Lane Cooper

“ Yet the transference of the idea to the Indians of North America was easy in an age when popular geography was vague; and the faith of the Jesuits in the potential goodness of the savage doubtless helped to propagate a general belief that the aborigines were noble. The idea, which seems rather to have come from the travellers than from Rousseau, but possibly is dormant in almost every educated mind, is well established in American literature from William Bartram to Fenimore Cooper. The related notion of social equality in a state of nature has a more solid basis. ”

“ Almost a century has passed since the nondescript Captain Carver, immediately after the French and Indian War, conceived the idea of opening up the vast north-western tract to the enterprise of Great Britain. The interest of travellers has shifted from the character and habits of the roving Indian to the domestic manners of East and West, North and South; and science has moved from a less impersonal, yet fairly exact, observation of plants and animals, or of subterranean rivers in a terrestrial paradise, to the precise geology of a Featherston-haugh or a Lyell. ”

“ As an eloquent and powerful advocate, you have pleaded the cause of humanity in espousing that of the poor Africans; you viewed these provinces of North America in their true light, as the asylum of freedom, as the cradle of future nations, and the refuge of distressed Europeans. ”

“ To a man who believes in this, the world, with its plants and animals, is no longer a work of art, shaped by the fingers of a Master-Artist; it is filled with a subtle spirit which is interfused in all material and living things, “rolls” through them, and is their principle of movement and pulsation. In one form or another, this notion of immanence, familiar in the earlier poems of Wordsworth, characterizes the reaction against the age of reason, and may be found in many observers of nature in America. ”

“ Isaac Weld the Irishman, author of a widely read book on the United States and Canada, wrote one of his thirty-eight letters from Jefferson’s then unfinished establishment at Monticello. He made mediocre pencil sketches of Niagara Falls, and the “Rock Bridge” of Virginia, but secured a picture of Mount Vernon from a friend. He visited the Dismal Swamp, saw Washington in a cheerful mood at a reception in Philadelphia, and culled observations on the Indians, helping himself at need from Carver and Jefferson. In Weld’s account, the backsliding of the educated savage Joseph Brant became heroic. ”

“ By disengaging and projecting the ideal form of American life, such works interpreted the new republic for England and the Continent. More than this, they interpreted one part of the new nation to another. No other class of books can have done so much to consolidate the people; their effect upon character and imagination can hardly be overestimated. ”

“ As the lists would indicate, the literature is cosmopolitan—an inference that is confirmed in other ways. Not only were the works of foreigners turned into English, but British and American observers were translated on the Continent: Bartram into French, German, and Dutch; Crèvecœur into French (by himself) and German; Weld into Italian, Dutch, and German; and so on. Again, the same work, as, for example, Bartram’s, might be published in the same year at Philadelphia and at London or Dublin, or first in this country, and then abroad, or vice versa. ”

“ The place of the travellers in the move-ment known as “the return to nature” would require for adequate treatment nothing short of a dissertation; nor could one always discriminate between the literary preconceptions which the observers brought with them and the ultimate facts about man and his environment which they transmitted to the poets. Yet we recognize in the reports of American travel something ultimate, as did the poets and philosophers. ”

“ In American and English poets, also, one may see the connection between highter forms of literature and books of travel. Freneau translates the Travels of the Abbe Robin (Philadelphia, 1783) , and writes Stanzas on the Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country (Poems, 1786) . Timothy Dwight’s “Most fruiful thy soil, most inviting thy clime,” in Columbia, echoes the sentiment of his Travels. Longfellow derives the myth of Hiawatha from Schoolcraft, and is said to have used Sealsfield’s Life in the New World, and Fremont’s Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, in Evangeline. ”

“ The first work on physical geography ever published, that of the Swede Bergman, appeared in 1766, shortly before the time when books of American travel began to grow numerous. The influence of Continental science upon American observers is often obvious, as in the case of Linnæus, to which Zimmermann refers in his translation of Bartram. Indeed, a pupil of Linnæus, Pehr Kalm, who has been included among the botanists of Philadelphia, is remembered for his description of Niagara Falls. ”

“ On the other hand, we may dwell for a moment upon the sentimental treatment of external nature in Rousseau, and upon his conception, in part derived from early American travellers, of the “natural” man in a terrestrial paradise. Such a being could, in fact, exist only in a tropical or sub-tropical environment such as the favoured regions in which the first American explorers and missionaries encountered the natives. ”

“ Possession of the soil, and the opportunity to gain more and more of it—as depicted by Crevecè...ur—must always act as a stimulus to the human mind. Once reaching these shores, a mobile population would be allured to the West through the virile descriptions of the Mississippi Valley by a Timothy Flint, or through the animated sketches of life and manners by a James Hall. To the literature of travel may also be ascribed much of the attraction exerted by this country upon distinguished foreigners in seasons of stress or misfortune. ”

“ As in Crèvecœur’s American Farmer, it grows out of the facts of life in a new agricultural settlement.
An opposite conception was also prevalent. Side by side with the ideal of an eloquent stoic, artless, magnanimous by nature, we find—often in the same book of travels—the cruel savage as he is, vengeful and impure. Montaigne, indeed, a predecessor of Rousseau in admiring the unlettered aborigines, had held that the European surpassed the savage in barbarity ”

“ The Government expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains in I8I9, under the command of Major Long, was more fruitful in technical results; and with the vast, though unmethodical, accumulations of Schoolcraft the data on Indians in the records edited by Biddle are not to be compared in value. But the authorized account of Jefferson’s great enterprise, published in the concluding year of the final war with England, marked the fulfilment of Carver’s vision, and betokened the approaching establishment of the United States as the ruling power in the Western Hemisphere. ”

“ Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia will give the best idea of this part of the continent to a foreigner; and the American Farmer’s Letters, written by Mr. Crèvecœur (commonly called Mr. St. John) , the French consul in New York, who actually resided twenty years as a farmer in that State, will afford a great deal of profitable and amusive information, respecting the private life of the Americans, as well as the progress of agriculture, manufactures, and arts in their country. ”

“ There is a motion and a spirit in the environment itself: “At the reanimating appearance of the rising sun, nature again revives”; “the atmosphere was now animated with the efficient principle of vegetative life” ”

“ Here, for example, is President Jefferson:
The ... of the United States is in his person tall, meagre, emaciated; his muscles relaxed, and his joints so loosely connected as not only to disqualify him, apparently, for any vigorous exertion of body, but to destroy everything like elegance and harmony in his air and movement.
§ 10. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Wirt’s young nobleman denies to the President the gift of poetical fancy; yet Jefferson allowed such imaginative faculty as he possessed to dally with the theme of western exploration. ”

“ With Weld, the strictures of the British travellers upon American life become sharp. A mild rejoinder to foreign depreciation soon appeared in the fictitious Letters of the British Spy by the American jurist William Wirt, which purported to derive from the abandoned manuscript of “a meek and harmless” young Englishman of rank who was travelling incognito. Composed in a formal Addisonian manner, this defence of American statesmen and American eloquence is overcharged with allusions to Cicero and Demosthenes. ”

“ As the journals, on which I chiefly depended, had been kept by men of business, intent upon the main object of the enterprise, and but little versed in science, or curious about matters not immediately bearing upon their interests, and as they were written often in moments of fatigue or hurry, amid the inconveniences of wild encampments, they were often meagre in their details, furnishing hints to provoke rather than narratives to satisfy inquiry. ”

“ The so-called rationalism of the French, with its tendency to destroy traditional distinctions, to suppress imagination, and yet to end in a kind of deism, is too large a subject for more than passing notice. ”

“ Man in a state of nature suggests solitude; and solitude, with its charms for the eighteenth-century poet, suggests the so-called “feeling for nature” that of late has been much discussed by literary students in dealing with the period. ”

“ His manuscript work on the Indians was published by the American Ethnological Society in 1853.
The Travels reveal the enthusiasm of a man still young, with an eye that nothing escapes, not without poetical imagination or philosophical vision, and with a deep reverence for the Creative Spirit which he feels in all about him. The volume is divided into four Parts. In the first, the Introduction, he recounts the voyage by packet from Philadelphia to Savannah, whence he proceeds to the “Alatamaha” River. ”

“ The Stranger in America: Containing Observations Made during a Long Residence in that Country, on the Genius, Manners and Customs of the People of the United States; with Biographical Particulars of Public Characters; Hints and Facts Relative to the Arts, Sciences, Commerce, Agriculture, Manufactures, Emigration, and the Slave Trade. ”

“ The Travellers and Wordsworth. The relation of English poets to American observers is most significant of all. Coleridge praises Cartwright, Hearne, and Bartram; “the impression which Bartram had left on his mind,” says his grandson, “was deep and lasting.” Lamb is enamoured of pious John Woolman, and eventually favours Crèvec...ur, yielding to Hazlitt’s recommendation. Southey commends Dwight, and employs Bartram in Madoc. In Mazeppa, Byron, an inveterate reader of travels, takes the notion of an audible aurora borealis from Hearne. But the most striking instance is Wordsworth. ”

“ Though the authentic work became popular in America and Europe, being reprinted and translated, the initial delay in publication, and the presence of other diarists in the party, made room for more than one earlier account of the expedition—for example, the Journal of Patrick Gass, of which there were five editions before 1814, as well as a French and a German translation in that year. However made known, the achievement of Lewis and Clark has won greater fame than any other geographical exploration ever undertaken within the United States proper. ”

“ Brothers is of opinion that “there is in the United States more taxation, poverty, and general oppression than ever known in any other country.” And in January, 1844, The Foreign Quarterly asserts that “As yet the American is horn-handed and pig-headed, hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous,... with an incredible genius for lying.” Ere this, however, better sense was prevailing. Basil Hall, though preferring the manners of aristocratic England, was not unkindly, nor was Mrs. Trollope (1832) unsympathetic. Dickens himself, having followed the Ohio and the Mississippi to St. ”

“ Dwight himself made judicious use of it. The indefatigable Morse, though not a Humboldt, a Ritter, or a Leopold von Buch, was a lowly precursor of the European scientists who furnished the next generation with ideals in geography and travel.
§ 2. Nature and the Natural Man. If territorial expansion and the development of geographical science are to be noted in studying the literature of travel, the general background of eighteenth-century thought must not be forgotten. ”

“ It worked in the mind of Jefferson, took shape in the Lewis and Clark expedition and in the enterprise of John Jacob Astor, and reappeared in Irving’s Astoria. Carver’s volume still fastens upon the imagination, as it did in the time of Schiller, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand.
§ 7. William Bartram. Coleridge, who found pleasure in Carver’s descriptions, doubtless set a higher value upon Bartram; he says in Table Talk: “The latest book of travels I know, written in the spirit of the old travellers, is Bartram’s account of his tour in the Floridas. It is a work of high merit every way.” ”

“ The only modern books that I read are those of travels, or such as relate to matters of fact–and the only modern books that I care for.” What they meant to him may be seen in Ruth, which is full of images from Bartram—the magnolia, the cypress, green savannas, and scarlet flowers that set the hills on fire; in The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, based on Hearne; in the address to Hartley Coleridge, reminiscent of Carver ”