American author, was born at Charleston, S. C., April 17, 1806, of Irish extraction. He made verses at the age of 7; and during the war of 1812, celebrated in rhyme the exploits of the American army and navy. Left in charge of his grandmother at Charleston, he was placed with a druggist; but at 18 began the study of law; was admitted to the bar at 22; published “Early Lays” and “Lyrical and Other Poems” (1827), and became (1828) editor of The City Gazette, and published “The Vision of Cortes, Cain and Other Poems” (1829), and “The Tri-Color,” a poetical glorification of the French revolution (1830). In 1832, his paper, opposing nullification, failed; and he lost his wife, father, and grandmother, and took refuge in New England, where at Hingham, Mass., he wrote his best poem, “Atalantis, a Story of the Sea” (1833); and the same year “Martin Faber,” the story of a criminal. From this time he poured out rather than wrote poems, novels, histories, and biographies in rapid succession, which may best be classed in groups. Of poems, he published “Southern Passages and Pictures” (1839); “Donna Anna” (1843); “Grouped Thoughts and Scattered Fancies” (1845); “Lays of the Palmetto”—ballads of southern heroism in the war with Mexico (1848); “Poems, Descriptive, Dramatic, and Legendary” (1854); “Areytos, or Songs and Ballads of the South” (1860). Of dramas—“Norman Maurin, or the Man of the People;” “Michael Bonham, or the Fall of the Alamo;” and a stage adaptation of “Timon of Athens.” Of prose romances of the imagination—“The Book of My Lady” (1833); “Carl Werner” (1838); “Confession, or the Blind Heart” (1842); “Castle Dismal” (1845); “The Wigwam and the Cabin,” two series (1845, 1846); “Marie de Bernière” (1853). Of historical romances—“The Yemassee” (1835); “Pelayo” (1838); “Count Julien” (1845); “The Damsel of Darien” (1845); “The Lily and the Totem, or the Huguenots in Florida” (1845); “The Maroon and Other Tales” (1855); “Vasconcelos” (1857); “Cassique of Kiawah” (1860). Of revolutionary stories—“The Partisan” (1835); “Mellichamp” (1851); “Katherine Walton” (1851); “The Scout” (1841); “The Kinsman, or the Black Riders of the Congaree” (1841); “Woodcraft” (1855); “The Foagers” (1855); “Eutaw” (1856); these five being stories of the war in the Carolinas. Of local tales—“Guy Rivers” (1834); “Richard Hurdis” (1838); “Border Beagles” (1840); “Beauchamps” (1842); “Helen Halsey” (1845); “The Golden Christmas” (1852); “Charlemont” (1856). His other works comprise a “History of South Carolina;” “South Carolina in the Revolution;” “Lives of General Marion, Captain John Smith, Chevalier Bayard, General Greene;” “Civil War in the South;” “American Loyalists of the Revolution;” “Views and Reviews of American Literature;” “The Morals of Slavery,” etc. Residing in South Carolina during the war of secession, he sustained the southern cause in a weekly newspaper, and had his house and library wrecked by federal soldiers. Of his various and voluminous works, some are of high excellence. He died in 1870.

Personal

  For my part, and for the last six months I have been literally hors de combat from overwork of the brain,—brain sweat, as Ben Jonson called it,—and no body sweat, no physical exercise. In the extremity of my need, I took contracts … for no less than three romances, all to be worked at the same time. I got advances of money on each of these books, and the sense of obligation pressing upon me, I went rigidly to work, concentrating myself at the desk from 20th October, 1868, to the 1st of July, 1869, nearly nine months without walking a mile in a week, riding but twice, and absent from work but half a day on each of these occasions. The consequence was that I finished two of the books and broke down on the third, having written during this period some three thousand pages of the measure of these which I now write to you.

  Behold, also, how our old circle of ancient friends and comrades is thinning! One by one they have quitted our sides, until at length old Simms himself, whom I had got into the habit of regarding as immortal, has finished his course, and said his final farewells!… Gallant old man! Whatever his faults, I, for one, loved him with all my heart! And there is no doubt that his time had fully come. He had fought a good fight and kept the faith, at least the faith he had plighted to his own genius and will. Yet, as Pierpont says of his deceased child, “I cannot make him dead!” So much vitality was there in the man, so vivid is his image before the “mind’s eye,” that all attempts at a realization of his death utterly fail!… Simms’s genius never had fair play! Circumstances hampered him! Thus, the man was greater than his works.

