It is more than three-quarters of a century since Audubon's masterpiece, The Birds of America, was completed, and two generations have occupied the stage since the "American Woodsman" quietly passed away at his home on the Hudson River. These generations have seen greater changes in the development and application of natural science and in the spread of scientific knowledge among men than all those which preceded them. Theories of nature come and go but the truth abides, and Audubon's "book of Nature," represented by his four massive volumes of hand-engraved and hand-colored plates, still remains "the most magnificent monument which has yet been raised to ornithology," as Cuvier said of the parts which met his astonished gaze in 1828; while his graphic sketches of American life and scenery and his vivid portraits of birds, drawn with the pen, can be read with as much pleasure as when the last volume of his Ornithological Biography left the press in 1839. This appears the more remarkable when we reflect that Audubon's greatest working period, from 1820 to 1840, belonged essentially to the eighteenth century, for the real transition to the nineteenth century did not begin in England before 1837; then came the dawn of the newer day that was to witness those momentous changes in communication and travel, in education, democracy and ideas, which characterize life in the modern world.
When Audubon left London for Paris on September 1, 1828, it took him four days by coach, boat and diligence to reach the French capital, a journey which in normal times is now made in less than eight hours. Mail then left the Continent for England on but four days in the week, and to post a single letter cost twenty-four sous. Writing at Edinburgh a little earlier (December 21, 1826), Audubon recorded that on that day he had received from De Witt Clinton and Thomas Sully, in America, letters in answer to his own, in forty-two days, and added that it seemed absolutely impossible that the distance could be covered so rapidly. This was indeed remarkable, since the first vessel to cross the Atlantic wholly under its own steam, in 1838, required seventeen days to make the passage from New York to Queenstown.
"Walking in Paris," said Audubon in 1828, "is disagreeable in the extreme; the streets are paved, but with scarcely a sidewalk, and a large gutter filled with dirty black water runs through the middle of each, and people go about without any kind of order, in the center, or near the houses." The Paris of that day contained but one-fourth the number of its present population. Having reaped the fruits of the Revolution, it was enjoying peace under the Restoration; moreover, it was taking a leading part in the advancement of natural science, of which Cuvier was the acknowledged dean. It was but a year before the death of blind and aged Lamarck, neglected and forgotten then, but destined after the lapse of three-quarters of a century to have a monument raised to his memory by contributions from every part of Europe and America, and to be recognized as the first great evolutionist of the modern school.
Audubon had not seen his ancestral capital for upwards of thirty years, not since as a young man he was sent from his father's home near Nantes to study drawing in the studio of David, at the Louvre. Though in the land of his fathers and speaking his native tongue, his visit was tinged with disappointment. At the age of forty-three he was engaged in an enterprise which stands unique in the annals of science and literature. But fifty plates, or ten numbers, of his incomparable series had been engraved, and this work had then but thirty subscribers. That he was bound to sink or swim he knew full well. On August 30 he wrote: "My subscribers are yet far from enough to pay my expenses, and my purse suffers severely from want of greater patronage." This want he had hoped to satisfy in France, but after an experience of eight weeks, and an expenditure, as he records, of forty pounds, he was obliged to leave Paris with only thirteen additional names on his list. Yet among the latter, it should be noticed, were those of George Cuvier, the Duke of Orleans and King Charles X, while six copies had been ordered by the Minister of the Interior for distribution among the more important libraries of Paris. Moreover, he had won the friendship and encomiums of Cuvier, which later proved of the greatest value. The savants who gathered about him at the meeting of the Royal Academy of Sciences, over which Cuvier presided, exclaimed, "Beautiful! Very beautiful! What a work!", but "What a price!", and acknowledged that only in England could he find the necessary support. Audubon concluded that he was fortunate in having taken his drawings to London to be engraved, for the smaller cost of copper on that side of the Channel was an item which could not be overlooked. Little did he dream that commercial greed for the baser metal would send most of his great plates to the melting pot half a century later. No doubt he was right also in concluding that had he followed certain advisers in first taking his publication to France, it would have perished "like a flower in October." It should be added that King Charles' subscription expired with his fall two years later, while that of Cuvier ended with his death in 1832.
