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Cooper the novelist, says Parke Godwin, always brought “a breeze of quarrel with him.”
Cooper wrote thus to Rufus W. Griswold (August 7, 1842): “A published eulogy of myself from Irving's pen could not change my opinion of his career .... Cuvier has the same faults as Irving, and so had Scott.
They were all meannesses, and I confess I can sooner pardon crimes, if they are manly ones.
I have never had any quarrel with Mr. Irving, and give him full credit as a writer.
Still I believe him to be below the ordinary level, in moral qualities, instead of being above them, as he is cried up to be.”
He adds: “Bryant is worth forty Irvings in every point of view, but he runs a little into the seemly (?) school.”
1 Whipple writes to Griswold six years later: “I have no patience with the New York literati.
They are all the time quarrelling with each other.
Why not kiss and be friends?”
2 No such letter could ever have been written about the three most eminent Cambridge authors, nor could anything
1 “ Letters of R. W. Griswold,” pp. 144, 145.
2 Ibid., p. 233.
Macmillan, 1900.
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