The Audubon Magazine. 



Vol. I. 



NOVEMBER, 1887. 



No. 



THE CHARACTER OF JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, 



AS has been said before, Audubon's 

 was no well-rounded, complete char- 

 acter; loving he was, but wanting in the 

 capacity for self-sacrifice; generous, but 

 without any controlling sense of duty. Let 

 us deal gently with this last-named short- 

 coming, for had he been animated by a 

 high sense of duty to his gentle wife he 

 could not have allowed her to eat the bread 

 of dependence and to struggle unaided in 

 the battle of life for well nigh twenty years 

 of her married life; he would have sacri- 

 ficed his predilections, bent his neck to the 

 common yoke in some more or less distaste- 

 ful business pursuit, and both he and she 

 would have missed the crowning triumph 

 of their lives. 



And indeed Audubon would have been 

 quite incapable of this desertion on his own 

 motion. He needed his wife's unqualified 

 approval, and her expression of unbounded 

 faith in the value of his labors to justify 

 his desertion to himself, and we must ap- 

 preciate the measure of self-denial this 

 required of her before we can begin to 

 reaUze the ideal nobleness of the woman 

 who reverently sacrificed the domestic 

 hearth and devoted her life, her energies, 

 her talents, to affording her husband the 

 opportunity to complete his labors, and to 

 aid him with the material means necessary 

 to secure the world's recognition of them. 



Down to the loss of the remnant of his 



fortune through that "infernal sawmill," 

 as he styled it, he had been roaming about 

 the woods and observing and painting his 

 loved birds, but not as a means to a practi- 

 cal end for the benefit of his wife and fam- 

 ily. As he told Wilson at Louisville and 

 reasserted in his diary, he had at that time 

 no thought of publishing. He was simply 

 indulging tastes for which he had a craving 

 amounting to a passion. He knew, too, 

 that his indulgence in this passion led him 

 to be regarded as a vagabond; and while 

 this estimate stung him to the quick, and 

 although he felt in the secret recesses of 

 his heart that his pursuit was lofty in com- 

 parison with the all-absorbing race for 

 Avealth, he must nevertheless have suffered 

 keenly from a mistrust of his own judg- 

 ment. 



But when Wilson called on him for a 

 subscription to his work, which he was then 

 preparing to publish with material inferior 

 in quantity and quality to that which Au- 

 dubon had already collected, the latter 

 built on the possibilities of turning his own 

 collections to account, and on a vastly more 

 magnificent scale; but even then he laid 

 out no plan of operation to secure means 

 to the desired end. On the contrary, he 

 just went on dreaming until, his last cent 

 sunk in ill-judged enterprises, he was 

 thrown entirely on his own resources for 

 the support of his wife and family. This 