Audubon was one of those rare spirits whose posthumous fame has grown with the years. He did one thing in particular, that of making known to the world the birds of his adopted land, and did it so well that his name will be held in everlasting remembrance. His great folios are now the property of the rich or of those fortunate institutions which have either received them by gift or were enrolled among his original subscribers, and wherever found they are treasured as the greatest of show books. The sale of a perfect copy of the Birds at the present day is something of an event, for it commands from $3,000 to $5,000, or from three to five times its original cost. All of Audubon's publications have not only become rare but have increased greatly in price; they are what dealers call a good investment, an experience which probably no other large, illustrated, scientific or semi-scientific works have enjoyed to a like degree.
As has been said of Prince Henry the Navigator, though in different words, John James Audubon was one of those who by a simple-hearted life of talent, devotion and enthusiasm have freed themselves from the law of death. Audubon was a man of many sides, and his fame is due to a rare combination of those talents and powers which were needed to accomplish the work that he finally set out to do. His personality was most winning, his individuality strong, and his long life, bent for the most part to attain definite ends, was checkered, adventurous and romantic beyond the common lot of men.
Few men outside of public life have been praised more lavishly than Audubon during his active career. Though he had but few open enemies, those few, as if conscious of the fact, seemed to assail him the more harshly and persistently. In reading all that has been said about this strenuous worker both before and since his death, one is continually struck by the perverse or contrary opinions that are often expressed. He was not this and he was not that, but he was simply Audubon, and there has been no one else who has at all closely resembled him or with whom he can be profitably compared. One charges that he did not write the books which bear his name. Another complains that he was no philosopher, and was not a man of science at heart; that he was vain, elegant, inclined to be selfish, inconsequential, and that he reverenced the great; that he shot birds for sport; that he was a plagiarist; that he was the king of nature fakirs and a charlatan; that he never propounded or answered a scientific question; and, finally, that though at times he wrote a graphic and charming style and showed occasional glimpses of prophetic insight, he cannot be trusted; besides, he might have been greatly indebted to unacknowledged aid received from others.
These or similar charges were brought against Audubon during his lifetime, as they have been made against many another who has emerged quickly from obscurity into world-wide renown. Many attacks upon his character were assiduously repelled by his friends, though seldom noticed publicly by himself; as if conscious of his own integrity, he was content to await the verdict of time, and time in America has not been recreant to his trust. Some of these charges it may be necessary to examine at length, if found to be justified in any degree, while others may be brushed aside as unworthy of even passing consideration. Evidence of every sort is now ample, as it seems, to enable us to do justice to all concerned, to penetrate the veil that has hidden much of the real Audubon from the world, and to place the worker and the man in the fuller light of day.
The reader who follows this history may expect to find certain blemishes in Audubon's character, for the most admirable of men have possessed faults, whether conscious of them or not. The lights in any picture would lose all value were the shadows wholly withdrawn. If we blinded ourselves to every fault and foible of such a man, we might produce a sketch more pleasing to certain readers, but it would lack the vitality which truth alone can supply. The more carefully his character is studied, however, as Macaulay said of Addison, the more it will appear, in the language of the old anatomists, "sound in the noble parts, free from all taint of perfidy, of cowardice, of cruelty, of ingratitude, of envy."
In this attempt to present a true and unbiased estimate of Audubon in relation to his time, we have the advantage of dealing with a well rounded and completed life, not with a broken or truncated one. He impressed many of his contemporaries in both Europe and America with the force of his contagious enthusiasm and prolific genius, and their opinions have been recorded with remarkable generosity. On the other hand, "if a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end," said an excellent authority,[1] "we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence," because the minute details of daily life are commonly so volatile and evanescent as to "soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition." Such details, which often reveal character while they add color and life to the narrative, have been amply supplied, as the reader will find, by Audubon himself, not only in his journals and private letters already published but in the numerous documents of every sort that are now brought to light.