bancroft died in 1837.[11] Appointed Collector of the Port of Boston by President Van Buren, Bancroft held the office from 1838 to 1841, and administered its affairs with a thoroughness theretofore unknown, and in a way incidentally to reflect great credit on the profession of letters.

In 1844 Bancroft was the Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts and polled a large vote, but was defeated by George N. Briggs. A year later he became Secretary of the Navy under President Polk. In the exercise of his duties he gave the order to take possession of California, and as acting Secretary of War the order to General Taylor to occupy Texas.

During his secretaryship Bancroft founded the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. This he brought about not by asking Congress to authorize its establishment, but by so interpreting the powers granted him under the law that he was able to set in operation a school for the training of midshipmen and offer it to Congress for approval. Once the school was established and its usefulness proved, there was no difficulty in securing funds for adequate equipment. The Academy was formally opened on October 10, 1845.

From 1846 to 1849 Bancroft was minister to England. There were important diplomatic problems to be solved, but his triumphs were chiefly literary and social. He accumulated a rich store of documents, and on his return to America made his home in New York and devoted himself anew to the _History_.[12] The fourth volume appeared in 1852; the fifth in 1853; the sixth in 1854; the seventh in 1858; the eighth in 1860; the ninth in 1866; the tenth and concluding volume in 1874. His _Literary and Historical Miscellanies_ appeared in 1855.

When the New York Historical Society celebrated the close of the first half-century of its existence (1854), Bancroft was the orator. His address on that occasion, ‘The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race,’ has been pronounced the best exposition of his historical creed.[13]

Bancroft was a strong Union man and during the Civil War acted with the Republican party. He declined a nomination to Congress from the eighth district of New York (October, 1862), on the ground that a multiplication of candidates would leave the result very much to chance; there should be a union, he urged, of all those ‘who feel deeply for their country in this her hour of peril.’ At the close of the war he was chosen to pronounce the eulogy on Lincoln before Congress (February, 1866).

President Johnson, in 1867, appointed Bancroft minister to Prussia. Later he was accredited to the North German Confederation, and in 1872, following current political changes, to the German Empire. He brought about that notable treaty whereby Germans who had become citizens of the United States were freed from allegiance to the land of their birth. Never before by a ‘formal act’ had the principle of ‘renunciation of citizenship at ‘the will of the individual been recognized.’ England followed Germany’s example and gave over her claim of indefeasible allegiance. Another diplomatic triumph was the settlement of the North-western boundary dispute. While in Germany Bancroft celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation at Göttingen. The University gave him an honorary degree, and congratulations were showered on him from scholars, statesmen, princes, and men of letters.

After nearly eight years of service Bancroft was recalled from the German mission at his own request. He lived in Washington during the winter months and spent the summers at Newport as had long been his habit. The work of his later years included two revisions of the _History_ (1876 and 1884), a _History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States_ (1882), _A Plea for the Constitution of the United States of America, wounded in the House of its Guardians_ (1886), and a sketch of the public life of Martin Van Buren (1889).

Bancroft died in Washington on January 17, 1891.

II

HIS CHARACTER

Bancroft’s character was fashioned on a large scale. His mental horizon was broad, his power to plan and carry out a vast undertaking was commensurate with the reach of his vision. There was little in his habit of thought to suggest the narrowness so often associated with the name of scholar. Yet he had the infinitely laborious powers of the mere scholar. He could toil with unflagging energy day by day or year by year.

The magisterial note in his historical writings is due not alone to the subject or to the literary manner, but also to the deliberate tenacity of purpose with which the historian wrought. Such a work is the product, not of feverish spasms of intellectual activity, but of even and steady effort.

Bancroft has been accused of a want of enthusiasm in receiving critical observations on his work. It is a question whether historians (more than philosophers) are wont to receive with rapture proofs that they are possibly in the wrong. Bancroft’s tone of controversy is perhaps less peculiar to himself than is commonly asserted. However, it must be kept in mind that he had a ‘strong nervous personality.’