  What a strong, earnest face [1840] and what a Byronic head.

  I frequently met Mr. Simms at the houses of New York friends, and in my father’s residence. He was a voluble talker and a good letter-writer. There was at the period of my first meeting with Mr. Simms, about 1850, something in his strong, earnest, clean-shaven face, blue eye, and stalwart figure singularly suggestive of Christopher North. When, some sixteen or seventeen years later, I met him for the last time under a friend’s roof on the banks of the Hudson, he was much changed in appearance and in spirits—much embittered by his losses, and by the result of the war. Before it came, I had heard from his lips these extravagant words: “If it comes to blows between the North and the South, we will crush you [the North] as I would crush an egg,” holding up his clenched hand as if in the act of performing that feat. It must be admitted that few men not in politics did more to bring on hostilities between the two sections than William Gilmore Simms, and few men suffered more from them.

  From both his parents Simms inherited a sanguine, impulsive, and impressible temperament. It would seem that the father’s traits were more strongly impressed upon the son than the mother’s; for there was little in Simms’ nature that was feminine…. A barbarian he could not be, since he was not an aristocrat by birth. Perhaps there has never been a man whose development was so sadly hampered by his environment; and that he succeeded as far as he did in escaping from the effects of his environment should move our admiration and respect. It is needless to dwell upon the native kindness of heart, the buoyant spirits, the superb physical and moral energy of the man, for these have been fully set forth already. Though at times seemingly eaten up with self-conceit, he was never either really conceited or selfish. He was never ashamed to acknowledge his own deficiencies; never so busy with his own affairs as to turn a deaf ear to a call for help or sympathy. The amount of good he did in his last feeble years cannot be calculated. Those who saw his eccentricities only, laughed at him; those who knew him well, loved him more and more until their love almost grew to reverence. If he often did a foolish action, he never did a mean one; and though not symmetrically great, he was essentially noble. He had virtues, too, not specially common in his time and section. While fond of stimulants and excitement, he refrained always from intoxication; while fond of the story that is told to men only, he was irreproachable in his private morals…. On the whole, one forms the impression that Simms was a vigorous, hearty man, with a versatile and talented mind, a very large heart, an indomitable will, and keen if not always delicate, sensibilities. His weaknesses and eccentricities were partly due to inherited tendencies, partly to environment, but, though they marred the symmetry of his character, they nevertheless could not efface the strength and lovableness of his personality.

General

  His “Southern Passages and Pictures” appeared in New York, in 1839, and he has since published “Florida,” in five cantos, and many shorter poems. They are on a great variety of subjects, and in almost every measure. Among them are several very spirited ballads, founded on Indian traditions and on incidents in the war for independence. His style is free and melodious, his fancy fertile and inventive, and his imagery generally well chosen, though its range is limited; but sometimes his rhymes are imperfect, and his meaning not easily understood. He is strongly attached to his country, but his sympathies seem to me to be too local. The rivers, forests, savannas, and institutions of the south, he regards with feelings similar to those with which Whittier looks upon the mountains, lakes, and social systems of New England.

  The author of these novels means to be understood as setting up for an original, patriotic, native American writer; but we are convinced that every judicious reader will set him down as uncommonly deficient in the first elements of originality. He has put on the cast-off garments of the British novelists, merely endeavoring to give them an American fit; and, like those fine gentlemen who make up their wardrobes from the second-hand clothing shops, or from the “unparalleled” establishment of Oak Hall, there is in his literary outfits a decided touch of the shabby genteel. The outward form of his novels is that of their English models; the current phrases of sentiment and description, worn threadbare in the circulating libraries, and out at the elbows, are the robes wherewith he covers imperfectly the nakedness of his invention. The obligato tone of sentimentality wearisomely drones through the soft passages of the thousand times repeated plot of love…. The style of Mr. Simms … is deficient in grace, picturesqueness, and point. It shows a mind seldom able to seize the characteristic features of the object he undertakes to describe, and of course his descriptions generally fail of arresting the reader’s attention by any beauty or felicity of touch. His characters are vaguely conceived, and either faintly or coarsely drawn. The dramatic parts are but bungling imitations of nature, with little sprightliness or wit, and laboring under a heavy load of words.

  Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner, and united the Southern pride, the Southern dislike to the making of bargains, with the Southern supineness and general want of tact in all matters relating to the making of money. His book, [“Martin Faber”] therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and resources, but with these it made its way in the end.

  Mr. Simms has a vivid imagination, and is by no means deficient in artistic skill. His language is frequently faulty, but that is undoubtedly owing to the fact he writes so much he does not take time to revise the productions of his pen. While he occupies a respectable rank among the poets of America, he stands at the head of that class of authors who entertain us with light literature.

  In that wielding of events, that sacrificing of characters to situations, he stands unsurpassed—to a great extent unapproached. In America, neither Brown nor Cooper is his equal in this regard; though both surpass him far in certain other qualities. Here the contest for first place in general merit, or in the balance of merits (including quantity), lies between our author and Cooper. In characterization and in polish, Cooper has the advantage; while in the energy of action, variety of situations, and perhaps in literal truthfulness of delineation—I mean the absence of fanciful and impossible personages—Mr. Simms has clearly the advantage. In general results—take both for all in all, quantity, versatility, and quality—it may be reasonably questioned whether Mr. Simms has an equal in America. I believe he has not. In general value to his sphere of literature he is facile princeps both North and South.

  A really great author (whether in prose or verse) Simms emphatically was not, and there is no use in maintaining so fulsome a proposition. But his talents were splendid, and his whole life seems to me noble, because of the “grit,” the perseverance, the indomitable energy which it displayed. I’ve not the remotest idea that his works will endure. They were too carelessly written. They lack the “labor limæ” to an extent which is distressing. Nevertheless Simms is worthy of all honor. “God rest his soul.”

  No writer of modern times has excelled him in industry; but the rapidity with which his works were produced has had its usual effect. None of them show the matured and symmetrical design which marks a work of art, still less the hand of a master in their execution. There are passages of description in many of his novels that are vivid and picturesque, but the style is often redundant, lacking in repose, and scarcely ever free from provincialisms. The characters are like the lay figures of the studio, useful in exigencies and effective in tableaux, but devoid of interest in themselves. The best of his novels are of the historical kind, in which southern life in early times is painted, such as “The Yemassee” and “Guy Rivers.” The most of them are irredeemably dull, at least for readers who value their time, and they must surely sink into neglect.

  What Cooper did for the pioneer life of the Middle States was done by Simms for that of the south, the characteristic features of whose colonial and revolutionary history he has preserved in a series of spirited and faithfully colored narratives. He is a picturesque and vigorous writer, evidently inspired by his subject (i. e. in his historical romances), cherishing a generous pride in the annals of his native section and the chivalrous character of her people. Although his books have, to a great extent, been superseded, as have Cooper’s, by novels which deal with later times, they are still widely read and admired. Taking into account the variety and amount of Mr. Simms’s literary work, its distinctively American character, and the positive merit possessed by much of it, his name deserves to be cherished among those of the most honored representatives of our literature.

  This work [“History of South Carolina”] has several distinctive merits above other histories of South Carolina. It covers the whole period down to our Civil War. It has all the beauties of the author’s characteristic style. It shows an intense local patriotism, and, consequently, on all sectional questions it is ardently South Carolinian. From beginning to end the narration is spirited and graphic, but the sketch is too brief for details even on the most important points.

  Simms, with a downward proclivity toward the Newgate Calendar, began, in 1833, to flood the country with every style of fiction. There was no generation of Southern life which he did not touch upon, and no phase of romantic murder which he did not illustrate. With a feeling for reality, which was unknown to Cooper and Kennedy, a certain cleverness of invention and strong sense of subordination which kept him from the obvious artifices of both these writers, he was a superior student of human nature in the peculiar line which he took, and held his characters more rigidly to the sequence of cause and effect.

  His brain and pen were never idle, and he essayed nearly every sort of writing. Though far removed in his South Carolina home, from the greater publishing centres, libraries, colleges, and author-coteries, Simms was poet, dramatist, Shakespearean editor, essayist, aphoristic philosopher, historian, biographer, lecturer, commemorative orator, legislator, pro-slavery apologist, journalist, magazinist, critic, and, above all, novelist. Authors have been hacks, helpers, or wage-earners since the art of writing was invented; but Simms’ industry and fertility are remarkable in view of his environment, which was not favorable to such facile and miscellaneous productiveness. The novels, naturally, have survived the other writings, so that the “works” of Simms have come to mean, in publishers’ parlance, merely the best of his romantic or historial fictions. The most attractive part of the novels, to tell the truth, is their titles.

  He was a versatile and diligent author, engaging in many branches of literary work. Of all that he did, his novels alone survive, and even they belong to a style of romance no longer in vogue. They are modelled upon the lines laid down by Sir Walter Scott, and are full of intrigue, incident and action, with a Southern historical background. Their faults are largely due to the time and conditions in which Simms wrote; he deserves credit for his vigorous effort to found a Southern literature.

  Cooper to-day keeps his place close at the heels of Scott, while Simms is fading into oblivion as fast as G. P. R. James, with whose work his may fairly be compared, although Simms was probably far richer in native gifts.

  With regard to his prose, attention must be confined to his revolutionary and colonial romances. If the quality of permanence is to be found in his work, it is to be found there…. His place is not a high one; but it should never be forgotten that he was not only a pioneer, but the pioneer, of American literature, whose destiny forced him to labor in the least favorable section of all America for successful literary work. When his environment is considered, the work he did will be deemed worthy of admiration rather than of fault-finding.

  Simms was an inferior Cooper with a difference. His novels are good boys’ books, but are crude and hasty in composition…. His poems have little value except as here and there illustrating local scenery and manners.

  Let it be remarked parenthetically, that while a few Carolinians never gave Simms due honor, his name will remain one of the brightest on their roll of great names, and will not stand far down the list of pioneer American writers…. The South cannot afford to ignore his work for, take him all in all, she has produced few greater men—few men who have labored harder to give his section her true place in history and literature…. Hayne gives an account of how he sat and watched the pen glide over the paper while Simms wrote. Some marvelous accounts are given of the rapidity with which he turned off manuscript. Notwithstanding this, he studied his field so closely that, as Poe intimated, he did not depend enough upon his imagination, did not idealize enough. His narrative reads too much like history. His characters are people in whose history we can easily become interested, but his men and women ever remain on the outside, and do not come into our lives and become part of our spiritual furnishings.

  The place of Simms, the veteran in Southern letters, is at once honorable and pathetic. Striving against wind and tide, he produced as many stories as Cooper, besides a goodly amount of poetry, biography and miscellany; but the bulk of his writing was too hasty for immortality.

  These romances have spirit and vigor of style, but show the defects of the author’s lack of thorough literary training. They will always be of interest, however, as illustrations of the life of the time, and as the only important representative, in the Literature of the period, of the part of the country which was the author’s home.

  The first Southern writer of distinction to follow literature as a profession. This circumstance, involving as it did a long and gallant struggle with adverse conditions, gives him an important place, aside from the intrinsic value of his writings, as the pioneer among the Southern men of letters…. Simms is distinctly inferior to Cooper, with whom he inevitably suggests comparison; yet his best stories form a kind of companion study to Cooper’s work, depicting as they do the same period of our national growth under Southern instead of under Northern or Western conditions. In his portrayal of the Indian character Simms is probably more truthful than Cooper, whose Indian heroes, if more romantic, are, it is to be feared, more ideal.

  He was full of strong self-assertion, and though a most friendly, hospitable man, carried in his step and speech a good deal of the combative spirit and the audacities which he put so cleverly into the pages of his tales of the Revolution. In the present revival of Colonial studies we may possibly look for a new cult of the author of “Mellichampe.”

  Though William Gilmore Simms published several volumes of verse, including some prosy dramas, they are, with the exception of a few descriptive passages, as completely ignored by the general reader as are the works of Crafts and Grayson.