Emerson described the greeting he had from Bancroft in London. When he presented himself at the minister’s door, ‘it was opened by Mr. Bancroft himself in the midst of servants whom that man of eager manners thrust aside, saying that he would open his own door for me. He was full of goodness and talk.’ Other accounts of him give an impression of much stateliness of manner tempered by affability. Still others convey the idea that he was always artificial, and sometimes playful with a playfulness that bordered on frivolity. A friend[14] professed to detect in Bancroft’s bearing marks of the man of letters, diplomat, politician, preacher and pedagogue, one trait superimposed on another. But the blend of characteristics was charming.[15]

III

THE WRITER

The charge brought against Bancroft of having embellished his themes with ‘cheap rhetoric’ is unjust. Rhetorical the historian undoubtedly was, but the rhetoric was not cheap. It had the merit of sincerity; it was the result of an honest effort to present important facts and comments in becoming garb.

In 1834 the style thought appropriate to historical writing was markedly oratorical. Historians addressed their readers. A pomp of expression, something almost liturgical, was held seemly if not indeed of last importance. Reading their works, one involuntarily calls up a vision of grave gentlemen in much-wrinkled frock-coats, making stilted gestures, and looking even more unreal than their statues which now terrify posterity. Bancroft was affected by the prevailing drift towards oratorical forms. At times one is tempted to exclaim: ‘This was not meant to be read but to be heard.’

Take for example this passage on Sebastian Cabot: ‘He lived to an extreme old age and loved his profession to the last; in the hour of death his wandering thoughts were upon the ocean. The discoverer of the territory of our country was one of the most extraordinary men of his age; there is deep cause for regret that time has spared so few memorials of his career. Himself incapable of jealousy, he did not escape detraction. He gave England a continent, and no one knows his burial place.’

Not to enter into the question whether this is good, or indifferent, or even bad writing, it is sufficient to note that the passage in question belongs to spoken discourse rather than to literature. It appeals to us, if at all, through the medium of the ear rather than the eye.

Take for another example the comparison of Puritan and Cavalier: Historians have loved to eulogize ‘the manners and virtues, the glory and the benefits of chivalry. Puritanism accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the sectarian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dissoluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of spirit; the puritans from the fear of God. The knights were proud of loyalty, the puritans of liberty. The knights did homage to monarchs, in whose smile they beheld honor, whose rebuke was the wound of disgrace; the puritans, disdaining ceremony, would not bend the knee to the King of kings. The former valued courtesy; the latter justice. The former adorned society by graceful refinements; the latter founded national grandeur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the gradually increasing weight, and knowledge, and opulence, of the industrious classes; the puritans, relying on those classes, planted in their hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty.’

Passages such as these are often employed as a rhetorical flourish at the end of a chapter. They are analogous to what actors call ‘making a good exit.’ In Bancroft they constitute for pages together the prevailing rather than the exceptional form. The reader, whether conscious of it or not, is kept on a strain. At last he grows uncomfortable. He wishes the historian would cease to declaim, would come down from the rostrum, throw aside his academic robes, and be neighborly and familiar.

This _History_ was so long in the writing that Bancroft’s style changed materially. The opinion prevails that his diction improved as the work proceeded, that the later volumes are uniformly less inflated, strained, and ‘eloquent’ than the earlier ones. It is true that he made innumerable revisions of the text. The changes were not always improvements. Sometimes in rewriting a sentence he made it less energetic. Strong expressions were softened. A plain old-fashioned word would be taken out; often it carried the whole phrase with it. Whether the literary or the historical sense dictated the change in question cannot always be determined.

Bancroft’s diction is manly and forceful, but it lacks natural grace and suppleness; it is flexible as chain armor is flexible, but not as is the human body. It may be doubted whether he is ever read for literary pleasure. Nevertheless, scattered through these twelve volumes are hundreds of passages well worth the study of those who enjoy an exhibition of mastery in the use of words.

IV

_THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES_