Fenimore Cooper

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES General Editor: B.C.Southam The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a literary tradition. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s death.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER THE CRITICAL HERITAGE Edited by

GEORGE DEKKER & JOHN P.WILLIAMS

London and New York

First published in 1973 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE & 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Compilation, introduction, notes and index © 1973 George Dekker & John P.Williams All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN 0-203-19939-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19942-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-15928-8

General Editor’s Preface

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the developments of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures. The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenthand twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative quality— perhaps even registering incomprehension! For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writer’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear. In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged. B.C.S.

Contents

PREFACE

xi

INTRODUCTION

1

NOTE ON THE TEXT

43

1

W.H.GARDINER, review in North American Review, July 1822

47

2

MARIA EDGEWORTH, letter, 1823

57

3

Unsigned notice, British Critic, July 1826

59

4

Unsigned review, Port Folio, March 1823

63

5

Unsigned notice, British Critic, July 1826

67

6

Unsigned review, New-York Mirror, December 1824

71

7

Unsigned review, New-York Review and Atheneum, June 1825

75

8

Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, March 1825

77

9

JOHN NEAL on Fenimore Cooper

79

(a)

Article, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1824

79

(b)

Review of Lionel Lincoln, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, September 1825

80

The Spy (1821)

The Pioneers (1823)

The Pilot (1824)

Lionel Lincoln (1825)

vii

(c)

Review of The Last of the Mohicans, London Magazine, May 1826

81

10

Unsigned review, New-York Review and Atheneum, March 1826

87

11

Unsigned review, United States Literary Gazette, May 1826

93

12

W.H.GARDINER, review, North American Review, July 1826

99

13

Unsigned review, Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, April 1826

111

14

Unsigned article, Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, 1827

115

15

The Paris Globe reviews Cooper

121

(a)

Two reviews by F.A.S., June, July 1827

121

(b)

SAINTE-BEUVE, review of The Red Rover, April 1828

129

16

SCOTT reads The Red Rover and The Prairie, January 1828

133

17

Unsigned review, London Magazine, January 1828

135

18

GRENVILLE MELLEN, review, North American Review, July 1828

137

19

Three unsigned British reviews

145

(a)

Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1828

145

(b)

Literary Gazette, June 1828

146

(c)

Edinburgh Review, June 1829

148

The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

The Prairie (1827)

The Red Rover (1827)

Notions of the Americans (1828)

viii

20

HAZLITT on American literature, Edinburgh Review, October 1829

151

21

LEIGH HUNT reviews Cooper

157

(a)

Review of The Pilot, Tatler, April 1831

157

(b)

Review of The Bravo, Tatler, October 1831

158

22

CHARLES SEALSFIELD on Cooper, NewYork Mirror, February 1831

161

23

Unsigned notice, New-York Mirror, February 1832

165

24

W.H.PRESCOTT on Cooper

167

(a)

Article, North American Review, July 1832

167

(b)

Letter to Cooper Memorial Committee, February 1852

168

25

Unsigned review, Metropolitan Magazine, October 1833

171

26

Unsigned review, New-England Magazine, August 1834

175

27

Edinburgh Review on Cooper, April 1835

179

28

Unsigned review, Knickerbocker Magazine, August 1835

183

29

J.G.LOCKHART, review, Quarterly Review, October 1837

187

30

FRANCIS BOWEN, review, North American Review, October 1838

191

The Bravo (1831)

The Headsman (1833)

A Letter to his Countrymen (1834)

The Monikins (1835)

Gleanings in Europe: England (1837)

Homeward Bound (1838)

ix

Home as Found (1838) 31

Unsigned review, New-York Review, January 1839

195

32

V.G.BELINSKY on Cooper

201

(a)

Review of The Bravo, Moscow Observer, 1839

201

(b)

Review of The Pathfinder, Notes of the Fatherland, 1841

203

(c)

Article, Notes of the Fatherland, 1841

205

33

HONORÉ DE BALZAC, review, Paris Review, July 1840

207

34

EVERT DUYCKINCK, review, Arcturus, January 1841

213

35

Unsigned review, New-York Mirror, September 1841

219

36

EDGAR ALLAN POE, review, Graham’s Magazine, November 1843

223

37

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS on Cooper, Magnolia 1842

231

38

THACKERAY on Cooper

241

(a)

Review of The Redskins, Morning Chronicle, August 1846

241

(b)

Burlesque titled ‘The Stars and Stripes’, Punch, October 1847

243

39

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A Fable for Critics, 1848

249

The Pathfinder (1840)

Mercedes of Castile (1840)

The Deerslayer (1841)

Wyandotté (1843)

The Redskins (1846)

The Sea Lions (1849)

x

40

Unsigned review, Brownson’s Quarterly Review, July 1849

253

41

HERMAN MELVILLE on Cooper

255

(a)

Review of The Sea Lions, Literary World, April 1849

255

(b)

Review of The Red Rover, Literary World, March 1850

256

(c)

Letter to Cooper Memorial Committee, 1852

256

42

The Cooper Memorial

259

(a)

Letters written to the Cooper Memorial Committee, 1852

259

(b)

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, ‘Discourse on…Cooper’, 1852

260

43

FRANCIS PARKMAN on Cooper

261

(a)

Letter to Cooper Memorial Committee, 1852

261

(b)

Article, North American Review, January 1852

261

44

GEORGE SAND on Cooper, 1856

271

45

BRET HARTE, Parody of Cooper, 1867

277

46

MARK TWAIN’S classic demolition of Cooper, North American Review, July 1895

283

47

JOSEPH CONRAD on Cooper, Outlook, June 1898

293

American reviews of Cooper’s works 1820–51

295

BIBLIOGRAPHY

301

INDEX

303

APPENDIX:

Preface

This volume in the Critical Heritage Series brings together the most important nineteenthcentury critical discussions of James Fenimore Cooper. It consists of a lengthy Introduction followed by a selection of ‘representative’ reviews which, though often of little intrinsic value as literary criticism, reveal the literary values of Cooper’s century and are essential documents for the study of Cooper’s literary reputation. Our Introduction begins with a detailed survey of Cooper’s critical reception by his American contemporaries, then briefly summarizes what is known about his contemporary reception in Europe, and concludes with an extended discussion of the criticisms he received from such major writers as Melville, Conrad, Goethe, Balzac and Belinsky. Although the editors are jointly responsible for this volume and collaborated closely in its preparation, the first and third sections of the Introduction can be regarded as independent essays—the former written by Mr McWilliams, the latter by Mr Dekker. These sections, together with the Appendix listing American reviews, offer something new in the way of interpretation and information; for the rest, we claim originality only in so far as our selections include a number of interesting yet virtually unknown pieces of nineteenthcentury criticism. For advice about the Russian response to Cooper we are especially grateful to Mr M.A.Nicholson of the University of Essex. For financial and secretarial assistance in preparing this edition, we are indebted to the University of Essex and the University of California at Berkeley.

xii

Introduction

I THE CRITICAL RECOGNITION OF COOPER IN AMERICA, 1820–52

In 1824, a few months after publication of The Pioneers, the short-lived Atlantic Magazine pictured the following imaginary conversation between an American editor and an American publisher:1 Ed. —‘Pray what is all that pile of rubbish?’ Pub. —‘Imitations of Mr. Cooper’s novels, sent to us for publication; with a modest demand of a large price for the manuscript, and half the profits. Because these works have been exceedingly popular, all these writers have thought they might be equally successful, with the help of the backwoods, an Indian, a panther and a squatter.’ The publisher’s response reveals the odd mixture of pride and condescension with which American critics greeted the appearance of Cooper’s early novels. On the one hand, reviewers gloried in Cooper’s popularity, both abroad and at home. Niles’ Weekly Register crowed that Cooper had proved the falsity of Sydney Smith’s infamous sneer, ‘Who reads an American book?’ With evident delight, Niles’ mentioned that The Spy had gone through three editions in six months, that The Pioneers had sold 3,500 copies the day following publication, and that the first edition of 3,000 copies of The Pilot had been quickly exhausted.2 On the other hand, the artistry and popularity of Cooper’s tales posed problems for an American reviewer of the 1820s. Despite reverence for Waverley (1814) and Scott’s later romances, a few American critics could scarcely overcome their lingering suspicions that all fiction would readily corrupt the pure hearts of republican maidens. Secondly, Cooper’s popularity made him suspect among those reviewers most deferential to transatlantic opinion, or among those who considered ‘popular’ and ‘excellent’ to be mutually exclusive adjectives. The crucial problem, however, was the perplexingly mixed nature of Cooper’s art itself. Here was an American author of decidedly republican persuasion, who insisted upon the worth and usability of American materials, yet adopted

2 INTRODUCTION

as a fictional model the historicalromance, a form created by Scott, and one which clearly seemed dependent upon the complex, cultural wealth of the European past. Cooper’s ability to combine popularity with quality induced established, leading journals such as Port Folio and the North American Review to begin seriously to evaluate American fiction. Although by 1820 the historical romance had gained wide acceptance as a fictional form, the viability of American materials within that form remained a serious and debated question. Hence the important early reviews of Cooper’s fictions use Cooper as a vehicle for considering larger problems: is American culture sufficiently rich to support a historical romance, what are the materials best suited to the genre, and how should these materials be wrought for greatest effect? The standard procedures of reviewing in ante-bellum American literary journals were admirably suited to discuss such questions. Literary reviews were exercises in judicial criticism. Books were evaluated according to their ethical content and their ability to entertain. Literary qualities were of decidedly secondary importance, and little effort was made to judge an author according to his success in realizing his own intentions. Nearly every American review of Cooper’s novels follows the same format. The reviewer opens with a personal commentary upon the largest questions raised by Cooper’s works as a whole. He then proceeds to distinguish the good and bad qualities of the specific novel under review. He concludes with lengthy extracts of especially worthy or unworthy passages. These passages are fleshed out with plot summaries and character analyses to form a descriptive summary for readers unable to purchase or unwilling to read Cooper’s novel. The heart of the review is the opening evaluation of Cooper’s works. Although many of the reviewers were academics (especially those writing for the North American Review), scholarly explications as we understand them were non-existent. Consequently, to survey contemporary critical reviews of Cooper’s works tells us little of the works themselves, but is an engrossing introduction to the age’s conceptions of the moral function and national significance of fiction. ROMANTIC ASSOCIATIONS: 1820–30 In a letter written to Rufus Griswold in 1844, Cooper described American critical reception of The Spy: ‘The North American, and many of the old literati, endeavoured to lessen it in the public estimation, but it succeeded beyond a question.’3 Cooper was referring to the lengthycritique of The Spy which W.H.Gardiner had written for the North American Review in July of 1822 (No. 1). Despite Cooper’s detraction, Gardiner’s article is probably the most thoughtful, challenging and influential review that Cooper was to receive during his lifetime from any American journal. If Gardiner’s tone seems unnecessarily cool, as it did to Cooper, we should recall that The Spy was the first American novel which the North American Review had deigned to analyse, and that Cooper’s book was hardly faultless. Distinctive in its quality, Gardiner’s review may also have influenced the direction of Cooper’s writings. Gardiner’s critique of The Spy constitutes a compelling defence of the sufficiency of American materials for historical romance. Even more importantly, Gardiner suggests specific subjects and fictional methods which Cooper’s later American romances were to adopt.

INTRODUCTION 3

Gardiner opens by denying a complaint common to Brockden Brown, John Neal, Cooper, Tocqueville, Hawthorne and James:4 We are told, it is true, that there is among us a cold uniformity and sobriety of character; a sad reality and utility in our manners and institutions; that our citizens are a downright, plain-dealing, inflexible, matter-of-fact sort of people; in short, that our country and its inhabitants are equally and utterly destitute of all sorts of romantic association. Influenced by Archibald Alison’s associational theories, Gardiner, like many early review of Cooper, demands that the American novelist fictionalize American history in such a way as to vivify those scenes and times with which republican patriotism and natural sublimity are most clearly associated. Gardiner calls for a ‘modern historical romance… on American soil, and of materials exclusively our own’. Gardiner’s search to find the materials suitable to ‘modern historical romance’ involves a twofold problem. America lacks the ‘gorgeous palaces’, ‘monuments of gothic pride’, ‘mysterious hiding places’ and ‘ravages of desolating conquest’ necessary to a portrayal of ‘the heroic and magnificent’. At the same time, however, Gardiner argues that gradations in class and differences in character-type, so necessary for the colour of romance, are seemingly absent in America. Despite these deficiencies, however, he insists that American historical romance is possible. He urges the American novelist to cease lamenting the absence of ruins and to find romance in the historical past ‘when the cultivated farm was a howling wilderness, the abode of savages and outlaws, and nothing was to be seen in its borders but rapine and bloodshed’. Secondly, Gardiner urges the American novelist to cease lamenting thecolourless equality of America’s citizenry. The variety and richness of American romance are not to be found in class distinctions, but in differences of regional character-types: the Yankee pedlar, New York Dutchman, Mississippi boatman, Virginia aristocrat and so forth. If the beginning American novelist were to describe an American landscape when it had been wilderness, and if he were then to people that landscape with regional character-types caught up in important historical events, he would find that ‘romantic associations may become attached even to this familiar spot’. Gardiner’s call for romantic fiction about ‘the howling wilderness’ and ‘the long struggle of civilization, encroaching on the dominion of barbarism,’ was realized, not in The Spy, but in the Leather-stocking Tales. Specifically, Gardiner suggested three subjects most congenial to the American historical romancer: ‘the times just succeeding the first settlement —the area of the Indian wars, which lie scattered along a considerable period—and the revolution’. Cooper was to write The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish about Puritan settlers of the 1660s, six romances dealing with Indian wars, and five romances concerning the Revolution. The similarities in character among Cooper’s Dutchmen, Yankees, frontiersmen and gentry show that he conceived an American romance to be dependent upon the colour of character-types differentiated by region as much as class. Gardiner was dissatisfied with The Spy’s failure to picture the American landscape and thereby arouse ‘that deep moral feeling, which weds the soul to beauty wherever it exists, and breathes its

4 INTRODUCTION

own freshness and fragrance over all that it creates’. Few American novels evoke ‘that deep moral feeling’ of American nature more compellingly than Cooper’s next novel, The Pioneers. Gardiner’s assessment of the faults and virtues of The Spy established a set of critical judgments that are echoed today. Gardiner praised the vitality of Cooper’s low characters —Lawton, Katy Haynes, Betty Flanagan and, especially, Harvey Birch. Conversely, he deplored Cooper’s genteel characters, remarking on ‘the great stiffness and inelegance, relieved by a little vulgarity, of his high life’. The excitement, suspense and quick pace of Cooper’s adventure or battle sequences are set against Cooper’s inability to develop a character. Cooper’s skill at narrative never extends to ‘the power of moving the softer affections’. Cooper’s genteel women are execrable, neither genteel, interesting, nor convincingly sentimental. The dénouement of Cooper’s plot is hurried, the author is negligent about narrative details, and his grammar is sloppy. He should write less rapidly and revise carefully. And,finally, Cooper is writing within the genre established by Walter Scott, but is not yet worthy of his master. Gardiner’s judgments were to be repeated again and again. By 1826, no review of Cooper’s novels was complete without references to Cooper’s narrative power, bad grammar, unconvincing characterization of high life, convincing characterization of low life, failure to develop character, descriptive powers and inferiority to Scott. Reviews of Cooper by Sealsfield (1831, No. 22), Bowen (1838, No. 30), Simms (1845, No. 37) and Parkman (1852, No. 43) provide variations upon these same dicta. Lowell’s lines on Cooper in A Fable for Critics (No. 39) are a witty rehearsal of critical common places. Gardiner’s judgments became critical clichés, not because W.H.Gardiner uttered them, but because they remained, like many a cliché, true. As Cooper’s canon expanded, other critical judgments became equally commonplace. The descriptive scenes of The Pioneers, The Pilot and The Last of the Mohicans convinced contemporary reviewers that Cooper’s greatness lay in his power of describing nature and of testing individual men within a grand or sublime setting. It is not surprising that, in the era of Bryant’s poetry, the Hudson River School and Washington Allston, Cooper’s chief praise was that he seemed a painter with words. Cooper was repeatedly lauded as an enchanter or magician who paints pictures of forest and sea, and who sweeps the reader into the grandeur of the scene and the suspense of the action. Cooper’s reviewers indicate that critics as well as readers in ante-bellum America desired fiction that was painterly and emotional, equally dependent upon the pathetic fallacy and a thorough suspension of disbelief. The following comments, encompassing a range of sixteen years, are representative. Timothy Flint’s Western Monthly Review, analysing The Red Rover in 1828, concluded that Cooper’s ‘chief reach of power is in being a happy and faithful painter of nature’. In 1831, the North American Review metaphorically attributed to Cooper ‘all that alternation of light and shade, which make the image appear as if starting from the canvass, —all the rich and beautiful coloring, which invests it with truth and reality, —all that expression, which is the informing soul of the picture’. The Knickerbocker praised The Deerslayer (1841) because ‘the pictures which our author has here drawn of nature, we contend are second to none of those vivid limnings by which he has won his reputation’. Reviewing Afloat and Ashore

INTRODUCTION 5

(1844), Graham’s Magazine delighted in ‘the wonderful minuteness of description by which Mr Cooper brings objects directly before the eye, and feelings directly home to the heart,and enables us to see the one, and feel the other, with almost the sense of reality.’ Throughout the 1820s, praise for Cooper’s painterly description of nature was coupled with embarrassed but genuine praise for Cooper’s republicanism. In the New-York Mirror’s review of The Pilot (No. 6), Cooper was extolled as a great nationalist who celebrates ‘the honour of an infant republic, in her first struggles with the gigantic and confident power of the old empire’. After criticizing the dialogue, plot, characterization and style of Lionel Lincoln, the New-York Review and Atheneum praised Cooper for having written a patriotic tribute to revolutionary achievements (No. 7). Despite literary absurdities, the reviewer said, Cooper succeeds in capturing ‘the sturdy spirit of those times’ and in portraying his country’s ‘earliest and most sacred national associations’. The American Quarterly Review, summarizing Cooper’s achievements in one sentence, commented in 1827 that Cooper’s ‘various and acknowledged excellence has received a peculiar and happy aid from the nature of the subjects, which appeal directly to our early associations, local impressions, and sectional feelings’.5 Even the North American Review was willing to concede that The Pilot’s portrayal of American naval prowess tapped a genuine source of republican pride: ‘We have a commonplace, hackneyed sort of enthusiasm, on the subject of liberty, republican principles, etc.; but this is so common a theme of declamation in all assemblies, from Congress to the bar room, that it is ordinary and tame, except now and then, when raised for the moment by some fortunate effort, or remarkable brilliancy. But on the subject of our naval skill and prowess, although we are not willing to confess it, we are, yet, real enthusiasts. This is a string to which the national feeling vibrates certainly and deeply; and this string the author has touched with effect.’ Early reviewers were quick to grant Cooper his due as a literary pioneer who has pr that American materials are suitable for historical romance. W.H.Gardiner, despite his clear-sighted recognition of The Spy’s weaknesses, insisted that its author ‘has laid the foundations of American romance, and is really the first who has deserved the appellation of a distinguished American novel writer’. Port Folio praised The Pioneers for Cooper’s ability to interweave a romance plot (the marriage of Elizabeth Temple and Oliver Edwards) with fine scenic descriptions of the processes of American settlement (No. 4). Reviewer after reviewer praised Cooper’s first three sea novels because‘the American novelist’ had been the first to seize upon the sea as a setting for historical romance. In 1838 the Southern Literary Messenger summarized one of the chief reasons for Cooper’s early popularity. Assessing all the novels from The Spy (1821) to The Water-Witch (1830), the reviewer concluded: He [Cooper] had shown that ivied walls, time-worn castles and gloomy dungeons, were not necessary to make a land of romance; that the war of the Revolution rivalled, in romantic interest, the wars of the crusades; that the Indian warrior equally with the turbaned Saracen, was the theme of the romancer; and that heroes

6 INTRODUCTION

need not always be clad in iron mail, nor heroines have only knightly lovers sighing at their feet, or breaking lances and heads to attest their devotion. Solely by his genius and industry, he has laid the foundations for a school of romance as original, as extensive, and destined to be as perpetual as that instituted in another land by the author of Waverley. After publication of The Pioneers, nearly every review was to praise Cooper immortalizing the skills and virtues of American scouts through the figure of Leatherstocking. Cooper’s powers as the painter of sublime oceans and living ships continued to evoke unqualified superlatives whenever a new sea novel was published. Conversely, however, the standardized list of Cooper’s literary defects kept pace with the list of his merits. The Pilot, Lionel Lincoln and The Prairie convinced many reviewers that Cooper was all too willing to sacrifice probability of plot, credibility of character and grace of style for the sake of two or three grand scenes. When Obed Battius followed David Gamut, Polworth, Le Quoi and Sitgreaves, reviewers rightly concluded that Cooper’s ‘humor’ characters were boring, incredible and tiresomely talkative. Complaints against the slowness with which a Cooperian plot unfolded grew more frequent as reviewers recognized that, to Cooper, a novel always meant an extended tale in two American or three British volumes. The general critical agreement concerning the specific merits and flaws of Cooper’s art broke down as soon as reviewers considered the larger questions of the effect and purpose of Cooper’s romances. There was common praise for Cooper’s discovery of American materials suitable for historical romance, but no agreement as to how those materials should be treated. Some critics asked for a ‘heightened’ treatment of history, sympathized with Cooper’s attempt to portray the beau idéal of character, and argued that the patriotic and moral effectiveness of historical romances increases in proportion to the richness of theircolouring and the directness of their emotional appeal. Others demanded greater fidelity to historical fact and a fictional concern with the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. The struggle between the demand for romance and the demand for vraisemblance (the word ‘realism’ was unknown) indicates the fledgling state of American fictional criticism. Reviews of Cooper’s fiction were occasions for critics to debate elemental questions concerning the nature of the American novel. Among Cooper’s early reviewers, insistence upon historical authenticity is more common than a yearning for further romance. Niles’ Weekly Register was convinced that The Pioneers’ ‘great merit is, that there is probability in the highest wrought parts of the book’. W.H. Gardiner’s review of The Pioneers for the North American Review (No. 12) singled out Cooper’s portraits of Templeton’s villagers for special praise, because they form ‘precisely such a collection as we uniformly meet when we visit a young thriving village in the interior of our country’. The United States Literary Gazette argued that Cooper’s portrait of John Paul Jones failed for excess of mystery and want of historical detail. The same journal, reviewing Lionel Lincoln in 1825, praised the historicity of Cooper’s battle sequences and condemned the incredible, ‘imaginary’ plot of the Lincoln ancestry. The critic editorialized quite freely:

INTRODUCTION 7

‘The taste of the novel readers of this age requires something very different from the delicate distresses and complicated stories, with their machinery of trapdoors and dark-lanterns, which puzzled the brains and harrowed up the souls of more romantic generations.’ One year before American readers were to delight in the Satanic Magua, the Apollonian Uncas and the virtues of Hawkeye, the United States Literary Gazette had been convinced that ‘we can only be pleased with the representation of man, as nature made him, a being subject to affections and passions, capable of goodness and greatness, but variable and erring, whose thread is a mingled yarn, and whose virtues and vices alternately ennoble and debase him.’ The demand for vraisemblance rather than romance explains two charges often levelled at Cooper’s characterization. Attacks upon Cooper’s exaggerated portrayal of good Delawares and evil Hurons began with the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, but became widely accepted after Lewis Cass, writing a critique of Heckewelder for the North American Review (1828), pronounced Cooper’s Indians to bemere figments of romance, whose language was too figurative, sentiment too elevated, morality too pure and attachments too disinterested. Three years later, the North American Review argued that Cooper’s characterization of Yankees was consistently false and spiteful. According to O.W.B.Peabody, Harvey Birch, Hiram Doolittle and David Gamut were all ‘wooden nutmegs’; ‘no such ogre’ as Hiram Doolittle ‘was ever permitted to roam at large among us’. The charge that Cooper caricatured Yankees, still mentioned in Lounsbury’s day, was sounded most shrilly during Cooper’s lifetime by the New-England Magazine and the North American Review, both published in Boston. Other critics, however, found Cooper’s factual exactness to be excessive. They were convinced that Cooper had sacrificed the more inspiring and emotional shades of true romance. W.H.Gardiner may have praised the realism of Harvey Birch and Betty Flanagan, but he also, with the same breath, criticized Cooper’s ‘excessive minuteness which leaves nothing for the imagination to supply’. The reviewer of The Pioneers for Port Folio was evidently disappointed that the work was a ‘Descriptive Tale’ rather than a romance (No. 4). He lamented the lack of exciting incidents, the dearth of pathos, and the many opportunities Cooper missed for the exchange of a fine sentiment between Elizabeth Temple and Oliver Edwards. In book six, chapter one of Köningsmarke (1823), James Kirke Paulding felt driven to protest that Cooper’s desire to record the ordinary development of an ordinary American village in The Pioneers was not necessarily a sign of Cooper’s ‘tediousness’ and ‘vulgarity’, as Manhattan fashionables were assuming. The North American Review and Port Folio condemned the professional vocabulary of The Pilot, not because Cooper’s knowledge of the sea was faulty, but because the difficulty of comprehending Cooper’s expertise cramped his readers’ emotions. Cooper’s most heightened, stylized tale is probably The Red Rover, yet the Western Monthly Review urged Cooper to let his imagination roam more freely and create works ‘more faulty, it may be, but of infinitely higher interest and merit, than this before us.’ At the end of a review of The Water-Witch, the New-York Mirror counselled Cooper to abandon such plodding subjects

8 INTRODUCTION

as colonial New York and write a true romance—about American buccaneering in the West Indies! The contradictory demands of verisimilitude and romance are most apparent in the reviews of The Last of the Mohicans. In 1822, W.H. Gardiner had called upon the author of The Spy to write Indian romancesbased upon ‘the flattering pictures of their best historian, the indefatigable Heckewelder’ (No. 1). In 1826, however, after Cooper had created Uncas and his Delawares according to the Heckewelder model, Gardiner attacked Cooper’s Indians as the ‘mere creations of the poet’s brain, the half formed dreams of a disturbed imagination’ (No. 12). Cooper’s error, Gardiner explained, is that ‘he has relied exclusively upon the narrations of the enthusiastic and visionary Heckewelder.’ The inconsistencies underlying this reversal surface elsewhere in Gardiner’s review. Before condemning such improbable characterizations as the chivalrous Uncas and the diabolical Magua, Gardiner had reprimanded Cooper for the insufficient delicacy of his heroines. It is difficult to imagine how young ladies lost in a war-torn wilderness could be more genteel than Alice and Cora, yet Gardiner found them ‘miserably deficient in the grace and ease, gentility of deportment, true delicacy and unaffected refinement’ of the American maiden. Critics of the tale were aware of flaws in Cooper’s plot and his scanty accounting for characters’ motives. The New-York Review and Atheneum (No. 10), the United States Literary Gazette (No. 11), and the North American Review (No. 12) quite reasonably objected that neither genteel maidens nor a psalm singer was likely to be crossing the wilderness during the height of the French and Indian Wars. The journals declared that Hawkeye’s tracking feats strained credibility to the verge of the ridiculous. The reviewer for the Literary Gazette observed, ‘By the time one has gone nearly through with these adventures, he feels such an entire confidence in the abilities of Hawk-eye and his savage associates, that he ceases to feel any anxiety on their behalf.’ Simultaneously, however, Cooper’s reviewers singled out Cooper’s plot for special praise. Gardiner commended the ‘intense and breathless interest’ of the narrative; the New-York Review described the experience of reading The Last of the Mohicans as ‘a long and feverish dream’. The reviewers seem not to have recognized that the suspense of Cooper’s plot depended upon the improbabilities of the fictive situation. The intensity which critics praised was only possible because Cooper refused to retard his narrative by explaining away the marvellous elements of his plot. Reviewers of The Last of the Mohicans seem to have demanded both romance and vraisemblance. After criticizing the improbabilities of the novel, the critic for the New-York Review commended Cooper because he ‘gathers his materials chiefly from an acute observation of men and things’, and because he ‘paints from realities’. The Literary Gazette,having damned Cooper’s characters by standards of realism, proceeded to criticize Cooper for allowing Uncas and Cora to die rather than to marry: ‘We are in general disposed to have works of fiction terminate happily. We like a good wedding or two, to set all right.’ These kinds of contradictions, common to many reviews that closely succeed publication, were inevitable in the early reviews of a comparatively new genre. It is no wonder that Cooper, in his first preface to The Pioneers, baited contemporary reviewers:

INTRODUCTION 9

‘Just as I have made up my mind to adopt the very sagacious hints of one learned Reviewer, a pamphlet is put into my hands, containing the remarks of another, who condemns all that his rival praises, and praises all that his rival condemns. There I am, left like an ass between two locks of hay; so that I have determined to relinquish my animate nature, and remain stationary, like a lock of hay between two asses.’ The years between 1826 and 1830, between Cooper’s departure for Europe and the completion of The Water-Witch, brought forth new emphases in the reviews of his novels. During these years, the reviewers’ preference for Cooper’s sea tales over his frontier tales first emerged. Secondly, Cooper’s critics began to complain, not without reason, that Cooper had a penchant for repeating himself. And, lastly, there is a marked reaction against both the Byronism of Cooper’s sea tales and the tendency of American novelists to equate historical romance with Indian romance. These last tendencies are clearly based upon a demand for fiction that shall be socially realistic and morally unreprehensible. Cooper published four romances on American materials while he was abroad. Of these four, the two sea tales, The Red Rover and The Water-Witch, were each reviewed three times by American journals. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish was reviewed only once and The Prairie, quite inexplicably, seems not to have been reviewed by one American journal at the time of its publication. Articles upon The Red Rover and The Water-Witch continued to extol Cooper’s original genius in describing sea and ship. Whereas reviewers ascribed sole possession of the nautical romance to Cooper, they complained of the plethora of Indian romances. The North American Review, analysing The Red Rover in 1828 (No. 18), declared itself ‘disposed to greet [Cooper] the more heartily on his own element’ and acknowledged ‘We are always well inclined to take a sea-breeze, after toiling for long days in tangled wildernesses and heated towns’. By 1830, American reviewers were conscious that Cooper was publishing a novel a year. They noticed that Leather stocking and Long TomCoffin, The Pilot and The Red Rover, The Prairie and The Last of the Mohicans, all resembled one another. Charles Sealsfield, who perhaps was envious of Cooper’s success, declared in 1831 (No. 22), ‘One of the faults of our author, in fact, is a habit of copying himself, of giving his readers a second edition of the same characters.’ The Southern Review opened the only American review of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish with the sentence ‘This work is a failure.’ The reviewer went on to describe Cooper as ‘lingering in the field of his former fame’, inflicting ‘the dulness of repetition’ upon his reader, and thwarting his reader’s hope for new subjects. Referring to Indian romances, the reviewer exhorts ‘Let him desert a field which will produce no more under his mode of cultivation.’ The reviewer implies that Cooper’s imagination is so exhausted that he has resorted to imitating Catherine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie and Scott’s Peveril of the Peak. Cooper’s Indians are old hat, his dialogue is as stiff as his ‘females’, and he never provides a ‘finished performance’. No review so critical of Cooper had appeared in an American journal during the 1820s. In 1844 Cooper said of The Red Rover, ‘The success of this book was probably greater than that of any book I ever wrote.’6 Popular in America, wildly popular and highly praised in France, The Red Rover was to be the inspiration for an overture by Berlioz called Le Corsair Rouge. The American reviews, however, although they unreservedly praised the sea scenes, were uniformly critical of Cooper’s characterization of the Rover himself. By

10 INTRODUCTION

1828, American critics, sure that Byron’s day was past, and that Byron’s tendency to make villainy glamorous would corrupt the American mind, turned on Cooper’s Rover as a means of attacking the Byronic hero. The North American Review (No. 18) complained that there was ‘too much poetry’ about the Rover, that he had ‘too much of the genteel villain, and too little of the Ishmaelite, in his composition’. Sealsfield claimed that ‘romantic young ladies’ would be corrupted by the appeal of sensitive robber heroes such as the Rover and the Skimmer of the Seas (No. 22). Port Folio was the most aggressively high-minded of all the journals: ‘An individual who is represented as the terror of the seas —as the reckless violator of law and right, should not be invested with the finest qualities of the man and of the gentleman. We think them not only incompatible, but tending to sanction murder and robbery. Lord Byron and the German writers have sufficiently disgusted us with that description of heroes.’ The fact that Cooper had clearly exonerated the Rover from the charges of robbery and murder was overlooked. The Western Monthly Reviewwent so far as to damn Cooper because ‘his stories have no moral aim’ and to urge Cooper to turn from glamorous villainy to ‘tales in which domestic manners are delineated, high morals inculcated, and feelings of tenderness and benevolence moved’. If the North American Review was an accurate barometer of literary taste, novel readers of the late 1820s were rapidly tiring of the vogue of Indian romances. In a review of The Red Rover (No. 18), the North American called for new subjects for historical novels. The reviewer, Grenville Mellen, argued that the simplicity of Indian culture and the rudeness of the Indian mind preclude profundity or complexity in Indian romances. Mellen contended that ‘public taste has undergone a change’ from the gothic to tales of manners, and from narration to credible dialogue. In a total reversal of W.H.Gardiner’s nationalistic assumptions, Mellen stated ‘It is not necessary that the scene of an American work of imagination should be laid in America. It is enough that it represent our character and manners either at home or abroad.’ The Sketch Book is thrown up to Cooper as ‘a book as essentially American as it is possible for any book to be’. Cooper may not have seen Mellen’s review, but he followed Mellen’s precepts. No Indian romance appeared between 1829 and 1840. After completing The Water-Witch, Cooper wrote three novels which, unlike The Sketch Book, were uncompromisingly American in principle, but European in subject matter. The reviewers of Cooper’s early tales were so preoccupied with questions of American materials and the nature of historical romance that they often failed to see that Cooper succeeded in spite of his adaptation of Scott’s conventions, rather than because of them. No American reviewer perceived that Cooper’s powers as a painter of the wilderness indicated a profound inner struggle between the appeal of the natural life and the need for the civilized life. Nor did the many tributes to Leather stocking recognize that Natty’s importance lies not only in his virtues, but in his need to retreat from encroaching civilization to maintain those virtues. Although it is not true that early reviewers failed to praise Cooper’s republicanism (Lionel Lincoln is a case in point), it is equally true that only a superb French review in the Paris Globe (No. 15a) suggested a connection between Cooper’s descriptive powers and republican values. In 1843 Cooper was to declare ‘As a writer, I have never been supported by the written, critical opinion of my own country.’7 The reviews of the novels that Cooper had

INTRODUCTION 11

written through 1830 will notsupport his contention. Reviewers neither criticized nor cavilled at his republican values. The merits as well as the defects of Cooper’s fiction were accurately and honestly outlined. In 1826, the United States Literary Gazette summarized quite fairly the critical reception of Cooper’s early works: ‘So far Mr. Cooper certainly has had no just cause of complaint, either against the critics or against the public. The public have read him, have applauded him, and, above all, have been proud of him. The critics have not been sparing of praise where it was deserved, whilst censure has been administered with a gentle and unwilling hand.’ POLITICS AND THE ROMANCE: 1830–40 Cooper had little regard for literary criticism and remained indifferent to literary reviews of his novels. His early prefaces ridicule critics’ inconsistencies. In 1831, he wrote Samuel Carter Hall that ‘My rule is very simple. I neither seek nor avoid strictures on what I have written. When they fall in my way I read them, but I do not go out of my way to find them.’8 In a public letter of 1842 Cooper declared ‘The criticism of America has never been of a very high order—high talents easily finding loftier employment.’9 One year later, in another public letter, Cooper insisted ‘I question if there is a living writer who cares less for criticism than myself. I seldom read it—never, I might almost say, when known to be friendly, and my intimate friends know it never disturbs me. This is not probably what you have been told; but those who know me, will corroborate it.’10 There is no good reason to doubt these assertions. Cooper may have seriously weighed the early, helpful suggestions of the North American Review, but it is evident that he was too busy with his pen, his family, his activities abroad and his many political services to worry over literary notices of his fiction. His later novels reveal little regard for critical strictures on his literary deficiencies, nor did he alter his sense of the kinds of novels he wished to write for the sake of currying critical favour. Cooper’s indifference to literary criticism of his novels must be sharply distinguished from his resentment of political criticism of his works and from his prosecution of political defamations of his character. In Notions of the Americans, A Letter to His Countrymen, and various personal letters of the early 1830s, Cooper spoke of his desire to be the spokesman for republican values in fiction. During the 1830s, Cooper sought to further his country’s mental independence from the aristocratic political principles of old world oligarchies. In his words, he wished ‘to illustrate and enforce the peculiar principles of his own country, by the agency of polite literature’.11 When American reviewers declared their indifference or hostility to Cooper’s political aims, Cooper was at first stunned, then troubled, and finally angered. After the cool American reception of The Heidenmauer (1832), Cooper wrote to William Dunlop from Paris: ‘I know full well that there is a set, and a pretty large one, of quasi litterateurs at home, and soi-disant men of taste, who have no sympathies with the real opinion of the country, but then these men are in possession of all the reviews, do all the talking, and give the ostensible tone to all things, and it is too much for me to put these men down.’12 Cooper’s statement implies that American reviewers were hostile to Cooper’s novels because the reviewers were anti-republican. When one examines the reviews themselves,

12 INTRODUCTION

however, one concludes that American reviewers became critical of Cooper’s novels because they felt that treating serious political questions in a romance was an artistic sin. Nearly every journal-review of Cooper’s novels from 1830 to 1841 condemns Cooper, not because he is a republican, but because he is obtruding political matters upon the apolitical purity of the historical romance. It is crucial to distinguish newspaper reviews, inspired by party, from journal reviews which, with few exceptions, remained apolitical. Dorothy Waples’s The Whig Myth of Fenimore Cooper is an important study of the defamation of Cooper’s character by Whiggish newspaper editors, a defamation which began with Cassio’s review of The Bravo, passed through the excoriation of The Monikins and the travel volumes, and climaxed in the ridicule heaped upon the author of Home As Found. Waples, however, draws most of her materials from newspaper reviews, not from the monthly or quarterly journals. When Cooper sued for libel, he prosecuted James Watson Webb, Horace Greeley, Thurlow Weed, Park Benjamin and William Leete Stone, all of them Whig newspaper editors from New York. He did not sue the North American Review, the Knickerbocker, the New-York Mirror, or the Southern Literary Messenger, all of whom were reviewing Cooper’s works during the 1830s with little pleasure, but without obtrusive Whiggery. Although this Introduction deals with Cooper’s reception in critical journals rather than newspapers, it is desirable to summarize here the essence of Waples’s findings, for they form a crucial part of Cooper’s relations with his countrymen. Beginning in 1832, Whig editors,anxious to deny the charge that Whiggery was aristocratic, found it convenient to pillory Cooper, a revered author of Democratic leanings, as a contemptible aristocrat. Their newspaper reviews combined sarcasm, innuendo, distortion and lies into an effective defamation. The same charges were endlessly repeated: Cooper’s early novels were only amusing extravaganzas, but are superior to anything he has written since he turned his back upon America in 1826. Cooper is a querulous egotist, supersensitive to criticism, anxious to equal Scott, but unworthy of him. The European novels prove Cooper’s neglect of his native land, whereas the social novels and political writings are an outrageous libel on the American character. Cooper is a social climber without any gentlemanly background, who nonetheless apes European aristocracy and longs to establish a political aristocracy in America. Cooper’s libel suits are an attempt to destroy freedom of the press or to gain him the fame necessary for high political offices which have long eluded him. Cooper’s writings are inferior to Irving’s, Cooper isn’t selling any longer, and no one cares about Cooper, anyway. These newspaper charges are obviously extra-literary, motivated by party, and contemptibly false. Nonetheless, they influenced popular conception of Cooper for decades, even through the time of Lounsbury’s critical biography. The newspaper warfare also indicates, however, the considerable influence Cooper must have had upon national opinion. A man of letters is not often a tool of party warfare for eight years. The reviewers of literary monthlies or quarterly journals rarely descended to ad hominem arguments, wilful malice or deliberate falsification. They were convinced that Cooper had blundered artistically in forsaking forest and sea romances for novels about Europe, political tracts, or social novels about the state of American civilization. Secondly, they were genuinely puzzled by an author who vigorously insisted upon his

INTRODUCTION 13

republican principles, yet repeatedly dared to criticize the state of the republic. Some reviewers concluded that Cooper was anti-republican, some took refuge in the prejudice that politics and the novel were incompatible, but very few understood the distinction between republican principles and republican facts that Cooper proclaimed so insistently. Thirdly, reviewers were generally unable to perceive that, in A Letter to His Countrymen, the travel volumes, or Home As Found, Cooper was citing personal experience only as a vehicle for discussing national problems. Reviewers tended either to condemn Cooper for his obsession with himself or to argue, in Simms’s words, that Cooper is ‘apt to generalize too much from small beginnings’.13 In The Popular Book, James D.Hart describes the widespread demand for sentiment, patriotism and moral uplift characteristic of American public taste in the 1830s and 1840s. Readers of these decades desired fiction that was affirmative, escapist, sentimental romance. G.P.R. James and Bulwer were exceedingly popular in America; Dickens’s ability to evoke tears was widely appreciated; and the day of Mrs Southworth and Grace Greenwood was not far away.14 The novels Cooper had written before 1830 were, in part, adaptable to these kinds of taste, but no one could construe The Monikins or Home As Found as an escapist, sentimental romance. Throughout the 1830s, Cooper disregarded his readers’ expectations for idle entertainment, and none were quicker in condemning Cooper’s disregard than his reviewers. Cooper may have oversimplified in contending that the journals, like many newspapers, were motivated by political hostility, but he was correct in asserting that his countrymen showed their indifference to his republicanism by reprinting English Tory reviews of his works. Notions of the Americans (1828) received only the most superficial American notices, but the Museum of Foreign Literature reprinted the Edinburgh Review’s vicious attack upon Cooper’s Notions (No. 19c) in its entirety.15 Between November of 1837 and December of 1839, the Museum reprinted five politically motivated attacks on Cooper that had appeared in English journals.16 In February of 1838, the Knickerbocker published portions of Lockhart’s excoriation of Gleanings: England (No. 29). American journals showed little desire either to criticize the specific tenets of Cooper’s republicanism, or to defend Cooper’s republicanism from British attack. They simply reprinted English reviews, silently acceded to them, and regretted that the great romancer had delved into politics. Discussing American reception of Cooper’s works in the 1830s, Simms concluded ‘Nobody thought much of combating Mr. Cooper’s opinions, but all seemed at once impressed with the impertinence of a literary man presuming to entertain a political opinion at all.’17 Cooper’s political aims in the European tales were ignored or regretted. The NewEngland Magazine and the Christian Examiner, after rehearsing well-worn clichés about Cooper’s novels, simply did not mention that The Bravo was a political romance that attacked aristocratic oligarchy. The American Monthly Review understood Cooper’s political intent perfectly, commended Cooper’s principles, yet doubted whether republican notions ‘will serve greatly to increase the favor of the work in the eyes of the generality of readers, who take up a book ofthis description for amusement and excitement merely, and not for instruction’.

14 INTRODUCTION

Whereas the journal reviews of The Bravo were mixed, reviews of The Heidenmauer were uniformly critical. The New-York Mirror and the American Monthly Review argued, on compelling literary grounds, that The Heidenmauer was Cooper’s worst book since Precaution—dull, thin and poorly plotted. The New-England Magazine redefined the comparison to Scott: ‘We are always sorry to have Mr. Cooper leave the quarter-deck and the forests of his own country; not only because he is no where else so successful, but because among other scenes he brings himself more directly into competition with the great magician, who wields a wand a thousand times more potent than his.’ Uncomplimentary comparisons of Cooper with Scott continued in the reviews of The Headsman. The Metropolitan Magazine offered a telling criticism of the inconsistency of Cooper’s ending (No. 25). Noting Cooper’s attack on aristocratic entail, the New-England Magazine said ‘it is in bad taste to warp a production of creative art so as to suit a particular theory of government.’ After admitting that republican politics might be a good subject for an essay, the reviewer concluded ‘we do not think the beauty, or interest, or usefulness of a work of fiction increased by weaving into it this inappropriate matter.’ None of the three journal reviews of A Letter to His Countrymen seem inspired by party. The New-England Magazine (No. 26) was wittily and contemptuously critical of Cooper, not because Cooper’s politics are wrong, but because Cooper is so thin-skinned as to be upset by ‘an anonymous newspaper squib’, Cassio’s review of The Bravo. Cooper’s European novels have been criticized, the reviewer argued, not because of their political attitudes, but because ‘they are dull and heavy books.’ Although the reviewer concluded with a fleeting, Whiggish compliment to Daniel Webster, the thrust of his review was to advise Cooper not to be upset by trifles. The American Quarterly Review, commenting warmly on Cooper’s novels in 1835, wondered why Cooper should have stooped to tilt with Cassio, regretted the personal references in Cooper’s Letter, and asserted that the country is not so anti-republican as Cooper believes. In 1835 Cooper published his long deferred Monikins, a crabbed allegory containing flashes of brilliant political satire and lengthy stretches of dull matter and overwritten prose. A heavy-handed satire on American social and political pretensions was precisely what the novel-reading American in 1835 did not desire. To publish such a workupon the heels of A Letter to His Countrymen was to invite castigation. ‘The man who read The Monikins’ became a standing newspaper joke for an odd fellow. The work received only two reviews by literary journals. The New-England Magazine said that ‘the author, in following the trait [sic] of Swift, probably forgot that, although he possessed an abundance of dull malignity, he had neither the sparkling wit, the keen sarcasm, nor the polished style of the English satirist.’ The Monikins is just such an affair as any Bedlamite might produce, except that it lacks the vivacity and excitement of the mad-house’. The wit of the Knickerbocker’s review (No. 28) was, if possible, even more destructive and unfair. The reviewer termed The Monikins ‘perfectly indescribable’, ‘a mass of husks and garbage, of whose elements or use no conjecture can be formed’. Significantly, the reviewer insisted that ‘with [Cooper’s] political opinions we have nothing to do’. In his last paragraph, the reviewer pinpointed the crux of critical opposition to Cooper’s works during the 1830s: ‘It is the unhappiest idea possible, to suppose that politics can be associated, in any effective way, with romance or fiction. One is the reality, the other the ideality of life.’

INTRODUCTION 15

The four volumes of European travel sketches which Cooper published between 1836 and 1838 were frequently but tepidly noticed in the literary journals. Praise for Cooper’s descriptions of Swiss scenery turned to complaints over the thinness of the volume on France. American reviewers for the Knickerbocker and the New-York Mirror criticized the shrillness of Cooper’s republican prejudices before Lockhart’s attack on the volume was reprinted in February of 1838. The Knickerbocker accused Cooper of exaggerating British hostility to America and of sneering about nobility he was anxious to meet. A characteristic judgment of this period is the North American Review’s 1838 article entitled ‘Cooper’s Novels and Travels’. After praising the romances of the 1820s, the reviewer disparages the literary quality of the European novels and refers to Cooper’s ‘unfortunate change of scene and subjects consequent on his long residence abroad’. The first three travel volumes, he says, are easy, dull reading. While in Europe, Cooper’s selfimportance and republican sensibilities were excessive and evident. Cooper pricks the foreign lion too frequently and insults European dignitaries who are his hosts. In order for Cooper to maintain his ‘wide-spread popularity’, he should return to writing romances about the Puritan settlement, should avoid Scott-like novels about Europe, and, above all, should refrain from ‘speculating upon political topics of ephemeral interest’. Such criticisms reveal a lingering fear of offending British opinion and a strong distaste for a romancer turning politician, but they are not written by Whigs for party purposes. Of American literary journals, only the American Monthly Magazine was attacking Cooper on a party basis. As of September 1837, Park Benjamin had assumed editorship of the American Monthly, had publicly announced that the journal would be devoted to Whig principles, had proceeded to slander Cooper in a review of Gleanings: England, and, before many years, was to be sued by Cooper for libellous newspaper articles that appeared in Benjamin’s New World. Other journals criticized Cooper’s works without defaming his character. The Knickerbocker, as critical of Cooper as most magazines of the late 1830s, opened its pages to Cooper’s review of Lockhart’s Life of Scott. While condemning the presumed captiousness, satire and fault-finding of Cooper’s writing, the New-York Mirror defended Cooper from Lockhart’s defamation of his character.18 The earliest reviews of Homeward Bound express relief that Cooper has left contentious politics and returned to picturing the sea. The Gentleman’s Magazine called Cooper’s new sea tale an ‘atonement for the jaundiced sermonizings lately inflicted upon the public’. As soon as journals grasped Cooper’s purposes in creating Steadfast Dodge, however, howls of outrage arose. Between September of 1838 and March of 1839, literary magazines reviewed Homeward Bound three times and Home As Found five times. Among these eight reviews, it is difficult to find one word complimentary to Cooper. Some of the criticism is literary. Critics complained of the dullness of the plots, the lack of convincing characters, the awkwardness of Cooper’s dialogue, and his lack of refinement. The Southern Literary Messenger, reviewing Home As Found, criticized Cooper for thinly fictionalizing personal experience and manipulating characters to make predetermined points. Most reviewers concentrated their strictures on Cooper’s picture of American society. At a time of great national self-congratulation, a few years before the height of manifest destiny, Cooper had written an uncompromising satire on American provincialism,

16 INTRODUCTION

American vulgarity, the levelling impulse, and toadying to Britain. Reviewers responded by denying the truth of Cooper’s portrayal of American society in general, and Steadfast Dodge in particular. The New-York Mirror called Home As Found ‘a most unfair and injurious picture of American character and society’, and the New York Review (No. 31) lamented that Cooper wrote the book, not as a ‘faithful rebuke’ of national failings, but in aspirit of ‘scornful sneers arising from morbid feeling, disaffection, disappointment, and assumed superiority’. Reviewers either damned Steadfast Dodge as a malicious and false caricature, or wrongly complained that Cooper had slandered the better newspaper editors by making Dodge representative of the entire tribe. The Gentleman’s Magazine, which had praised Homeward Bound, opened its review of Home As Found by declaring ‘Considered as a novel, it is flat, stale and miserably dull; as a literary composition, it is puerile and common place; as a national disquisition, it is marked with undeniable stains of prejudice and ill-temper.’ Both misunderstanding and fear underlie the shrillness of these criticisms. Because critics could not grasp that the republic could be criticized according to republican standards, they concluded that Cooper must be un-American. Secondly, they evidently feared that Cooper’s portrait of America would be welcomed and believed in England. The Southern Literary Messenger declared: ‘The true patriot, in heart as well as principle, may see faults, but not faults only or chiefly; and he will naturally love to dwell on his country’s honor rather than her reproach. He will not exaggerate her weak points, or expose them wantonly to the ridicule of foreigners, who gloat over every ludicrous representation of American character.’ A defender of Home As Found, writing, oddly enough, in a Whig newspaper, the New Yorker, says of the novel ‘The very fact that our citizens are so enraged at it, proves that [Cooper] has succeeded in his design. They know so much of it to be true, that they are afraid that the world abroad will take all of it for fact.’19 The complaint that a romancer should have turned social critic is common to most reviews of both novels. The North American Review (No. 30) asserted that Cooper’s recent works ‘abound in uncalled for political disquisitions’ which have made him a ‘ruthless partisan’ rather than the detached man of letters he should be. Reviewing Homeward Bound, the Knickerbocker warned ‘The errors and follies of one’s own country, are themes upon which it is far better to say nothing that is erroneous, than all that is true, and especially in a novel, where, in either case, elaborately introduced, they must be out of place.’ The Southern Literary Messenger was certain that Home As Found would fail because ‘the great majority of readers seek in a novel, as their principal and almost exclusive object, light and agreeable entertainment.’ The treatment accorded Cooper by American literary journals during the 1830s is a sorry spectacle. Because Cooper was considered thenational romancer, he was condemned for expressing political and social realities in fiction. The complex, yet honest position Cooper adopted as a republican critic of America was falsified or dismissed. None the less, journal reviewers were comparatively kind. In 1838 Park Benjamin wrote for his Whig sheet, the New Yorker, a short article called ‘Mr. Cooper’s Last Novel’, which purported to be a review of Home As Found. Within one page, Benjamin called Cooper ‘a superlative dolt’, ‘our most democratic aristocrat’, ‘Funnymore’ and ‘the craziest loon

INTRODUCTION 17

that ever was suffered to roam at large without whip and keeper’.20 Home As Found is dismissed as a series of ‘lying caricatures’. Benjamin summarizes Cooper’s career since 1826 by stating ‘When in England, he blackguarded the English; now he is at home, he blackguards his own countrymen. He is as proud of blackguarding as a fishwoman is of Billingsgate.’ Weed, Greeley, Benjamin and Webb cared only to slander the man. The viciousness of their language is markedly different from the honest confusion of literary magazines. The Whig defamation of Cooper illustrates the licence of newspaper journalism in the 1830s. Reviews in literary magazines, however, indicate that readers and critics of the 1830s had simplistically concluded that social criticism could have no place in fiction. NEGLECT AND RESTITUTION: 1840–51 The claim that, during the 1840s, Cooper’s works were unread and unreviewed is not strictly accurate. American literary magazines neglected Cooper’s novels, yet felt an obligation to notice them. Although Cooper published sixteen novels between 1840 and 1851, only Wyandotté, The Crater, The Sea Lions and The Ways of the Hour were reviewed in detailed articles. Many of the sixteen novels, however, were granted one- or twoparagraph critiques in columns of literary notices. The few article-length reviews of Cooper’s works dealt largely with Cooper’s early novels or refought the political controversies of the 1830s. Neither Satanstoe nor The Chainbearer, two of Cooper’s finest works, seems to have been accorded even one literary notice. The North American Review did not consider one of Cooper’s works between the History of the Navy (1839) and The Ways of the Hour (1850). After concluding in 1841 that The Deerslayer was ‘beneath the dignity of a critique’ because Cooper had ‘written himself out’, the Southern Literary Messenger closed its columns of literary notices to Cooper for the remainder of his lifetime. Cooper was given curt notices by reviewers, but had by no means lost his public. William Charvat has revealed that in the middle and late 1840s, Cooper’s sales were at least the equal of his sales in the 1820s. Owing to the lower royalty rates and lower book prices prevailing in the 1840s, however, Cooper’s financial return was considerably less per volume than it had been earlier. Thus, America’s first professional author not to be dependent upon political sinecures, editorial work, or an independent income, spent his last decade caught in a pattern of continued popularity, critical neglect and decreasing returns.21 In face of these obstacles, the quality of his later novels is remarkable. The Pathfinder (1840) was Cooper’s last critical success. It was widely noticed, if not reviewed, and every journal began its praise of the book by welcoming Cooper’s return to his proper field of endeavour, the forest romance. The New-York Review, labelling The Pathfinder ‘a true work of genius’, praised its scenic descriptions and complimented Cooper on refraining from the ‘disgusting self-obtrusion of his two or three last productions’. Such eulogies of the last two Leather-stocking Tales were not solely motivated by literary preference for romance or by critical relief that Cooper was no longer controversial. Reviewers of 1840 and 1841 were evidently tiring of sensation novels.

18 INTRODUCTION

Whereas in 1828 Cooper’s Byronism had been condemned for its amorality, in 1841 Natty Bumppo was praised as a young reader’s model for virtue. The Knickerbocker said that The Pathfinder was ‘an admirable production, full of fine pictures of exalted virtue in the humble paths of life’. Cooper’s portrait of Deerslayer evoked pietistic moralizing from the New-York Review: ‘After the pictures of vice and horror into which most novels of the day habitually conduct their readers, we feel grateful to Mr. Cooper for the traits of genuine nobleness with which his last delineation is complete; and, vitiated as the public taste is, by the tinsel, the sophistries, and the impurities of many undeservedly popular romances, we cannot but believe that our emotions will be heartily shared by those who follow Deerslayer on his ‘First War-Path’. Among more friendly critics, Cooper was beginning to represent the fine, simple writer whom we ought to read in this degenerate, complex age. During the same years in which literary magazines were commending The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer as Cooper’s timely return to romance, some of the best contemporary critics used Cooper as apretext for attacking the very genre of historical romance itself. A review of Mercedes of Castile in Arcturus (No. 34), credited by Perry Miller to Evert Duyckinck,22 opens by declaring that ‘The Romance of History is an exhausted vein of writing from which the ore has long disappeared’. Duyckinck protests that the public is surfeited with trashy imitations of Scott. The historical romance turns history to fantasy; the humane concerns of the novel devolve into third rate melodrama. The taste of the present age prefers truth to fiction, the present to the past, the ordinary to the legendary. Great though Cooper is, he works in an outmoded genre. Reviewing Wyandotté, Poe prefaces his study of the novel by denigrating Cooper as the best of merely popular writers (No. 36). To write romances about sea and forests, sailors and Indians, is to select subjects that are easy to manage well, intellectually simplistic and ‘excessively hackneyed’. Until one considers sales figures, it is difficult to reconcile the strictures of these two critics with the general welcome accorded the last two Leather-stocking Tales. Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), however, was not selling. Arcturus struggled through two brief years of existence (1840–2). Cornelius Matthews’s realistic novel of New York, Puffer Hopkins (1842), was a popular failure. Cooper, by contrast, wrote his wife that ‘Lea has sold near 4,000 of Pathfinder. It has great success, in the worst of times.’23 Evidently, Poe and Duyckinck were prophets of a literary taste for which the general reader and many a reviewer of Cooper were not yet prepared. In the years between The American Democrat (1838) and the Littlepage Manuscripts (1845–6), Cooper had persistently explained his conviction that the ideal American republic is one in which the electorate would vote educated, landed gentlemen into political power. In defence of his ideal, Cooper attacked egalitarian demagoguery whether it manifested itself in the press, the law or the Anti-Rent controversy. By the late 1840s, Cooper’s political attitudes had been both misunderstood and deliberately falsified. The days when declared Democratic publications defended Cooper while declared Whig

INTRODUCTION 19

publications attacked him were gone. Noticing The Redskins in 1846, the American Whig Review, having observed that Cooper, like many Whigs, opposed Anti-Rentism, complimented Cooper on being a Christian, a gentleman and an upholder of Constitutional property rights. One year later, the U.S. Democratic Review gave an extended notice to The Crater, the only detailed commentary which the book received. At the end of The Crater, Cooper had described the overthrow of an ideal republicbecause of the successes of egalitarian demagogues. After ridiculing Cooper’s social and religious prejudices, criticizing Cooper’s didacticism, and praising the sea scenes, the Democratic Review commented on Cooper’s politics: ‘Unless we have greatly mistaken his political philosophy, he is a monarchist; he is certainly in favor of a union of church and state, and would have the state subordinated to the church, and the people subordinate to the priesthood’. Not only is the reviewer wholly in error; he is a Democrat who seems to believe his misreadings. The two extended notices of Cooper’s last novels were wilfully contemptuous. Because The Oak Openings (1848) refers to American defeats during the war of 1812, the Democratic Review concluded that ‘Mr. Cooper seems to have called up [these defeats] purposely to chasten our pride at a moment of great exultation.’ Cooper has unearthed new subjects for his tedious didacticism; ‘the book begins with a downright temperance lecture.’ Cooper’s later Indians are ‘degenerate’, his political views are ‘loose’, he indulges in ‘bursts of trite religious enthusiasm’, and ‘threadbare truisms’. The reviewer’s climactic detraction is to link Cooper with G.P.R.James. Accusing Cooper of ‘the filling up à la James, of the skeleton of a meagre plot’, the reviewer explains that The Oak Openings is being noticed only out of deference to Cooper’s former reputation. The Ways of the Hour (1850), Cooper’s last attempt to combine social criticism with fiction, was handled even more roughly. After eleven years of silence, the North American Review opened its analysis of The Ways of the Hour by stating that ‘Mr. Cooper as a novelist is but the ghost of his former self. He committed literary suicide at least ten years ago.’ All of Cooper’s novels since The Monikins reveal Cooper’s ‘bad taste’, ‘garrulity’, and ‘prejudices’. Cooper’s novels are ‘libels upon his countrymen at large’. Ever since The Bravo, Cooper has been writing neither fiction nor essay but a mongrel hybrid which is tedious as fiction and misleading as social commentary. Cooper’s criticisms of trial by jury are simply wrong. American jurors are impartial and levelheaded; popular election of judges is a glory of the democratic way. In the late 1840s, a movement to forgive Cooper his intrusions into politics, to forget old quarrels and to re-establish him as ‘the American novelist’ becomes quite discernible. Its beginnings were two lengthy articles on Cooper by Rufus Griswold (1844) and William Gilmore Simms (1845, No. 37).24 Cooper’s affinities with the ‘Young America’ movement resulted in the gracious notices of Cooper in Duyckinck’s Literary World, two of which were written by Herman Melville (Nos.41a, b). Brownson’s Quarterly Review wrote a sympathetic and extremely perceptive account of the social and political causes for Cooper’s unpopularity (No. 40). The eleven-volume Putnam edition of Cooper’s works (1849–51) called forth a number of tributes to Cooper’s past achievement. The desire to forgive and to praise culminated in the memorial tribute paid to Cooper after his death. On 25 February 1852, Daniel Webster presided over a public commemorative

20 INTRODUCTION

meeting, attended by Irving, Bancroft, Bryant, Griswold, and Ripley. Before Bryant delivered his ‘Discourse on Cooper’s Life, Character, and Genius’ (No. 42b) written tributes from Prescott, Melville, Dana, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Parkman, Morse, Kennedy and Simms were read (No. 42a). No public commemoration of an American author by his peers has been more impressive. These closing tributes to Cooper were remarkably similar. At the time of Cooper’s death, his countrymen continued to think of him as the painter of American landscape, the pioneer in the sea novel, and the patriot who proved that American materials were viable for fiction. Praise for Cooper’s moral courage, integrity and manly adherence to republican principles was common. Regret was still expressed, however, that he used fiction as a vehicle for social criticism. Dr Francis, writing his reminiscences of Cooper in 1851, delighted to think of Cooper as ‘the creator of genuine nautical and forest romances’ rather than ‘the critic of our republican inconsistencies’.25 After praising Cooper’s ability to portray the American landscape, Francis Parkman declared that he had ‘never read one…of that numerous progeny which of late years have swarmed from Cooper’s pen’ (No. 43b). It is significant that Putnam chose to reprint the Leather-stocking Tales, five sea tales and The Spy. Cooper’s contemporaries evidently thought it a kindness to overlook The Bravo, Home As Found, The Crater or The Ways of the Hour. During Cooper’s early years, many friendly reviewers advised him to strive for more realism within the genre of historical romance. During the 1830s, after Cooper had turned to social criticism, his contemporaries demanded uncontroversial, historical romances. When Cooper returned to forest romances in the early 1840s, he was condescendingly praised as the best of familiar old storytellers. And, during the later 1840s, when he had evolved fictional methods for combining historical romance with social criticism, his Wallingford and Littlepage novels were ignored. Because the historical romance was an accepted and familiar genre, contemporary critics were able to decide upon the fictional merits and deficiencies of Cooper’s art with surprising acumen.Whenever Cooper tried to adapt the romance form to social purposes, however, they damned his attempt and misread his politics. Amid all the inconsistencies of Cooper’s reviewers, their conviction that politics is inadmissible in fiction remained unaltered. II COOPER AND EUROPE As long as the critical yardstick by which Cooper was measured remained literary, English and American reviewers treated Cooper very much alike. In England as in America, Cooper was praised as a painter of landscapes, a pioneer of the sea novel, and a master of adventure suspense. His dialogue, high life, style and characterization of women were widely deplored. Early English reviews were both frequent and complimentary. Precaution received only one American review; the three British journals that noticed the book were generally favourable, and none perceived that the writer was an American. The Spy was noticed by at least seven journals, The Pilot by six, and The Red Rover by eight. No American journal reviewed Cooper’s early works with such unabashed enthusiasm as Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine. (Colburn and Bentley were Cooper’s British publishers).

INTRODUCTION 21

Cooper’s sea novels were widely preferred to Smollett’s. Until the publication of Notions of the Americans (1828), English journals tolerated Cooper’s unobtrusive republican leanings and refrained from hectoring him merely because he was American. The major journals, however, did not deign to notice Cooper’s early novels. The Edinburgh Review ignored Cooper entirely until it reviewed Notions of the Americans and Hall’s Travels simultaneously (No. 19c). The Quarterly Review accorded Cooper two condescending sentences in 1826 and remained silent until 1837, when Lockhart pilloried Cooper’s character and republicanism in a review of Gleanings: England (No. 29). Blackwood’s published only John Neal’s acid, envious comments (No. 9) and even the Westminster Review, Whiggish though it was, did not review Cooper until 1829. British journals were even more insistent than American journals in noting that, except in sea fiction, Cooper must be considered the best of Scott’s imitators. Until 1828, it is difficult to determine the extent to which British critical opinion of Cooper influenced American reviewers. Exactly parallel criticisms were made on both sides of the Atlantic, but Americanjournals rarely mentioned specific British reviews. Journal reviews of both nations were often published simultaneously. By 1823, however, American reviewers frequently noted with pleasure that Cooper was well received in England. The publication of Notions of the Americans reveals American critical deference quite clearly. The book provoked positive as well as negative responses from British journals (No. 19a), but American journals were conspicuously silent until the Edinburgh Review delivered its philippic against Cooper, his notions, American self-congratulation and the fallacies of republican thought in general (No. 19c). The American Museum of Foreign Literature and the New York American both reprinted the Edinburgh’s article. American reviewers, however, continued their discreet silence. Cooper’s publishers wrote to Cooper that ‘The book has not met with so much favour as you anticipated—the natives find fault with it because it praises them, and we are strongly inclined to believe that if it had been a severe attack upon them it would have been almost as well received’.26 A second and equally important instance of American deference to British Tory opinion of Cooper occurred after the publication of Gleanings: England. J.G.Lockhart wrote a scurrilous vilification of the book and its author, denouncing Cooper as an ignorant, illbred libeller whose republican sensibilities were vulgar as well as ludicrous. The Museum of Foreign Literature copied Lockhart’s article in full, while the Knickerbocker, the Gentleman’s Magazine and the New Yorker rejoiced at the viciousness of Lockhart’s attack. In reviewing Lockhart’s Life of Scott, Cooper could only reply that the Quarterly Review had shown itself ‘notoriously devoted to profligate political partisanship, reckless alike of truth and decency’.27 His protests had little effect; when the Edinburgh Review or the Quarterly Review spoke, Americans listened. Cooper’s republican attitudes did not hinder his popularity on the Continent. His works were translated into French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian and even Persian. In Germany, Cooper’s contemporary popularity nearly defies credibility. Preston A.Barba lists 105 German translations of individual works and five separate collections of Cooper’s tales, all published between 1820 and 1853.28 Italy, Spain, and Russia were not so very far behind Germany in their appetite for fresh editions of The Spy, the Leather-stocking Tales,

22 INTRODUCTION

the sea novels, and (especially in Italy) The Bravo. Yet the enthusiasm for Cooper in these countries generated little serious critical writing—except in Russia. His most sympathetic and perceptive European audience was French.The firm of Gosselin brought out The Works of Fenimore Cooper in thirty volumes between 1836 and 1852. In France, Cooper’s republicanism continued to be a source of admiration, rather than a source of embarrassment, as in America, or detraction, as in England. The reasons for Cooper’s astounding popularity in nineteenth-century Europe may be conjectured from a superb review of Cooper that appeared in the Paris Globe, 19 June and 2 July, 1827 (No. 15a). Cooper emerges as a vivid portrayer of low-born, solitary heroes who exercise the height of human virtues and human potentialities amid the sublimity of an unspoiled landscape. Cooper shows us the promise of a new civilization in which laws are the guarantee of individual liberties. In the pages of Cooper we see the political revolution which made such a society possible, and we witness the processes of settlement which are bringing it to fruition. These human actions transpire against a natural backdrop emblematic of the fearsome size and future promise of American culture. Unlike Walter Scott, who hides his lack of principle behind a ruse of objectivity, Cooper proclaims his faith in liberty, country and the dignity of human nature. Cooper represents to the European reader the very type of a noble American republican. The reviewer for the Paris Globe sees in Fenimore Cooper everything that the Bourbon régime had denied and everything that European civilization had lost. His words reveal his desire to believe that Fenimore Cooper’s dream of republican America is the reality of America. In Notions of the Americans, Cooper himself was to try to claim his republican dream as a historical actuality. One hopes that Cooper, who was living at St Ouen during June and July of 1827, may have seen the Globe’s review, He would have understood and appreciated it. III COOPER JUDGED BY HIS PEERS: 1823–98 Maria Edgeworth was the first considerable foreign writer to express her admiration for Cooper’s genius (No. 2); a full century later, in 1923, D.H.Lawrence and Maxim Gorky closed the long, many-languaged tale of major critics and fictionalists who commented, sometimes derisively but more often encomiastically, on le grand écrivain américain.29 The substance of their comments is often less illuminating than that of a lesser-known critic like W.H.Gardiner (No. 1) or an anonymous reviewer like ‘F.A.S.’ (No. 15a), and sometimes it amounts to no morethan a passing echo of judgments already made popular by the common herd of reviewers. Coleridge, for instance, tells us that:30 ‘it would be no less unjust than injurious to Mr. Cooper to institute a comparison between him and Sir W.S. (and comparisons generally are in bad taste, weeds of criticism indigenous to shallow soils). If I mistake not Mr. Cooper’s genius would fit him better to fiction of a more avowedly imaginative kind: the further he is from society, the more he seems at home.’

INTRODUCTION 23

In spite of his objection to ‘comparisons’, Coleridge himself seems shackled by the hackneyed supposition that Cooper is an unsuccessful would-be Walter Scott; for he goes on to complain that Cooper’s prominent fault is that he ignores the wise Hesiodic maxim, ‘Fools, they do not know how much more a half is than a whole’.31 Perhaps Coleridge is right—that Cooper should avoid the ‘society’ which Scott portrays so well—but the same advice, ungarnished with Greek, was given a year earlier by an anonymous London Magazine reviewer (No. 17) and was to be given again and again, even after Satanstoe proved the critics wrong. Coleridge’s epistolary aside is only marginally more interesting than Matthew Arnold’s equally casual remark that ‘a good deal of it [The Pioneers] is boring, but it is wonderful how the topography and manners gain in interest by having been in the country….’32 Arnold was then, in 1888, reading The Pioneers aloud to his family. This tells us something about Arnold as a family man, and about the status of Cooper’s fiction as family literature during the later nineteenth century. But Arnold’s mention of Cooper belongs, as does Coleridge’s, to the history of popular literary taste rather than to the history of serious literary criticism. More significant to the student of literature, though no more penetrating as a criticism of Cooper, are the jottings in Goethe’s diary which record his enthusiastic progress through Cooper’s early sea and forest romances.33 Like Coleridge and Arnold when they described their reactions to Cooper, Goethe was near the end of his career when, in 1827, he read The Prairie and spoke admiringly of Cooper’s rich materials, imaginative treatment of them, and ability to sustain a complex narrative. But unlike Arnold and Coleridge, Goethe was still in full possession of his literary powers: he not only read Cooper but actually made use of incidents and descriptions from The Pioneers when he wrote his own Novelle (1826).34 No doubt Goethe’s brief observations on and appropriation of a few materials from one of Cooper’snovels add little to our understanding of Cooper, but they place the subject in the context of the development of world literature. The same is true of similarly brief mentions of Cooper by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy. If we compare Goethe’s treatment of space and homely manners in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) with that in Novelle, we may well decide that Cooper’s example altered the great German writer’s perception of such matters; and, as we shall note later, it was Cooper’s eyes that helped several of the major Russian novelists to discover aspects of their own country. Their discoveries may, in turn, point to strengths and weaknesses in the American author. More satisfying, less problematic, are the more extended discussions of Cooper by his great contemporaries and nineteenth-century successors. The most important of these come from America, England, and France, though Belinsky’s several pieces on Cooper were probably more influential in Russia than was any other nineteenth-century critical study of Cooper in the country of its origin. For sheer quality of perception, the American and French contributions of Gardiner, Parkman and Twain, ‘F.A.S.’, and George Sand, are undoubtedly the finest; while the English commentaries before Conrad’s (1898) are almost uniformly disappointing. Three major nineteenth-century critics—Hazlitt, SainteBeuve, and Belinsky—wrote at some length about Cooper, but their appraisals are perhaps less interesting to us today than those of his fellow novelists. It is true of course that a novelist turned critic writes as an interested party. Some of Balzac’s enthusiasm, for

24 INTRODUCTION

instance, must be attributed to his perception that he could turn Cooper to his own creative use. On the other hand, some of Twain’s obsessive if witty malice is surely due to his auctorial self-definition as the enemy of humbug and historical romance. In either case, self-interest may energize perception, and it will be disciplined by a profound awareness of formal and technical possibilities. THE JUDGEMENT OF COOPER’S AMERICAN PEERS Of the many important American writers who wrote about Cooper, some four or five contributed criticism which has a permanent interest. These are Edgar Allan Poe, Francis Parkman, Mark Twain, and—for rather special reasons—Bret Harte and Herman Melville. Among them, only Poe was what we should now describe as a professional literary critic, whose business it was to judge books, give reasons for his judgments, and relate those reasons within a consistent critical theory. Allof them, of course, were creative writers of some merit; and Melville and Twain at least were, at their greatest, greater fictionalists than Cooper himself. Parkman, though a professional historian, belonged to the romantic school of history which derived in large part from Scott and Cooper; and as the historian of the French in North America he was in some ways brilliantly equipped to appreciate and criticize Cooper. Harte was scarcely a great writer in any mode; but he had a close first-hand knowledge of both Cooper and actual frontier conditions, and he had the talent to exploit this knowledge in a good-humoured burlesque of the Leather-stocking saga. The confident air of Poe’s literary reviews, the ease with which he dismisses and categorizes all manner of writers and readers, create the impression that he is a critic who knows what he thinks and who, above all, thinks consistently according to settled principles. In fact, he changed his mind more than once about the nature of Cooper’s strengths and weaknesses. In 1841, reviewing Mercedes of Castile, he remarks that ‘We did not look for character in it, for that is not Cooper’s forte; nor did we expect that his heroine would be aught better than the inanimate thing she is…’35 Two years later, in his longer and more ambitious review of Wyandotté (No. 36), Poe refers to ‘heroes which have been immortalized by our novelist’ and goes so far as to say of Maud Meredith that, ‘we know no female portraiture, even in Scott, which surpasses her; and yet the world has been given to understand, by the enemies of the novelist, that he is incapable of depicting a woman.’ More important than this inconsistency is Poe’s uncertainty about the extent to which Cooper’s appeal depended on the inherent universal appeal of his ‘themes’ or on his treatment of them. Like most nineteenth-century reviewers, he responded to ‘those magnificent sea-pictures for which, in all their sternness and sublimity, he is so justly celebrated’ and to ‘the best passages’ of Cooper’s forest romances.36 In these quotations, the importance of treatment is implicitly acknowledged. Moreover, in 1836, he had made an important distinction between the Cooper who, describing the same scenes in The Headsman and Sketches of Switzerland, produced ‘mediocre’ drawings in the former but, in the latter, achieved ‘the vivid coloring of a master’.37 By 1843, however, while readily

INTRODUCTION 25

admitting the power of Cooper’s forest and ocean narratives, Poe denied that artistry had much, if anything, to do with that power. He argued that Cooper’s theme —life in the Wilderness—is one of intrinsic and universal interest, appealingto the heart of man in all phases; a theme, like that of life upon the ocean, so unfailingly omniprevalent in its power of arresting and absorbing attention, that while success or popularity is, with such a subject, expected as a matter of course, a failure might be properly regarded as conclusive evidence of imbecility on the part of the author. (No. 36). While placing Cooper ‘at the head of the more popular division’ of writers who employ such themes, Poe maintained that the serious artist, the ‘man of genius will rarely, and should never, undertake either….’ We might well hesitate to accept a critical precept which, if acted on by Cooper’s successors, would have deprived us not only of much of Melville’s and Conrad’s greatest fiction but even of Poe’s own Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym! None the less, Poe’s over-simple formulations take us to the centre of nineteenthcentury critical controversy about the nature of Cooper’s genius and achievement. Do Cooper’s ‘themes’ have such a universal appeal? Or was it Cooper’s treatment of them that helped to create that appeal? It was easy to show, as Poe cleverly did, that Cooper’s technique was often faulty, his observation was often inaccurate, and his genteel heroes and heroines were usually feeble stereotypes. But was there some larger artistic vision at work on materials which, from the standpoint of the English novel tradition, were exceptionally unpromising? Herman Melville, at any rate, had no doubts about either the value of Cooper’s themes or the artistic genius that Cooper exhibited in handling them. Reviewing The Sea Lions in 1849 (No. 41a), Melville speaks of a descriptive ‘force peculiarly Cooper’s’ and surmises that ‘Few descriptions of the lonely and terrible…can surpass the grandeur of the many scenes here depicted.’ To him, Cooper’s style seems ‘singularly plain, downright, and truthful’. To him, Cooper is ‘our national novelist’. And well might the author of Moby Dick pay this homage to the author of The Sea Lions. For as Thomas Philbrick has shown,38 The Sea Lions with its sombre imaginative vision, involving both a world-view and a matching literary method, offered Melville a crucial model for his own Leviathan. Indeed, the greatest ‘criticism’ of Cooper’s sea and forest romances is probably to be found, by implication, in Moby Dick and that even darker journey, down the Mississippi— Melville’s The Confidence-Man. In his Memorial tribute to Cooper (No. 41c), Melville speaks of his works as being ‘among the earliest I can remember, as in my boyhood producing a vivid and awakening power upon my mind’. Francis Parkman attests to the same experience, and the ‘awakening power’ inhis case was perhaps still more decisive. For there seems little doubt that his great life-work on the French in North America was partly inspired by an early reading of the Leather-stocking tales. It was therefore especially appropriate that the editor of the North American Review chose him to review Cooper’s Works in January 1852 (No. 43b). He had already demonstrated his fitness for the task by publishing two minor

26 INTRODUCTION

masterpieces of ‘Western’ literature—The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac. He knew the West and he knew how to write; and judging from his North American Review article, he made it his business to master the art of judicial criticism as well. Many of his sentences have a Johnsonian ring: ‘It is easy to find fault with The Last of the Mohicans; but it is far from easy to rival or even approach its excellences.’ Or: ‘An educated Englishman is an Englishman still; an educated Frenchman is often intensely French; but an educated American is apt to have no national character at all.’ And there is something more here than mere Johnsonian manner. Though he is sometimes oddly fastidious about what is allowable in fiction—and at one point both fastidious and ironically realistic about the propriety of dragging genteel heroines through the wilderness—Parkman has a powerful masculine intelligence which is wonderfully responsive to many of Cooper’s strengths and which is able to make out the case for Cooper with considerable stylistic authority. Parkman’s starting point is the premise that Cooper’s strengths and weaknesses stem from his being a practical man, ‘able and willing to grapple with the hard realities of the world’. His characters, his descriptions of nature, and his style all have a manly directness and fidelity to nature. Reversing the position taken by Poe, Parkman argues for the ‘Nature’ of Cooper as against the ‘Art’ of Hawthorne or Bulwer: ‘Cooper is no favourite of dilettanti critics. In truth, such criticism does not suit his case. He should be measured on deeper principles, not by his manner, but by his pith and substance. A rough diamond, and he is one of the roughest, is worth more than a jewel of paste, though its facets may not shine so clearly.’ At the same time, Parkman does not make Cooper out to be an artless naif; in particular, he denies that Cooper’s descriptions are ‘but a catalogue of commonplaces—mountains and woods, rivers and torrents, thrown together as a matter of course’. And when he goes on to discuss particular works by Cooper, he singles out scenes in The Pathfinder as demonstrating Cooper’s ‘peculiar powers’ of artistry: ‘Several of these scenes are borrowed in part from Mrs Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady; but in borrowing, Cooper hastransmuted shadows into substance. Mrs Grant’s facts…have an air of fiction; while Cooper’s fiction wears the aspect of solid fact.’ The striking authenticity of Cooper’s portraits of men and nature are not due to meticulous observations or reproduction of appearances. Writing of The Last of the Mohicans, Parkman says that The book has the genuine game flavor; it exhales the odors of the pine woods and the freshness of the mountain wind. Its dark and rugged scenery rises as distinctly on the eye as the images of the painter’s canvas, or rather as the reflection of nature herself. But it is not as the mere rendering of material forms, that these wood paintings are most highly to be esteemed. They are instinct with the very spirit of the wilderness; they breath the sombre poetry of solitude and danger. Coming from the future author of La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, this is high and informed praise indeed. To be sure, though he insists that there is something special about Cooper’s response to his subject-matter—Cooper somehow captures its authentic ‘spirit’ and ‘poetry’ —Parkman does not explain how this response is communicated. He is, we feel, closer to the truth than Poe was, and he puts Cooper’s faults (which he sees no less

INTRODUCTION 27

clearly) in a more just perspective. But his case, though moving and perceptive, does little to protect Cooper against the inspired malice of a Mark Twain. Few writers have been so open as Cooper to parody and servile imitation. From the start, reviewers noticed his repetitious use of certain fictional devices; a style which at its worst was both inflated and ungrammatical; and the improbable, even marvellous quality of many of the feats of his heroes. Even those who respected Cooper for some of his achievements were not always able to withstand the temptation to poke fun at faults which were so obvious to all discriminating readers and embarrassing to his admirers. James Russell Lowell, for instance, had a proper appreciation of the genius which had created Natty Bumppo; but, writing at a time when Cooper sometimes imitated his own earlier writings in a crude and rather desperate way, Lowell felt impelled to make out amusingly that all of Cooper’s characters were more or less faint carbon copies of his one great character (No. 39). This was unfair, but it was in the nature of the enterprise to exaggerate weaknesses or tendencies towards weakness. Bret Harte went further in his ‘Muck-A-Muck’ (No. 45), calling attention to a variety of Cooper’s stylistic mannerisms and mocking several famous scenes from The Pioneers. Harte may have been inspired by Thackeray’s earlier burlesque of Cooper, ‘The Stars and Stripes’ (No. 38b). Though ‘Muck-A-Muck’ is aless subtle and wide-ranging satire than Thackeray’s, it is also less studied, and dependent on a close knowledge of Cooper for its appreciation. Neither work, perhaps, can be said to show extraordinary powers of parodistic invention. Twain’s satire, on the other hand, is superior to all other satires of Cooper because it is at once a close critique of passages from The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer and a brilliant improvisation on them (No. 46). A summary of Twain’s criticisms would show that he added nothing to what earlier critics, Poe in particular, had found wrong with Cooper’s powers of observation and expression; but no summary could do justice to what is as much a work of art as of criticism. As a recently published earlier version of the essay shows,39 Twain took a good deal of trouble to get his critical persona right. In the earlier version he characterized himself as ‘Mark Twain, M.A., Professor of Belles Lettres in the Veterinary College of Arizona’, and his criticisms of Cooper took the form of a lecture to ‘Young Gentlemen’ on how not to write. In the textus receptus he abandons explicit selfcharacterization, but as the title ‘The Literary Offences…’ suggests, he behaves like a virtuoso prosecuting lawyer exposing the worthlessness of a witness’s testimony and bringing him relentlessly to book for his violations of fundamental literary law. The most hilarious passages in the essay convict Cooper by a method which is critically specious yet wholly unanswerable. On the basis of a minor slip or two, Twain rewrites Cooper’s own scenes, conjuring up grotesque images and situations which are then enlarged monstrously by reference to descriptions which, in their original context, were by no means foolish or inconsistent. Twain’s improvisations have a vigorous comic life of their own, and his easy colloquial voice is the perfect instrument for making any of his quotations from Cooper sound, at first hearing, hopelessly stilted and blundering. At the close of his essay on Cooper, Francis Parkman laments the failure of writers to develop a truly independent American literature based on the ‘rough beginnings’ of the national novelist. In fact, Melville was doing just that, and Twain was to follow suit not long after. It is therefore a little sad to find Twain joining what Parkman called the dilettanti

28 INTRODUCTION

critics in denigrating Cooper’s achievement. But Twain near the end of his career could not be expected to admire Cooper as generously as did Melville near the beginning of his. All literary and social historical factors apart, there was an immense temperamental cleavage between, in Melville’s words, that ‘great, robust-souled man’ Cooper and the man who was before long towrite ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’. Though the Cooper who wrote The Crater or the Littlepage trilogy might have understood Twain’s tale, this was not the Cooper that Twain and other nineteenth century American readers knew or cared about. THE JUDGMENT OF COOPER’S BRITISH PEERS In 1832 Washington Irving contributed an introduction to an English edition of William Cullen Bryant’s Poems. To gain a friendly reception for the comparatively unknown Bryant, he reminded his English readers of the winning ways of Bryant’s (and his own) countryman:40 The British public has already expressed its delight at the graphic descriptions of American scenery and wild woodland characters, contained in the works of our national novelist, Cooper. The same keen eye and fresh feeling for nature, the same indigenous style of thinking and local peculiarity of imagery, which give such novelty and interest to the pages of that gifted writer, will be found to characterize this volume, condensed into a narrower compass and sublimated into poetry. Irving is, as always, generous in his praise of Cooper, and his appeal to the popularity of Cooper’s ‘descriptions of American scenery and wild woodland characters’ confirms the existence of a cultivated readership for the Leather-stocking tales. None the less, it is surely significant that Irving, not Cooper, is the inevitable guarantor of the good character of Bryant to the British reading public. On the evidence of reviews, private letters, and humorous articles by the great and small alike, Cooper remained a foreigner—their ‘national novelist’ —in England as he did not in France or Russia. Irving it was who won the hearts of the contemporary British reading public, from Scott and Dickens down. In a rapid survey of American literature before 1829 (No. 20), William Hazlitt explained—somewhat unfairly—why Irving ‘the lover received from his mistress, the British public, her most envied favours’; and also, by logical inference, why Fenimore Cooper was never likely to receive so warm an embrace. Quite simply, Irving was ‘deficient in nerve and originality…’; he was merely the most accomplished and ingratiating imitator of ‘our classic writers’. Cooper, on the other hand, and in spite of many faults, ‘has the saving grace of originality. We wish we could impress it, “line upon line, and precept upon precept,” especially upon our American brethren, how precious, how invaluable that is’. But Hazlitt’s was not the voice of the British public or even, except on this occasion, of the Edinburgh Review when it spoke ofCooper. Indeed, many of Hazlitt’s notions about America and the problems facing American writers were taken directly from Cooper’s Notions of the Americans, which earlier in the same year the same Edinburgh Review had attacked in terms which were as insulting to his country as to Cooper

INTRODUCTION 29

himself. That review openly advanced England and English letters as the very pattern of modern Civilization (No. 19c). Hazlitt’s article is a serious and honourable act of restitution; and though it misses much and rarely errs on the side of generosity, it is perhaps the best article on Cooper and American literature generally that appeared in a British review during the first half of the nineteenth century. To say so is to claim very little: Cooper’s Americanness and frankness about what he considered British defects annoyed the British, at the same time as they enjoyed his novels; and though they enjoyed them, they lacked the critical means to do those novels justice. Though he condemns nationalism elsewhere in the article, Hazlitt tactfully ignores Cooper’s nationalism. It is in this connexion that the inevitable comparison with Scott is introduced—but in a way that does honour to both authors. Scott’s great secret, and Cooper’s too, ‘lies in his transcribing from nature instead of transcribing from books’; the difference is that Cooper’s nature is American nature, and though it may be commonplace, ‘it is American commonplace’. Other British critics could not equal Hazlitt’s detachment, especially when they reviewed Notions of the Americans (No. 19) or Gleanings in Europe: England. Lockhart’s denunciation of the latter book is not only a vilification of Cooper and America but also—and this quite openly—a blow on behalf of the Tory party at home (No. 29). Though less vehement in feeling and more useful as criticism, Leigh Hunt’s reviews of The Pilot and The Bravo (No. 21) are also quite partisan; they are merely partisan on behalf of the Liberal party at home and republican principles everywhere. And Thackeray’s two extended pieces on Cooper (No. 38), though raised above the vulgar level of party strife, are in their poised and ironic way as defensively English as their target is perceived to be, at different times, jingoistically or tormentedly American. Thackeray’s case is the more interesting because his burlesque of Cooper, entitled ‘The Stars and Stripes’, reveals a pretty extensive sampling of Cooper’s fiction and an intimate knowledge of his stylistic vices and mannerisms. ‘The Stars and Stripes’ itself suggests a relish for what it parodies, and we know from Thackeray’s diary that he admired The Prairie and considered it superior to the Scott novels he was reading at the same time.41 In his triumphant 1846 review of TheRedskins, there is, perhaps, a touch of compassion and respect in his ironic comment that Cooper’s observations on America, ‘coming so mildly from whence they do, will doubtless be received in a kindly spirit’. Clearly, like that of most other British readers, his response to Cooper was complex and even contradictory. Political considerations aside, British criticism of Cooper is hagridden by neoAristotelian assumptions about what fiction should be. Though he praises Cooper for being true to American nature, Hazlitt joins Maria Edgeworth (No. 2) and Leigh Hunt (No. 21) in identifying Cooper with the Flemish genre painters; and, with Hunt, echoes the Johnsonian caveat against an artist numbering the stripes of the tulip. However, as an admirer of The Pilot, Hazlitt does not share Scott’s equally neo-Aristotelian objection to Cooper’s use of technical nautical language (No. 20), and he is too emancipated from neoclassical theories of decorum to feel, as does Maria Edgeworth, that a spy should never be a hero and a gibbet should never be brought on the fictional stage. The problem these great writers and critics had in common was the lack of a theory of fictional realism capable of explaining or measuring any modern prose fiction whatever,

30 INTRODUCTION

including their own. Maria Edgeworth, though she objected to the inherent meanness of a spyhero, herself advanced the art of fictional realism by making the narrator of Castle Rackrent a lowly old family servant. Scott, though he objected to the specialized nautical language of The Red Rover, himself used unfamiliar Scottish dialect abundantly and advantageously in the service of verisimilitude. Hazlitt, though he supposed ‘a few dashes of red ochre are sufficient to paint the body of a savage chieftain’, allowed that close analysis and densely particularized descriptions were ‘excusable’ in Clarissa, ‘where all was studied and artificial’. He evidently sensed that the English social novel of contemporary manners was different in kind from the historical novel-cum-romance of Scott and Cooper; but he failed to perceive that Richardson’s technique was not only ‘excusable’ but absolutely necessary, and that the hybrid form practised by Cooper and Scott in their dealings with ‘remote’ times and places required an artful combination of Flemish detail and Romantic suggestiveness. Moreover, in his desire to define Irving, Brockden Brown, and Cooper by contrast with each other, Hazlitt grossly exaggerated the packed particularity of Cooper’s descriptions. In scrutinizing and describing Cooper’s realism, his earlier British critics were almost as fumbling and helpless as the Fenimore Cooper who eventually emerged from the pages of Mark Twain. It remained to a naturalized Englishman, Joseph Conrad, to say the last and best word of nineteenth-century British criticism of Cooper (No. 47). Like Francis Parkman, he had special qualifications to appreciate Cooper’s achievement; and if, like Parkman, he failed to define that achievement with any precision, he at least communicated an adequate response to it. Indeed, his point about Cooper’s realism is much the same as Parkman’s: ‘He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method may be often faulty, but his art is genuine. The truth is within him. The road to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that—only it is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time.’ Not, that is, through the mere heaping up of particulars, but through an organizing vision of the whole scene: ‘His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon.’ Conrad stresses, not the dead externality that Hazlitt found in Cooper’s descriptions, but their inwardness— ‘the profound sympathy, the artistic insight….’ He is vague but right as far as he goes, and not until D.H.Lawrence’s revolutionary modern reading of the Leather-stocking tales did any British critic do any better. Conrad’s essay still belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of Cooper criticism in Britain: not only is it highly impressionistic in approach, but, in the spirit of a maritime nation, it especially cherishes the sea novels rather than the tales of wilderness adventure. THE JUDGMENT OF COOPER’S FRENCH PEERS In his 1840 review of The Pathfinder (No. 33), Balzac claimed that Cooper owed his fame ‘in a great measure to the passionate admiration of France…’; ‘Cooper has been understood and, above all, appreciated in France.’ As noted earlier, the translations and sales of his works certainly testify to a great popular appreciation of Cooper in France. But that popular appreciation was great in other countries as well, including countries like Spain which have bequeathed us no significant contemporary critical discussions of

INTRODUCTION 31

Cooper’s work. What is special about the French reception of Cooper before the Second Empire is that the French liberal intelligentsia did indeed understand Cooper well and leave behind a record of their understanding. The countrymen of Rousseau, Condorcet, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville were in many ways better equipped than their English or American brethren to respond to the sweep and poetry of Cooper’s vision of primitive society in eclipse. They were, moreover, the countrymen of Cooper’s friendand political ally, Lafayette. Of the two reviews reproduced here from the liberal Paris Globe (No. 15) one is very frankly republican in its sentiments and prefers Cooper to Scott on politicalethical grounds; whilst the other more literary critical study, by Sainte-Beuve, does not fail to register its appreciation of Cooper’s American championship of ‘justice and liberty against oppression and force’. And although Balzac’s review is apparently apolitical, George Sand’s 1856 essay on Cooper clearly is not. Her essay, possibly the best of all nineteenth-century studies of Cooper, represents a late flowering of the intellectual and political traditions which fostered the French appreciation of his work. The Globe article signed by ‘F.A.S.’, already mentioned in this Introduction, was doubtless contributed by one of the eminent hands who made that journal the most intelligent organ of liberal intellectual thought of its time. Cooper was one of its favourites, and it certainly did much to establish his reputation among the European intelligentsia. The article by ‘F.A.S.’ (No. 15a) is notable for the range and depth of its information not only about Cooper but about American society and European political thought. Indeed, unlike Sainte-Beuve’s piece, it is not much concerned with Cooper’s technical or formal characteristics; instead, it interprets, with rare adequacy, Cooper’s vision of man and society. Though the frame of reference is that of political philosophy rather than of literary criticism, nothing in nineteenth-century criticism so well epitomizes the central issues and drama of The Pioneers (and of the Leather-stocking saga as a whole) as this statement by ‘F.A.S.’— Thus, in this profound work are embodied, under circumstances favourable to both, yet working one against the other to their mutual detriment, the two dreams of Rousseau: the man of nature, and a social contract unanimously agreed upon. Over the ruins of both these dreams triumphs the system of Benthamite utilitarianism; we glimpse the future realization of the terrible doctrine of Malthus. Sainte-Beuve’s essay, on the other hand, is literary—and, in one respect, the less perceptive for being so. Sainte-Beuve attacks Cooper where he is doubtless vulnerable: as a maker of plots. But precisely because Sainte-Beuve is so well schooled in the French neoclassical tradition of formal analysis, he fails to see that Cooper’s plots (often sorry affairs in themselves) serve well enough to stage the moral and cultural confrontations which constitute the true action of a Cooper novel. At the same time, Sainte-Beuve’s sensibility is sufficiently romantic to respond sensitively to Cooper’s descriptions of the sea and seamen; his analysisof the metaphorical language of The Red Rover is unusually close and perceptive for its time. Of the nineteenth-century French novelists who were influenced by Cooper, the most eminent was Honoré de Balzac, whose early (1830) novel of peasant revolt, Les Chouans,

32 INTRODUCTION

was partly inspired by the Leather-stocking tales, and whose mature vision of urban social conflict was transposed from the same model.42 Though he knew Cooper only through French translations, he knew those translations very thoroughly indeed, and he mentioned them frequently and favourably throughout his career.43 From such a student of Cooper, and one moreover whose analyses of his French contemporaries’ works were frequently acute, we might well expect a major critical essay on the subject. But his single extended study of Cooper, a review of The Pathfinder (No. 33), is disappointingly reminiscent of what eventually takes shape, in the mind of the reader who has surveyed many contemporary reviews, as the quintessential nineteenth-century appreciative critique of Cooper. This critique begins by venturing a lengthy comparison between Cooper and Scott, in which Scott is preferred as a literary craftsman and depictor of social action and manners, as the more varied writer and as the discoverer of the genre which both he and Cooper use; but in which Cooper is given credit as the best of Scott’s followers and as an original in his way, as (above all) the creator of Leather-stocking and as the great descriptive prose-poet of the forest and ocean wilderness. Only in some half-dozen tales of forest or ocean romance does he seriously rival Scott or even command much interest as a writer. His ‘females’ and stock comic characters are, the lot of them, feeble and boring. Though he responds magnificently to his proper subjects, his genius seems peculiarly dependent on them for its strength. And so Balzac’s almost archetypal nineteenth-century appreciation of Cooper runs. Balzac is able to respond freshly to a particular work, The Pathfinder, but when he comes to generalize about Cooper he falls into all the more enlightened, yet still severely blinkering, stereotypes of Cooper criticism. Balzac’s friend George Sand shared his admiration for Cooper, but, writing after Cooper’s death and after the publication of such works as Satanstoe and The Sea Lions, she was able to gain a more just as well as more original perspective on Cooper’s achievement (No. 44). She too invokes the comparison with Scott, but the comparison at least justifies itself by helping to explain the greater tension and depth of feeling in Cooper’s work. Like ‘F.A.S.’, but in terms rather more appropriate toliterary discussion, she defines the central drama of the Leather-stocking saga: A European poet of this period would not have hesitated to hang his mournful harp amongst the willows of the riverbank in order to pour his curses on civilisation and the iniquities which fatefully serve its purposes. An American was bound to be reluctant to stigmatize these iniquities from which the very strength and independence of his people had been born…. This fateful situation of a power acquired at the cost of suffering, murder and fraud, pierced his heart with a deep, philosophical remorse; and, in spite of the tranquility of his constitution and talent, it floated like a psalm of death over the scattered and mutilated remains of the great families and the great forests of the vanquished land. It is this impulse of wonder and regret which must have inspired his most beautiful pages, and it is because of this that, at certain times, he has ventured more and excited more than Walter Scott, whose calm impartiality is less spiritually challenged. Scott is still the lofty bard who laments, too, the great days of Scotland; but the hymn he sings (and sings more skilfully, it must not be misunderstood) has less to bear. He mourns for a

INTRODUCTION 33

nation, a power, above all an aristocratic way of life. What Cooper sings for and laments is a noble people exterminated; a serene natural world laid waste; he mourns all nature and all mankind. These comments develop the perceptions of ‘F.A.S.’, and they antici-pate, with superior tact, D.H.Lawrence’s analysis of the schizoid elements in Cooper’s vision. Less valuable, yet interesting as another example of the way George Sand can take a critical cliché and make it yield new insights, is her examination of the means Scott and Cooper use to transform their ‘Flemish’ pictures into something rich and strange. That examination, though hardly applicable to works so patently non-Flemish as The Prairie, say, or The Red Rover, does have relevance to our reading of The Pioneers or Satanstoe or even The Crater. But what finally confirms one’s sense that George Sand is a cut above most, very possibly all, nineteenth-century critics of Cooper, is her sure perception of the value of largely neglected novels like Satanstoe and The Sea Lions. She wrote about Cooper when, it is true, all the evidence was available, but also when all the critical clichés had hardened. Drawing on a great experience of life and on the perceptions of a still lively eye, she made those clichés an advantage rather than a liability, and she vindicated Balzac’s claim that it was in France especially that Cooper was understood as well as appreciated. Yet she was also his last major French critic; he continued to be popular with the non-intellectual reader, but his name dropped out of serious literary discussion.44

COOPER JUDGED BY HIS RUSSIAN PEERS That Cooper’s name still means something among major Russian writers is strikingly verified by a reference to ‘Nathaniel Bumppo, Cooper’s “Hawkeye”’ in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, a novel published in 1971.45 Similar brief allusions to Cooper are to be found in the Epilogue to The Brothers Karamazov, in Chekhov’s story ‘The Boys’, and in two works by Tolstoy.46 The allusions have little critical value as such, but they do suggest how completely the Leatherstocking tales were absorbed into the culture of the literate classes. By the end of the nineteenth century, they were, in Russian as elsewhere, perhaps chiefly the children’s classics of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie; or so it is suggested in Chekhov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s stories, where Cooper appears as the favourite of young boys and girls. Yet Cooper, the enemy of Fourierism and all such communistic notions, may have been partly rescued from the children by the success of the October Revolution. This is indicated at any rate by Maxim Gorky’s 1923 introduction to a popular edition of The Pathfinder, which was clearly aimed at the newly literate masses.47 In his introduction, Gorky holds up the illiterate Natty as an illustrious example of a man of the people, and refers to the diaries of leading social revolutionaries for proof of the salutary influence of Cooper’s hero. Important as Cooper may have been in Russian popular culture during the past hundred years or so, the heyday of his critical reputation was, as in most other countries, between about 1825 and 1845. Gogol seems to have ignored Cooper, in spite of the apparent relevance of The Prairie or The Last of the Mohicans to his Cossack epic Taras Bulba. But the

34 INTRODUCTION

two other major figures of Russian literature during that time, Pushkin and Lermontov, knew and admired Cooper. Belinsky records that Lermontov considered that ‘Cooper was greater than Scott, that in his romances there is more depth and more artistic unity’.48 His famous story ‘Taman’, in A Hero of Our Time, is remarkably like Cooper’s equally Byronic The Water Witch; but it was doubtless the Cooper of the Leather-stocking tales who most interested Lermontov, poet of the wild peoples and landscapes of the Caucasus. This must also have been true of Pushkin, who participated memorably in the great early and middle nineteenth-century Russian literature of Cossacks and Caucasus. None the less, though the influence of Scott is abundantly clear in his The Captain’s Daughter, there is little if any trace of Cooper; and it may well be that, whilst he could usefully borrow Scott’s wavering hero and plot mechanisms, he was so richly supplied with Russian materials very like Cooper’s American materials that he had no occasion to borrow from him. Indeed, though Pushkin believed that all of Scott’s imitators were ‘far behind him except for Cooper and Manzoni’, he was critical of Cooper for idealizing the American Indians.49 And it is certainly true that Pushkin’s and Gogol’s Cossacks are drawn with more realism—and with, perhaps, comparable mythic power. Yet their myth is not the myth of the Leather-stocking tales. Their Cossacks, an impulsively generous and brutal people, have also a barbaric grandeur; but it is not the grandeur of Cooper’s American Adam, in whose music the notes of Ossian, Rousseau, and Chateaubriand still hauntingly reverberate. That music worked a spell on the European imagination, and when, as in Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, the Russian writer wished to register a sensitive European Russian’s initial impression of the Cossacks in their wild domain, he invoked Cooper’s Pathfinder. Perhaps, as in The Cossacks, the Russian noble savages were not quite what a reading of the Leather-stocking tales led the European Russian to expect. But that illusion and its disappointment were also a part of Russian experience, as Tolstoy perceived not only in The Cossacks but in another, unfinished story about a bear hunt:50 It was all splendid: the first hours of daylight, the dew soaking our feet, the backwoods, the longing for morning to come, for a swim in the lake—but this was due less to the fact that it was not the hunting season and we killed nothing, than that these hunting trips aroused in me still stronger, unsatisfied desires. I thought of Cooper’s Pathfinder, the virgin forests of America, the splendid things that could be done in these forests. And everything about me now was wrong and merely irritated me and made me despondent. Like Domingo Sarmiento when he portrayed the Argentine Gauchos,51 Tolstoy was moved by a Cooperesque vision of primitive man and sublime nature; but, again like Sarmiento, he also knew what it was to be disillusioned. The Russian, the Argentine— they could not, as could his great French admirers, swallow Cooper whole. Yet they could not reject him entirely; for their pampas and steppes were like Cooper’s prairie, and, if they lacked an ideal Natty Bumppo, they had their own Mahtorees and Bush families—and Cooper had been there first. Just as the Globe had promoted Cooper’s work among the educated classes in France, so the great journal of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, Notes of the

INTRODUCTION 35

Fatherland, published translations of his novels (most notably Katkov’s translation of The Pathfinder in 1840)as well as enthusiastic reviews of them. More or less closely associated with this journal were such leading liberal intellectuals as Annenkov, Herzen, and Chernyshevsky—all of whom mention Cooper briefly but favourably in their writings52— and it was edited by V.G.Belinsky, whose championship of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, and early recognition of Turgenev and Dostoievsky did so much to define the canon of classical Russian literature. Had Cooper received such distinguished editorial backing in America or England—indeed, had America been blessed with a journal as distinguished and critically daring as the Globe or Notes of the Fatherland—Cooper as well as other great nineteenth-century American writers might have gained more sensitive appreciation and more solid remuneration during their lifetimes. Unfortunately, a French reputation could do Cooper only a limited amount of good in the English-speaking nations; and a Russian reputation, like the rumours of vast popularity in Denmark or Turkey or Spain, could do him no good at all. References to Cooper are scattered throughout Belinsky’s voluminous collected works; he privately shared Lermontov’s view that Cooper was superior to Scott and publicly proclaimed that they were equals; he projected, but regrettably never wrote, a lengthy detailed analysis of his favourite Cooper novel, The Pathfinder.53 The more regrettably because the three somewhat substantial pieces on Cooper which he did write (No. 32) were clearly hasty affairs and by no means up to the standard of, say, his long detailed study of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. When he lacked the time and scope for such a study, he tended, as in these pieces, to resort to a form of rhapsodic impressionism in which Cooper emerged not only as the equal of Scott and Gogol, but, in his best work, of Shakespeare, too. Yet if they had been available in the West, these pieces, with their splendid unqualified commitment and disregard for current critical clichés, might have served as a useful corrective. In this connexion, it is particularly interesting to compare Belinsky’s with Balzac’s discussions of The Pathfinder. (It is quite possible that Belinsky had seen Balzac’s review, which appeared a year before his own first notice of the novel.) Balzac, for instance, finds Mabel Dunham ‘not true’, her characteristics ‘are painfully invented and useless….’ Belinsky goes to the other extreme, describing her as ‘a splendid, grandiose manifestation of the female world’! The truth, surely, lies somewhere between. But Belinsky is closer to the truth when he turns upside down Balzac’s epigrammatic contention that ‘The grandeur of Cooper is a reflection of the Nature he depicts; that ofWalter Scott is more peculiarly his own. The Scotchman procreates his work; the American is the son of his’. Belinsky, on the other hand, if he follows anybody, follows those critics like Hazlitt who stressed the poverty of American fictional materials: ‘Cooper surpasses Scott in creating vast, majestic edifices seemingly out of nothing, amazing us with the apparent simplicity of materials and poverty of resources from which he creates something great and boundless. The seething, energetic life of Europe, in all its complexity and diversity of colour, itself provided Scott with a rich and ready source of materials.’ Moreover, Belinsky argues (contrary to Balzac), that it is not so much for its ‘marvellous tableaux’ of forest and lake adventure that The Pathfinder is remarkable, but for its ‘subjective’ human drama—the drama of Natty’s self-abnegation. His point, and surely one that is well-taken, is that The Pathfinder is markedly less ‘objective’ and ‘epic’ than the

36 INTRODUCTION

previous Leather-stocking tales. To agree with this discrimination, however, is not necessarily to disagree with Balzac’s fine appreciation of the wonderful descriptive passages in this novel. As in France and, for that matter, in England, Cooper was especially cherished by the liberal and radical factions in Russia. Belinsky’s warm review of The Bravo (No. 32a), like Leigh Hunt’s, must have been partly politically inspired. But unlike Hunt, he could not call attention to what Cooper doubtless intended his English and Russian readers to perceive—the resemblance between the Venetian tyranny of his novel and the illiberal institutions of their own countries. Perhaps it was as well that the translation of The Bravo which Belinsky found so illiterate and unintelligible was no better; for the Tsarist censorship might then have perceived that The Bravo was infinitely more inflammatory than any of the passages it suppressed in the works of Pushkin or Gogol. So, if it had any occasion to notice it, might the Soviet censorship today recognize in Cooper’s old novel a bearing on the Stalinist period of Russian history. Before that period set in, however, Maxim Gorky wrote a short but memorable paragraph on the Leather-stocking tales which belongs in the tradition of Marxist humanism and, more generally, in the international liberal tradition to which Belinsky, George Sand, W.C.Bryant, and Cooper himself belonged: As an explorer of the forests and prairies of the ‘New World’ he blazes new trails in them for people who later condemn him as a criminal because he has infringed their mercenary and, to his sense of freedom, unintelligible laws. All his life he has unconsciously served the great cause of the geographical expansion of material culture in a country of uncivilized people and—foundhimself incapable of living in the conditions of this culture for which he had struck the first paths. That paragraph from Gorky’s 1923 introduction to The Pathfinder is here quoted from the great Hungarian critic Georg Lukàcs, himself an admirer of Cooper’s achievement.54 In spite of the barriers of time, language, and politics, that achievement has continued to communicate itself to successive generations of critics, sometimes with the help and perhaps just as often with the hindrance of previous generations. If we read those critics with a critical eye, they can help us to understand Cooper and also, it may be, to catch a glimpse of the shortcomings of our own historical perspective on his works. THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY RECEPTION By the end of the nineteenth century, Cooper had become a classic of children’s literature in all nations dominated by Occidental culture. But to serious adult writers and critics committed, at the one extreme, to the doctrines of Zolaesque Naturalism, or, at the other, to the ideals of Jamesean craftsmanship, the old-fashioned historical romance of Scott and Cooper seemed both juvenile and slap-dash. Mark Twain’s unfair and hilarious attack on Cooper did not go to such extremes, but its critical premises were those of the age of Zola and James. What is remarkable about Twain’s essay—its witty fantasy-life aside—is that its author was Quixotic enough to expend so much energy savaging an

INTRODUCTION 37

apparently lifeless opponent. To be sure, he could extract favourable statements about Cooper from the writings of academic critics like Brander Matthews and Thomas Lounsbury; during the same period, such solid editorial figures as Howells and Brownell wrote respectfully and at length about America’s pioneer novelist.55 Nonetheless, there is a trace of condescension in nearly all late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century critical discussions of Cooper. From his peculiar vantage-point Joseph Conrad might be able to relish the American’s sea novels, but even to him Cooper appeared a grandly archaic figure out of the age of sailing ships. Appreciation of Cooper’s achievement could not get very far until it found a critic of Romantic genius who was in touch with Freud on the one hand and with Crèvecoeur on the other. D.H.Lawrence’s essays (1919–23) are revolutionary in their reading of Cooper as aproper stuffed shirt who, at deeper and largely unconscious levels, was a symbolist poet expressing the racial myth of America.56 They have probably done more to reawaken serious interest in Cooper than any other critical study, both through their own direct impact on non-specialist readers and through their patent influence on such widelyread critics as Henry Nash Smith, Leslie Fiedler, and R.W.B.Lewis.57 Less momentous than Lawrence’s essays but seminal in its own way was an edition of The American Democrat, the first since 1838, which was brought out in 1931 with an introduction by H.L.Mencken, later supplemented by Robert E.Spiller.58 That editorial relationship was itself significant. Mencken was a famous editor and pundit for whom an appreciative introduction to Cooper’s forgotten book was a mere by-blow in the course of his campaigns against the more crass and mindless aspects of American democracy. Spiller was the distinguished scholar who devoted the first half of his career to establishing the importance of Cooper’s criticism of American society, and to creating the biographical and bibliographical basis for modern scholarly study of Cooper.59 More recently, work along the same lines has been advanced by James F.Beard, Jr, in his great edition of the Letters and Journals, his forthcoming critical biography, and his important essay on Cooper bibliography and scholarship.60 The last especially deserves mention in the present context, for it is a comprehensive, detailed survey of the subject under general discussion here. The renascence of interest in Cooper during the present century can now be seen to have been inevitable—not because he was an artist of the stature of Hawthorne, Melville or James, but because, as mythic poet and social critic extraordinary, his importance was bound to grow with the growth of studies in American cultural history. V.L.Parrington, A.M.Schlesinger and Marvin Meyers have considered Cooper a crucial figure in determining the political and social conflicts within the Jacksonian mind.61 Two informative critical biographies of Cooper, written by James Grossman and Donald Ringe, have emphasized the cultural implications of the entire Cooper canon, and Kay Seymour House recently has demonstrated the national significance of Cooper’s recurring character-types.62 Literary critics who treat American fiction as an expression of cultural and economic tensions—Marius Bewley, A.N.Kaul, and E.M.Fussell among them—have written extensively of Cooper.63 It is now apparent that Cooper’s importance to the study of the development of American civilization cannot be denied; it cannot even be easily exaggerated.

38 INTRODUCTION

None the less, critical studies written during the past decade have begun to emphasize Cooper’s deliberate artistry in works that tended to be overlooked both by the nineteenthcentury reading public and by twentieth-century cultural historians. Many years ago Yvor Winters demonstrated the artistic quality of The Water Witch;64 more recently, The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, The Bravo, Satanstoe and The Sea Lions have been ‘discovered’. There are good reasons for the growing interest in Cooper’s art. His position as a founder of the predominantly American tradition of fictional romance has been firmly established by Richard Chase and Joel Porte.65 New approaches to Cooper’s relations with contemporary artists—the Hudson River School, Sir Walter Scott, and other sea novelists —have created new perspectives from which to view Cooper’s achievement.66 Such studies of genre and aesthetics cannot, however, supersede the best work of cultural historians; rather, they are contributions to cultural history in their own right; but they are redressing the balance by making out a fresh case for the literary value of Cooper’s fiction. That case is much more impressive than an earlier generation of American literary scholars could have supposed possible. NOTES 1 Atlantic Magazine, I (1824), 3. 2 Niles’ Weekly Register, xxii (May 1822), 192–3; xxiii (February 1823), 354; xxv (February 1824), 357. 3 The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James F.Beard (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), iv, 459. 4 W.H.Gardiner’s review of The Spy, North American Review, xv (July 1822), 250. (No. 1). To reduce the number of footnotes, subsequent references to all American reviews listed in the bibliographical Appendix shall be omitted. The text indicates the particular review which is quoted or discussed. 5 American Quarterly Review, i (1827), 341. 6 Letters and Journals, IV, 461. 7 Letters and Journals, IV, 346. 8 Letters and Journals, II, 134. 9 Letters and Journals, IV, 261. 10 Letters and Journals, IV, 369–70. 11 A Letter to His Countrymen (New York, 1834), 98. 12 Letters and Journals, II, 360. 13 W.G.Simms, ‘The Writings of Cooper’ in Views and Reviews in American Literature, ed. C.H.Holman (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 287. 14 James D.Hart, The Popular Books: A History of America’s Literary Taste, (Berkeley, California, 1961), 67–139. 15 Edinburgh Review, xlix (1829), 473–525 reprinted in Museum of Foreign Literature, xv (1829), 510–32. 16 Museum xxxi (1837), 413–24 reprints the Quarterly’s attack on Gleanings: France. Museum xxxii (1838), 180–95 reprints the Quarterly’s attack on Gleanings: England. Museum xxxv (1839), 529–32 reprints Fraser’s attack on Cooper’s review of Lockhart’s Life of Scott. Museum xxxvii

INTRODUCTION 39

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

(1839), 74–9 reprints the Monthly Review’s attack on the History of the Navy. Museum xxxvii (1839), 449–55 reprints the United Service Journal’s attack on History of the Navy. Simms, ‘The Writings of Fenimore Cooper’, 282. New-York Mirror, xv (1838), 239. New Yorker, vii (1839), 179–80. New Yorker, vi (1838), 173. William Charvat, ‘Cooper as Professional Author’, New York History, xxxv (1954), 496–511. Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956), 89. Letters and Journals, IV, 34. Simms’s ‘The Writings of Cooper’ was first published in Magnolia, i (September 1842), 129– 39 before it was incorporated into Views and Reviews in American Literature. International Magazine, iv (1851), 454. Dorothy Waples, The Whig Myth of Fenimore Cooper (New Haven, 1938), 73. Knickerbocker Magazine, xii (October 1838), 350. Preston A.Barba, ‘Cooper in Germany’, Indiana University Studies, ii (1914), no. 21, 52–104. D.H.Lawrence’s two famous essays on Cooper are most familiar in the version printed in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923), which was written after his disillusionment with America. Less incisive, but more respectful and fair, are the versions first printed in 1919 in the English Review and subsequently collected in The Symbolic Meaning, ed. A.Arnold (Fontwell, Arundel, 1962). Gorky’s brief appreciation was first published as an introduction to a Russian translation of The Pathfinder in 1923; an English translation is available in Maxim Gorky, Literature and Life (London and New York, 1946), 96–7. The Lawrence and Gorky essays are not included in this edition; but Lawrence’s essays are generally accessible, whilst the only critically interesting paragraph in Gorky’s piece is quoted subsequently in this introduction. S.T.Coleridge, Unpublished Letters (London, 1932), II, 412. Letter dated April 1828. Ibid. Matthew Arnold, Letters (London, 1895), II, 375. Letter dated 12 February, 1888. Goethe’s very brief notes on Cooper are quoted by James Boyd, Goethe’s Knowledge of English Literature (Oxford, 1932), 266–8. See Preston A.Barba, ‘Cooper in Germany’. Originally published in the January 1841 edition of Graham’s Magazine; collected in Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Works (New York, 1965), X, 96–9. Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Works, X, 97–8. Review of Sketches of Switzerland, first published in the Southern Literary Messenger, October 1836; collected in Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Works, IX, 162–3. Thomas Philbrick, Jr, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 263–6. ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses’, ed. Bernard DeVoto, New England Quarterly (September 1946), 291–301. William Cullen Bryant, Poems (London, 1832), iv–v. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray (London, 1945), II, 156. Entry dated 24 October, 1844. Cf. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn (New York, 1963), 211–12, and Donald Fanger, Dostoievsky and Romantic Realism (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 58–9. Also E.Preston Dargan, ‘Balzac and Cooper: Les Chouans,’ Modern Philology, xiii (August 1915), 193–213. Geneviève Delattre, Les opinions littéraires de Balzac (Paris, 1961), 324–9. Cyrille Arnavon, Les lettres americains devant la critique française (Paris, 1951), 26–7.

40 INTRODUCTION

45 August chetyrnadtsatogo (Y.M.C.A. Press, Paris, 1971), 74. We owe this reference as well as much other invaluable advice on Russian writers to Mr M.A.Nicholson of the University of Essex. 46 Cf. Valentin Kiparsky, English and American Figures in Russian Fiction (Berlin, 1964). 47 Gorky’s introduction is translated in Maxim Gorky, Literature and Life (London and New York, 1946), 96–7. 48 Quoted by Ernest Simmons in English Literature and Culture in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 265. 49 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1949), XI, 363; XII, 105. Comments dated 1830 and 1836 respectively. 50 ‘The Oasis’, written 1868–9, published posthumously in L.N.Tolstoi: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1932), VII, 141. Translation by M.A.Nicholson. 51 D.F.Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, first published in Spanish in 1845. Sarmiento draws his comparison between Cooper’s heroes and the Gauchos in his second chapter. 52 P.V.Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, trans. I.W.Titunik (Ann Arbor, 1968), 55. A.Herzen, Memoirs, trans. Constance Garnett and Humphrey Higgins (London, 1968), I, 346; II, 957; IV, 1566. N.G.Chernyshevsky, Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1953), 374. 53 Belinsky’s opinions on Cooper are summarized by Simmons in English Literature and Culture in Russia, 264–5. 54 Maxim Gorky, quoted by Lukàcs in The Historical Novel, translated by Stanley and Hannah Mitchell (London, 1962), 65. 55 Thomas R.Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper (Boston, 1882) and Brander Matthews, Gateways to Literature (New York, 1912), 243–76. William Dean Howells, Heroines of Fiction (New York, 1901), I, 102–12, and W.C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (New York, 1909), 3– 60. 56 Lawrence, op. cit. 57 Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass., 1950); Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960); Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955). 58 The American Democrat, reprinted in 1931 with an Introduction by Mencken, and in 1956 with additional introductory material by Spiller. 59 Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (New York, 1931) and, with P.C.Blackburn, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1934). 60 Beard, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper (Cambridge, Mass., 1960–1968), 6 vols, and ‘James Fenimore Cooper’ in Fifteen American Authors Before 1900 (Madison, 1971). 61 Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America (New York, 1927); Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945); Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford, 1957). 62 Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1949); Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1962). 63 Bewley, The Eccentric Design (New York, 1963); Kaul, The American Vision (New Haven, 1963); Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton, 1965). 64 Winters, Maule’s Curse (Norfolk, Conn., 1938). 65 Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York, 1957); Porte, The Romance In America (Middletown, Conn., 1969). 66 James F.Beard, Jr., ‘Cooper and His Artistic Contemporaries’, NYH, xxxv (1954) 480–95; H.M.Jones, ‘Prose and Pictures: James Fenimore Cooper,’ Tulane Studies in English, iii (1952), 133–54; D.M.Ringe, ‘James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole: An Analogous

INTRODUCTION 41

Technique’, American Literature, xxx (1958), 26–36; George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist (London, 1967); T.L.Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

42

Note on the Text

Unless noted otherwise, the selections in this volume are reproduced from the first edition. Omissions are clearly indicated. The authorship of translations is given in the appropriate headnotes: the translations in all cases are as literal as is consistent with standard English usage. Numbered footnotes have been added by the present editors.

44

THE SPY 1821

46

1. W.H.Gardiner, from a review, North American Review xv (July 1822), 250–82

Gardiner (1797–1882) was a close friend of W.H.Prescott and a frequent contributor to the North American Review. For a discussion of this seminal essay, see Introduction, pp. 2–5.

We have long been of opinion that our native country opens to the adventurous novelwriter a wide, untrodden field, replete with new matter admirably adapted to the purposes of fiction. Our views on this subject have already been partially developed, … and our conviction has not been staggered by any arguments we have heard opposed to them. That nothing of the kind has hitherto been accomplished, is but a poor argument at best—especially when taken in connexion with the fact, that nothing has as yet been attempted. We are told, it is true, that there is among us a cold uniformity and sobriety of character; a sad reality and utility in our manners and institutions; that our citizens are a downright, plain-dealing, inflexible, matter-of-fact sort of people; in short, that our country and its inhabitants are equally and utterly destitute of all sorts of romantic association. We are not so foolhardy as to deny the truth of the theory on which these objections rest. It is not enough that solitary exceptions may be found here and there, if there be in fact great general uniformity pervading the mass of the people. The characters of fiction should be descriptive of classes, and not of individuals, or they will seem to want the touch of nature, and fail in that dramatic interest which results from a familiarity with thefeelings and passions pourtrayed, and a consciousness of their truth. Admitting then, that the power of creating interest in a work of fiction, so far as it arises from development of character, lies in this generalizing principle which substitutes classes for individuals, we are triumphantly asked whether that state of society is not best fitted to the end proposed, in which this system of classification is already carried to its greatest extent; —where order rises above order in the most distinct and uniform gradation, — each pinnacle standing aloof from its neighbor, each separated by its own impenetrable barrier. No—certainly not; if by these distinctions are meant the mere formal divisions of society into lords, gentlemen, and villains. It is not such artificial and arbitrary distinctions which give the greatest possible variety and scope to character, or effect that kind of classification which is best adapted to the wants of the author. On the contrary, they are so many impediments in his way, forcing character out of its natural development into constrained and formal fashions, if such principles were left to their own tendency, they

48 FENIMORE COOPER

would make all men so many flat-headed Indians; and when the causes of these unnatural distinctions in human character had ceased to exist, we should look round in vain for the model of the dull and uniform monsters they had created. Not so where men have sprung up in active and adventurous communities, unshackled by forms, unfashioned by governments, and left freely to work out their own way, pursuing their own objects, with nothing to interrupt or affect them, but that mutual attrition which has not always the effect of polishing in the moral, as in the physical world. When therefore we are told that the country whose society contains the most abundant distinction of classes is the chosen fairy land of poetry and romance, and that America can never be such because it contains none, we are instinctively brought to remember a certain forensic maxim, which may be of use before more than one species of tribunal, namely, where the law is against you, always deny the fact. Now we do most seriously deny, that there is any such fatal uniformity of character among us, as is herein above supposed; —we deny (bating the formidable division into king, lords, and commons,) that there is not in this country a distinction of classes precisely similar in kind, and of extent nearly equal to that which exists in Great Britain; nay, we boldly insist, that in no one country on the face of the globe can there be found a greater variety of specific character, than is at this moment developed in these United States of America. Do any of our readers look out of New-England and doubt it? Did any one of them ever cross the Potomac, or even theHudson, and not feel himself surrounded by a different race of men? Is there any assimilation of character between the highminded, vainglorious Virginian, living on his plantation in baronial state, an autocrat among his slaves, a nobleman among his peers, and the active, enterprizing, moneygetting merchant of the East, who spends his days in bustling activity among men and ships, and his nights in sober calculations over his ledger and day-book? Is the Connecticut pedlar, who travels over mountain and moor by the side of his little red wagon and half-starved pony, to the utmost bounds of civilization, vending his ‘notions’ at the very ends of the earth, the same animal with the long shaggy boatman ‘clear from Kentuck,’ who wafts him on his way over the Mississippi, or the Ohio? Is there nothing of the Dutch burgomaster yet sleeping in the blood of his descendants; no trace of the prim settler of Pennsylvania in her rectangular cities and trim farms? Are all the remnants of her ancient puritanism swept out of the corners of New England? Is there no bold peculiarity in the white savage who roams over the remote hunting tracts of the West; and none in the red native of the wilderness that crosses him in his path? It would be hard indeed out of such materials, so infinitely diversified, (not to descend to the minuter distinctions which exist in each section of the country) which, similar in kind but far less various, have in other countries been wrought successfully into every form of the popular and domestic tale, at once amusing and instructive, if nothing can be fabricated on this degenerate soil. But where are your materials for the higher order of fictitious composition? What have you of the heroic and the magnificent? Here are no ‘gorgeous palaces and cloud capped towers;’ no monuments of Gothic pride, mouldering in solitary grandeur; no mysterious hiding places to cover deeds of darkness from the light of the broad sun; no cloistered walls, which the sound of woe can never pierce; no ravages of desolating conquests; no traces of the slow and wasteful hand of time. You look over the face of a fair country, and it tells you no tale of days that are gone by. You see cultivated farms, and neat villages,

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 49

and populous towns, full of health, and labor, and happiness. You tread your streets without fear of the midnight assassin, and you perceive nothing in their quiet and orderly inhabitants, to remind you of misery and crime. How are you to get over this familiarity of things, yet fresh in their newest gloss? You go to your mighty lakes, your vast cataracts, your stupendous mountains, and your measureless forests. Here indeed you find nature in her wildest and most magnificent attire. But theseboundless solitudes are not the haunts of fierce banditti; you have never peopled these woods and waters with imaginary beings; they are connected with no legendary tales of hoary antiquity; —but you cast your eye through the vista of two short centuries, and you see them as they now are, and you see nothing beyond. Where then are the romantic associations, which are to plunge your reader, in spite of reason and common sense, into the depths of imaginary woe and wonder? If we are asked with reference to the good old fashioned romance, and are required to construct a second castle of Otranto, to amaze our reader with mysteries, like those of the far famed Udolpho, or harrow up his blood with another Fatal Revenge, we answer, that in our humble judgment, it matters little in regard to these mere creations of the brain, in what earthly region the visionary agents are supposed to reside; the moon, for aught we know, it has been elsewhere said may be as eligible a theatre of action, as any on this earth. Not that we would speak disparagingly of the wildest creations of romance, or have it thought that we are less affected than others, by those masterly efforts of a bold imagination, left to luxuriate in its own ideal world. But we are not ambitious that scenes so purely imaginary, should be located on this side of the Atlantic, when they cannot from their very nature, partake any thing of the character of the soil and climate which give them birth; although we are by no means sure that a first rate horror, of the most imaginative kind, might not be invented without the aid of Gothic architecture, or Italian scenery. —While for these reasons, which do not peculiarly affect ourselves, we have no particular longing after this species of American castle building, we do hope to see the day, when that more commodious structure, the modern historical romance, shall be erected in all its native elegance and strength on American soil, and of materials exclusively our own. The truth is, there never was a nation whose history, studied with that view, affords better or more abundant matter of romantic interests than ours. When you ask us how we are to get over the newness and quietude of every thing among us, your question points only at the present time—a thing in itself utterly destructive of romance in all quarters of the globe. What should we think of a historical romance, for instance, in which the duke of Wellington should win the battle of Waterloo, and the marquis of Londonderry be made the secretary of state for foreign affairs? And yet if their noble lordships should meet with any different fortune or fate, however excellent the plot, however spirited and well sustained the characters, who would not throw down the book with a quodcunqueostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi? Since then the praeterperfect is our only romantic tense, we reply, a little paradoxically perhaps, go back to the days when things were newer—but not so quiet as they now are. It is no new principle in the laws of imagination, that remoteness in point of time attaches romantic associations to objects which have them not in themselves —and these, so soon as they are created, become heightened by contrast. A ruin is a romantic object, only because it carries you perforce into remote antiquity, and suggests

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on its very front the moated castle with all its battlements and towers standing in proud proportion, a stately pile that seemed to bid defiance to the ravages of time and storm. You look at an elegant modern edifice, with a stack of chimneys for its minarets, and a smiling cornfield for its court yard, and it suggests nothing of itself, but the unromantic notion of peace and comfort, which are reigning within. Go back then to the day when its walls were slumbering in their native quarry, and its timbers flourishing in the living oak; when the cultivated farm was a howling wilderness, the abode of savages and outlaws, and nothing was to be seen in its borders but rapine and bloodshed. Imagine some stern enthusiast, voluntarily flying the blandishments of more luxurious abodes—or some accomplished courtier, driven from the scene of his ambition and intrigues— or some gallant soldier wearied of the gay capital, and panting anew for adventure and renown, fearlessly marching with his chosen band into these dreary and dangerous solitudes; follow him through the perils and difficulties he surmounts, and witness the long struggle of civilization, encroaching on the dominion of barbarism; and you will then find that romantic associations may become attached even to this familiar spot. Neither need we revert to any very remote period of antiquity to rid us of this familiarity, which forever plays about present things with a mischievous tendency to convert the romantic into the ludicrous. It is astonishing what changes are effected in manners, customs, names, and outward appearances, in the course of a single human generation; and when we look at the days of the fathers of the oldest now living, how little do we see that we recognize, how much that we wonder at! Not the least pleasing, perhaps, of the many admirable productions of the great master of romance in modern times, refer to a period hardly so remote as that of which we speak; and yet no one, not even they who live on the very spot, which is represented as the theatre of great and romantic action, complains of the familiarity of those scenes. There seem to be three great epochs in American history, which are peculiarly well fitted for historical romance; —the times just succeedingthe first settlement—the aera of the Indian wars, which lie scattered along a considerable period—and the revolution. Each of these events, all pregnant with interest in themselves, will furnish the fictitious historian with every variety of character and incident, which the dullest imagination could desire or the most inventive deserve. What is there for instance in the rebellions and wars of the Scotch covenanters, to compare with the fortunes of those sterner puritans, who did not rise in arms against their prince; but who, with a boldness of adventure, under which the spirit of chivalry itself would have quailed, leaving behind them all that is most dear to men on earth, the companions of their youth, the graves of their fathers, the home of their hearts, crossed a trackless ocean; fixed their habitations on an unknown and inhospitable shore; not for the visit of a day, not cherishing a latent hope of future return, when they should have amassed wealth, or acquired fame, to raise them in the estimation of their countrymen; but with the humble hope and firm resolve to expend their lives and their children’s lives in the wilderness, for the sake of worshipping their God after the fashion of their own hearts. The situation and character of these men, who ‘had they been as free from all sins as gluttony and drunkenness,’ (so says one of their quaint historians) ‘might have been canonized for saints,’ are in the highest degree picturesque; and moreover afford a singular contrast to those of Raleigh’s successors in the south, headed

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by that man of adventure, who had challenged a whole Ottaman army in his youth, carrying off the heads of three Turkish champions at his saddle-bow, and who was now solacing his riper years, amidst the cares of a colonial government, in the arms of the renowned Pocahontas. The gloomy but sustaining spirit of fanaticism in these, who had fled to the wilderness for conscience’ sake; the disappointed avarice of those who had come to it for silver and gold; the stern ecclesiastical oligarchy first established in the east; the worldly time-serving despotism of Smith and the succeeding governors in the south; the one punishing with banishment and death ‘that damnable heresie of affirming justification by works;’ the other promulgating in the new world the laws of the old ‘to prevent sectarie infection’ from creeping into the pale of mother church; the former denouncing temporal punishment and eternal wrath, against ‘all idlers, common coasters, unprofitable fowlers, and tobacco takers;’ the latter formally enacting and literally executing that salutary law, that ‘he who will not work shall not eat;’ the Virginian colony importing into the country a cargo of negroes, to entail the curse of slavery on their remotest posterity, in the same yearthat our first fathers were founding the liberties of America on the Plymouth rock, and Winthrop with his company of sturdy Independents, extending along the shores of Massachusetts the work which had been so happily begun, while ‘refiners, goldsmiths, and jewellers,’ ‘poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving men, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoil a commonwealth, than either to begin or maintain one,’ as the old writers inform us, were still flocking over to the shores of Virginia. Such contrasts judiciously exhibited, as, notwithstanding the distance of the two colonies, they well might be, with no very unpardonable poetical license, especially by the link of the New Netherlands, while they supply at once an infinite variety of individual character to the author’s hands, could not fail to confer on a work of fiction the additional value of developing the political history of the times, and the first beginnings, perhaps, of those conflicting sectional interests, which sometimes perplex us at the present day. Or if more rigid rules of composition require us to confine our views to the colony of Massachusetts Bay, for instance, what character could be more obsequious to the imagination than that of the moody and mysterious Blaxton? who was found by the colonists, the solitary lord of the little isthmus of Shawmut,* which he claimed and was allowed to hold against them, by the acknowledged right of established possession; of whom history only tells us that he had been a clergyman of the church of England, that he dissented equally from her canons, and those of his non-conforming brethren; but how or when he emigrated to America, and built his humble hut on a spot destined to become the seat of a populous and flourishing city, it tells us not. What shall we say to Sir Christopher, the knight of Jerusalem, a lineal descendant of the famous bishop of Winchester, who with the strange lady was travelling and revelling through the land, until he was stopped by the scandalized ‘seekers of the Lord,’ and arraigned on a charge of suspicion of bigamy, et alia enormia contra pacem, before such a judicial assembly as the politic Winthrop, the scholastic Cotton, the fiery and intolerant Dudley, with Underbill perhaps for a witness, and Miles Standish for captain of the guard? What would not the author of Waverly make of such materials? But we forbear to enlarge further on this prolific theme.

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The Indian wars, of which the first occurred soon after the time of which we have just spoken, and the last of any note in New England, in the years 1722–25, are fruitful of incidents, which might, to great advantage, be interwoven with the materials before noticed; and it scarcely needs to be asserted, that the Indians themselves are a highly poetical people. Gradually receding before the tread of civilization, and taking from it only the principle of destruction, they seem to be fast wasting to utter dissolution; and we shall one day look upon their history, with such emotions of curiosity and wonder, as those with which we now survey the immense mounds and heaps of ruin in the interior of our continent, so extensive that they have hardly yet been measured, so ancient that they lie buried in their own dust and covered with the growth of a thousand years, forcing upon the imagination the appalling thought of some great and flourishing, perhaps civilized people, who have been so utterly swept from the face of the earth, that they have not left even a traditionary name behind them. At the present day, enough is known of our aborigines to afford the ground-work of invention, enough is concealed to leave full play for the warmest imagination; and we see not why those superstitions of theirs, which have filled inanimate nature with a new order of spiritual beings, may not be successfully employed to supersede the worn out fables of Runic mythology, and light up a new train of glowing visions, at the touch of some future wizard of the West. At any rate we are confident that the savage warrior, who was not less beautiful and bold in his figurative diction, than in his attitude of death, the same who ‘suffered not the grass to grow upon the warpath,’ and hastened ‘to extinguish the fire of his enemy with blood,’ tracking his foe through the pathless forest, with instinctive sagacity, by the fallen leaf, the crushed moss, or the bent blade, patiently enduring cold, hunger, and watchfulness, while he crouched in the night-grass like the tiger expecting his prey, and finally springing on the unsuspicious victim with that war-whoop, which struck terror to the heart of the boldest planter of New England in her early day, is no mean instrument of the sublime and terrible of human agency. And if we may credit the flattering pictures of their best historian, the indefatigable Heckewelder, not a little of softer interest might be extracted from their domestic life…. [After a lengthy summary of the plot of The Spy, interspersed with some commentary and much quotation, Gardiner concludes with a summary judgment:] Such is our hasty epitome of the Spy; —a work, which, with numerous and great blemishes, has yet redeeming merits to give it a respectable station in the ranks of historical romance. We have no fondness for indiscriminate censure or praise; and we humbly trust, we shallnever award that palm, which we should withhold from a foreign production, to the work of an American, merely because it is such. There is no compliment, in that unmeaning adulation, which has styled the author of the Spy the Scott of America; nor do we think public sentiment, in this part of the country, will bear out a pretension so extravagant. At any rate, for ourselves, we do not hesitate to say, that although uncommon powers are here exhibited, from which we have a right to augur yet better things, we have discerned nothing in this production which draws the writer a step

* The Indian name of the peninsula on which Boston now stands.

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nearer to the author of the Waverley novels, than it does to Shakspeare himself. His faults, however, are in general those of inexperience, and we fear we must add haste. Nothing but unpardonable haste can account for that sad huddling into confusion, towards the end, of a plot so well laid in the outset. And if we look more into detail, we find not unfrequent such gross negligences as making locks which were black in one place, p. 14; auburn in another, p. 65; speaking of a house as lowering from the ‘light of day,’ p. 229, when it was just fired because the night was ‘too dark to move in,’ p. 226; or causing a gentleman to establish a cigar-box, instead of a cigar in the corner of his mouth, ‘without the slightest interruption to discourse,’ p. 208; while loose and inelegant expressions, and even sentences of ungrammatical construction, are more frequent than they could have been with the ordinary care of an ordinary writer. We hope these indications of haste do not proceed from the pitiful ambition of feeding the compositor with sheets, on which the ink is scarce dry. That may answer for the veteran of established reputation—at least for the nonce;’ but it is the last point in which we desire to trace a resemblance between our young writers and the author of Waverley. The particular talent of our author seems to lie in describing action and hitting off the humors of low life. Wherever there is something to be done, he sets about doing it with his whole soul; the reader’s attention is chained to the event; every other interest is absorbed in the deed, which is exhibited with a boldness of outline and vividness of coloring, proportioned to its importance in itself, or in its results. The flight, the hot pursuit, the charge, the victory, pass before you with the rapidity, and the distinctness too, of the forked lightning which plays in the summer cloud; and the reader, not less than the writer, is irresistibly borne on by the subject. On the other hand is character to be developed, where character is most strongly marked, not in the heroes and the heroines, but the scene-shifters of life, the vulgar bustling beings, who perform its ordinary functions, who make the strong shadow andthe sharp light, which education and refinement soften away, we are brought to hear a spirited dialogue, replete with comic humor, rich with the direct language of untutored men, which displays clearly the moral peculiarities of the speakers, and proves the writer to possess, and to have employed, the talent of observing others, and of subtracting useful or striking traits from the real characters of life. —These are high gifts—the highest in the writer of fiction of a secondary rank. They are also (in a far more exalted degree, however, than with our author) the characteristics of the great Scottish antiquary; but then to these are added in him other qualities of extraordinary perfection, which our author either does not possess, or possesses in a far humbler degree. The author of the Spy has not shown himself to be pre-eminently endowed with the power of moving the softer affections. That mysterious touch, which can open the secret sources of passion, and dissolve the heart in tears, and without which the highest order of excellence in fictitious composition cannot be attained, we do not say that he has not the mastery of, but he has not yet proved to us that he has. The close of the trial scene, the pedlar’s short description of the terrors of a lonely and ignominious death, which we have quoted above, and one of the early interviews between Frances and Dunwoodie, are the only instances which occur to us, in which he has exhibited much pathos; and these are not of the first rate. Neither has our author betrayed that exquisite sensibility to the

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beauties of nature, which so commonly belongs to the poetic mind. There is a vast field of novelty open in our country, for this species of descriptive writing. Our author has not neglected to enter upon it; —but though his descriptions of natural scenery contain nothing that is not American, and are in fact good, yet they exhibit only the most obvious peculiarities of nature in this western world, with not a mark of that deep moral feeling, which weds the soul to beauty wherever it exists, and breathes its own freshness and fragrance over all that it creates. A delicate and discriminating taste, the result only of high cultivation, does not seem to be among the characteristics of this writer, and we trust he may not think it beneath him, to devote himself to the refinement of a power, which diffuses such an inexpressible charm over the productions of genius, and without which the invention, which can feed the appetite with perpetual novelty, and the imagination which can electrify the mind, may disgust as often as they please. It is true we are seldom shocked by gross violations of this principle, except in the mistaken view of the refinements of artificial and polished life, which have been already noticed;but harmony and smoothness are wanting throughout the whole. Of this we cannot be expected to give an illustration, unless the reader should find one in the citations already made; but as an instance of particularly bad taste we would specify, amongst many that might be adduced, the description of the highway, which ‘ran boldly to the base of a barrier that would frighten a spirit less adventurous, and regardless of danger and difficulties kept its undeviating way until the summit was gained, when, rioting for a moment in victory, it as daringly plunged into the opposite vale, and resumed its meandering and sloth.’ This was doubtless meant for fine description; —but the personification of a turnpike is about as violent an appeal to the imagination as can well be made. The inventive faculty, that, which if it be not genius is at least its chief characteristic, we cannot but think our author possesses in an eminent degree; and we have rather to complain of that want of good taste, which has crowded so much of violent action into so small a space, than of paucity of incident, or monotony of style. At the same time that we cannot but remark again upon that gross negligence, which has produced the effect of poverty; as, for instance, two miraculous escapes of the pedlar, effected in precisely the same way; two burnings, that of the pedlar’s hut, and that of the Wharton mansion, closely succeeding each other; and the horror of encountering the gallows erected for his execution, first inflicted upon Wharton himself, and then upon Frances. One capital defect, which remains to be considered, is that excessive minuteness which leaves nothing for the imagination to supply. The enumeration of little unimportant facts —mere necessary consequences —and full length descriptions of the exact tone, look, and gesture, with which something, or nothing, is uttered, the precise graduation of this or that emotion, and nice calculations upon the quantum of scorn or of smile exhibited on every trifling occasion, are prodigious weakeners of style, and when once noticed by the reader, produce a ludicrous effect. But we must put a period to remarks which have already swelled our article to unlooked for dimensions. We have to thank our author for having demonstrated so entirely to our satisfaction, that an admirable topic for the romantic historian has grown out of the American Revolution; although we still think it a less prolific source than our earlier history. If he has not done all that man could do, he has at least exhibited powers

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from which we have everything to hope. The Spy of the Neutral Ground is not the production of an ordinary mind, and we will not presume to set limits to that capacity of improvement, whichthe author of Precaution has evinced in this second attempt. He has the high praise, and will have, we may add, the future glory, of having struck into a new path —of having opened a mine of exhaustless wealth —in a word, he has laid the foundations of American romance, and is really the first who has deserved the appellation of a distinguished American novel writer. Brown, who is beginning to attain a merited distinction abroad as well as at home, although his scenes are laid in America, cannot be said with truth to have produced an American novel. So far from exhibiting any thing of our native character and manners, his agents are not beings of this world; but those dark monsters of the imagination, which the will of the master may conjure up with an equal horror in the shadows of an American forest, or amidst the gloom of long galleries and vaulted aisles. His works have nothing but American topography about them. We recognize the names of places that are familiar to us and nothing more. Not even his natural scenery, wild, romantic, sublime, possibly a true copy of the particular spots it represents, can be said to possess the peculiar characteristics of America; and with him the aboriginal savage moves to his fell purpose, not as the real warrior of the wilderness, but a mere fiendlike instrument of death. —The graceful and humorous author of Knicker-bocker and the Sketch Book, we regret to say, has not yet permitted us to view him threading the mazes of romance; and when we have named these, we know not who else there is to enter into competition with our author for the palm as an American novelist. We hope to hear from him again—not too soon. We do not exactly ‘drop in unwilling ears This saving counsel—keep your piece nine years,’ But we protest most seriously against modern rapidity of production; and really beg that he will be so good (for it is a virtue now-a-days,) as just to write his book before he prints it; and it would do no harm if he were to read it over once into the bargain.

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2. Maria Edgeworth, letter ‘to an American Lady’ 1823 Extracts from an uncollected letter, published in Port Folio, xvi (1823), 86. Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) was an Irish novelist, author of Castle Rackrent (1800) and other moral tales which portrayed Irish peasant life and directly influenced Walter Scott. Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) was an Irish novelist, author of Castle Rackrent (1800) and other moral tales which portrayed Irish peasant life and directly influenced Walter Scott. Thank you for the Spy. I cannot agree with you in thinking it a flashy performance. We read it aloud in our family, and notwithstanding many peculiar faults of style and composition, and the wearisome trick of describing every creature’s looks and emphasis every time they speak or move, we found it highly interesting, from describing manners and a state of society that are new to us, —and independently of this American value, we think it a work of great genius. In the Flemish style nothing in Washington Irving, or even in Walter Scott, is more perfect nature than the Irish follower of the camp, Betty. I single her out as an instance, because of her we can best judge. She is one of the most faithful and exquisite Irish characters I ever saw drawn; with individual characteristic touches, and yet representing a whole class. The humour, and wit, and blunder, and sagacity, and good nature, and want of moral principle, and abundance of moral feeling, most happily blended together, so as to make it genuine Irish. It has the rare merit of not being the least exaggerated in humour—and the dialect is such as could not have been hit except by one well acquainted with Irish characters. But independently of Betty, there is very strong drawing of character and of human nat in general, as well as of national character in this work. The story I grant you is confused, and the main interest turning upon the pedlar Spy injudicious. No sympathy can be excited with meanness, and there must be a degree of meanness ever associated withthe idea of Spy. Neither poetry nor prose can ever make a spy an heroic character. From Dolon in the Iliad to Major Andre, and from Major Andre to this instrument of Washington, it has been found impracticable to raise a spy into a hero. Even the punishment of hanging goes against all heroic stomachs—the scaffold is a glorious thing, and may be brought on the stage with safety—but would even Shakspere venture the gibbet?

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3. Notice, British Critic ii (July 1826), 431

Extract from an unsigned article on ‘American Novels’. The author certainly deserves credit for the impartial poetical justice which he has dealt out upon the representative of ruffians who seem to have disgraced the popular cause. We cannot, speaking as mere cosmopolites, equally approve of the portrait of Colonel Wellmere.1 Knowing as we do, that cool arrogance is as much the vice of this country, as jealous gasconading vanity is that of brother Jonathan, we can easily suppose that the conduct of our young officers may have aggravated the exasperation which existed at the time in question; but to represent an English colonel as a mere petty-larceny knave, deficient in common spirit, is a ridiculous attempt. With the exception of this piece of bad judgment, Mr. Cooper, though touching on inflammable matter, has not overstept the limits of that reasonable partiality to his own country, which he may fairly be allowed to feel.

1

Colonel Wellmere of The Spy was the first of three British military villains to appear in Cooper’s historical romances of the American Revolution.

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THE PIONEERS 1823

62

4. Extracts from an unsigned review, Port Folio xv (March 1823), 230–48

See Introduction, p. 9. We hazard nothing in saying that the flattering expectation, expressed in the conclusion of the remarks on The Spy, which the reader will find in this number of the Port Folio, will be realized in the perusal of these volumes. The ingenious writer has submitted a new claim to encouragement and applause, which will readily be recognized, at home, by those who feel the love of country or the love of letters; whilst abroad, it will be hailed by men of generous minds, with that cordiality which is felt when we behold a worthy competitor, in a noble enterprize. He, however, who opens these volumes with an expectation of being enchained by a fascinating tale and agitated by critical conjunctures, as he was in the delightful romance, to which we have just referred, will most assuredly be dissappointed. There the author had a continent for his stage; and his plot was closely connected with the deliverance of a nation. With a daring pen, which is more to be admired than imitated, he brought upon the stage the greatest of uninspired men, and led our imaginations into the stratagems of a camp and the manoeuvres of a cabinet. Here the scene is laid in a frontier village, inhabited by ordinary personages, who have exchanged the abodes of civilization for a sylvan life. The reader, therefore, must not expect to be astonished by a succession of prodigious adventures, or perplexing incidents and harassing, entanglements. His feelings will not be excited by any romantic trials of friendship or love. These the author has avoided, although The Spy contains ample evidence that he possessesthe power of delineating tender scenes with great pathos and effect. We think a few pages of this description would have increased his popularity: but he seems to have turned away with a sort of churlishness, not belonging to his character, from our gratification in this respect. But let us be grateful for what we have. The work is truly, what it professes to be, ‘a descriptive tale;’ and it is by the laws of t species of composition that its merits are to be scanned. It might, indeed, be called historical; for the historian can scarcely find a more just and vivid delineation of the first settlements of our wilderness. The dangers, difficulties, and pinching privations, encountered and endured, by the hardy adventurers, who first broke the silence of our interminable forests, and opened a passage for the beams of the sun to the face of the earth, which they had not visited for centuries; —the strange mixture of men of all countries, characters and occupations, who

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found themselves, they knew not how, assembled around the same fire, and bound together by the same fortunes; —the hardihood and perseverance with which they met and tamed the rudeness of savage nature, —and the incredible progress of their victories and improvements—these are the novel themes of the Pioneers—and they are described in these volumes with the knowledge of a witness and the hand of a master. In Europe the scenes of this tale may be viewed as the wild creations of fancy, and the actors as the phantoms of an ingenious imagination; but the American, who has ample evidence of their truth, will recur to them with deep interest and pride, unmingled with a tinge of incredulity. We have been on the very spot, where the author has placed his village; —we have bathed in the same water where old Mohegan paddled his light canoe—we have witnessed the wilderness in flames, and contended successfully on the lake with the pride of the forest. The removal of forests of immense magnitude; the creation of flourishing towns and cultivated fields, where but a few years before those forests stood, are events now so familiar to us, that they scarcely excite surprise. But we perceive the effects without an exact knowledge of the means by which they have been produced. The Pioneers affords us much of this information, imparted with a fidelity and vividness that carry the reader into the midst of the scenes, and make him acquainted with every individual who is introduced. These individuals will all be found in good keeping; not deformed by caricature nor frittered away by extravagance. Each one speaks and acts with perfect fitness and congruity, and they are, as we can testifyfrom personal observation, the very kind of persons who may be expected to be found in such situations…. Having thus summarily, and we hope satisfactorily, got through or rather, if it must be so, evaded the dull labour of abridgment, we pass on to the more agreeable task of submitting to the reader some of the fine passages with which these volumes abound. The descriptions throughout of the appearance and scenery of the country, are highly wrought and very striking. The opening scene of the work, the shooting of the buck, the sudden appearance and appropriate deportment of Leather-stockings and the young Hunter, so admirably contrived to excite and fasten curiosity—the generous intrepidity of the latter in stopping the horses on the brink of a precipice—and the subsequent ride to Templeton, are all, as we have already said, exceedingly well done, and, in most parts, highly impressive. We have already complained of the want of a few love scenes, for although we are one of those, who have vowed, like Benedict, to die a bachelor, yet we are sometimes visited by some day-dreams on the subject, and we delight, when the mood is on, to indulge even its wildest wanderings. Perhaps if we had been one of the tenants of the wood, we should not have spoiled the barks of the Judge’s trees, so highly prized, with the name of Louisa. She is, however, very amiable, and good, and ‘all that, you know.’ Her weakness and timidity are well contrasted with the higher qualities of the Heiress of the Woods, and render her a very proper companion for her, although we cannot say that she would suit us in that capacity. This may arise however from a sort of indecision, on that delicate subject, which has become so habitual with us, that we claim little right to say a word about it, and shall consider it no disparagement of our critical acumen, if any indignant sister of Louisa, should stigmatize this as only the opinion of an Old— Oliver Oldschool, you mean Madam!

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But there is Elizabeth, a fine spirited girl, —with a clear sense of propriety, finely combined with a proper degree of feminine delicacy and pride. She possesses, moreover, great decision and firmness in doing her duty, and belongs, upon the whole, to a high order of heroines…. During the time that her lover resided under the same roof with her, a thousand little acts of tenderness must have escaped from the trammels of the most inflexible prudence. These we are left to imagine, and as our imagination is as dry on such topics as a remainder-biscuit,the veil must remain undrawn to our eyes. We shall just add, however, that the very causes, which imposed the restriction, were so many means in the hands of the author of enhancing the interest of the Tale. Pondering in our common and inexperienced minds upon the singular circumstances of the youth—his sullen pride in receiving the unsought favours of one by whom he fancied he had been so deeply wronged, and yet bound by the irresistible charms of his daughter, we should have led him often to ‘the dun umbrage of the falling stream;’ or borne him reckless of every thing, to the most frightful recesses of the mountains, to muse on his uncertain fate, and meditate on the means of gratifying at once his hate for the father and his love for the daughter. How many long and anxious talks, too, should we have framed for the wondering females, in their moonlight rambles by the margin of the sequestered Lake—about this young huntsman—so silent and handsome—the mystery of his connexion with the barbarous inhabitants of the cave— and, above all, the evident superiority of his mind to his fortunes! Never, Mr. Cooper, never while you live, if you wish to sleep in a whole skin, throw aside such incalculable treasures. For want of a few pages of this description, which we all know you could have thrown off with as much ease as a fine woman scatters civil speeches among a crowd of admirers, you have inflicted a task upon the patience of many of your fair readers, who dare not remain in ignorance of ‘the new American novel;’ certain prodigiously wise critics have pronounced you dull, and the learned fraternity of dandies, have voted you incontinently a sad bore!

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5. Notice, British Critic ii (July 1826), 437

Extract from an unsigned article on ‘American Novels’. In an infant state of society like that described in The Pioneers, the character of the old hunter stands out, as it is intended to do, in bolder relief than any of the other persons, including the beautiful and high-spirited Elizabeth Temple herself. Like Birch the pedlar, and Tom Coffin, he is the real hero of the scene in which he appears; and, indeed, the points of resemblance between the seaman and the backwoodsman are numerous, in spite of their totally different vocations. Both are original conceptions of men engaged in hardy and adventurous pursuits, but as undebased by the contact of their species as was Adam in his primitive simplicity, and imbued with that intuitive sense of the sublimities of nature and religion which often exists in the minds of men too illiterate to give it utterance. ‘For Tom often prayed,’ we are told, ‘though he did it on his watch, standing and in silence;’ and Natty appears to have only learnt lessons of gratitude to Providence, and humanity towards the meanest of its creatures, from the life of constant danger and vicissitude to which he has been exposed. Though both take as local and peculiar a tinge from the objects with which they have been conversant, as the aphis or chameleon, the cockswain is as unlike to a jolly jack-tar as the Leather-stocking is to a thoughtless whooping huntsman. Of the integrity and faithfulness of Bumppo it is unnecessary to speak; or of the beautiful parting scene between him and his young pupil Effingham.

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THE PILOT 1824

70

6. Unsigned review, New-York Mirror ii (December 1824), 151

See Introduction, p. 6. We have long fixed our eyes on America as the refuge and conservatory of all those principles and institutions which are truly valuable, and which, under the name of Liberty, comprehend the right of free and fair exertion of all the faculties and powers of man, the absence of all fettering restrictions on industry and talent, equal privileges of thought and action to all, and protection in the fullest extent to property of every description. Believing that all this is substantially realized in the United States, we cannot avoid taking a deep interest in every thing which tends to generate a binding national spirit in their citizens, and to awaken in them a well-grounded pride in their own feats, as well as in their own institutions. And this is manifestly one of the objects nearest to the heart of our author. Washington Irving, it must be allowed, has written what will please every where; but failing to perceive or appreciate the high destinies of his country, he has flattered the prejudices of Europe, while Cooper, in the Spy, and the Pilot, on grounds equally patriotic and magnanimous, has been rousing the just pride and best energies of America. In his former work, he recorded some of her glories by land; in the present, he has characterized that skill and resolution from which her future glories are to be derived at sea. Smollet had been at sea; but Cooper is, body and spirit, a sailor. The ocean is truly his element—the deck his home. He confers reality on all his descriptions. We hear the roar of the waves—the splash of the oars— the hoarse language of the seamen. We see the waters—the ships—themanning of the yards—the heaving of the lead—the very cordage of the vessels. Every movement—from that of the tracking of the frigate to the launching of the whaleboat, is visible to our eyes, and we actually take part in the proceedings and conversations of the crew. They are all, heart and soul, devoted to their profession and their country. Every thing is done nautically. The descriptions of the vessels—of their various manoeuvres—of the sunrise in the German Ocean—of, we might say, every sea-scene in the novel, is excellent; but the piloting of the frigate through the breakers and shoals at midnight—the wrecking of the Ariel, the fierce sea-fights, and above all, perhaps, the last hours of the gun captain and cockswain, Long Tom, and the death of the sailing-master, Boltrope—are given with a truth and force, and generate such a breathless interest, that De Foe himself is, in some respects, thrown at a distance by our author. Yet nothing is overwrought. Instead of obvious straining, an air of rough freedom,

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sometimes approaching, but never we think, amounting to coarseness—is thrown over the whole; but under all this apparent ease, a responsibility may be traced so deep, as if the honour of an infant republic, in her first struggles with the gigantic and confident power of the old empire, depended on the exertions of every individual. The bravery and skill of England, however, are not under-rated; and superiority in the Americans is ascribed to fortune and their sense of the cause in which they are engaged. The characters, generally speaking, are admirably brought out. Those of Long Tom and Boltrope are unrivalled. Barnstable, in his attachment to the Ariel, and her crew in particular, is also excellent; and in Griffifths, and perhaps still more in the mysterious Pilot, Paul Jones, the author displays great skill and power. There is, indeed, genuine talent throughout; and although a fastidious taste may find some things to carp at, the reader who cannot relish these volumes, is either the slave of authority or wants the qualities which enable others to appreciate what, under the impulse of genius, is perceived by an unsophisticated head, and poured out from an open, manly, and generous heart.

LIONEL LINCOLN 1825

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7. Unsigned review, New-York Review and Atheneum i (June 1825), 39–50

The writer of the religious or of the historical novel, has difficulties to contend with, peculiar to the walk of composition which he has selected; and unless the purposes of his work be blended in those nice proportions which it is the lot of few exactly to attain, the lighter reader will skim over the fiction, and throw aside the remainder with disgust, while the graver one will prefer to deduce his morality from real sermons, and to seek his knowledge in the authorized and established repositories of facts. The composition of the historical novel is encumbered with still another and a greater embarrassment. The author is obliged to regard, in the invention of his characters and incidents, all the proprieties of reality, and of that very reality in which he has placed his scene, with far more strictness here, than in fictions where no measure is immediately at hand to detect and to estimate his extravagance. The circumstances and characters which are known, have the effect of familiar objects in a landscape, which not only enable you to judge of the general perspective, but to ascertain the magnitude of others, which the artist, in the absence of these convenient tests of nature, might with impunity exaggerate or distort. The writer of such a work, then, has stretched his imaginations upon a Procrustean bed of his own making, and must force them all to correspond to it, at whatever risk of dislocating the limbs, or mutilating the stature of these children of his brain. In surmounting all these difficulties, the author of this book has been eminently successful. He has thrown himself fearlessly into the midst of scenes, fresh in the personal experience of many who are now alive, and destined to be eternally fresh in the traditionalrecollections of millions who have not yet begun to live. He has transfused into his narrative the sturdy spirit of those times, when every citizen was a soldier, and every soldier a patriot. Even in the humble personages whom he has chosen to illustrate this spirit, he has exhibited with admirable consistency, the sagacity with which the colonists discovered, and the shrewdness with which they explained their rights, as well as the jealousy with which they guarded, and the stoutness with which they defended them. The pettiness and homeliness of the details of these struggles, as compared with the larger operations of European warfare, which have made them to be usually considered unfit themes for the imaginative writer, have not induced him to shrink from the battle grounds on which our freedom was born, or to pass them by as unsusceptible of the decorations, or unworthy of the gifts of genius. In the skirmish at Lexington, the retreat from Concord, and the battle of Breed’s or Bunker’s Hill, he has fairly transplanted us to the periods and the spots which he describes; and with that rare felicity, both of selection and coloring, which is at once the triumph and the test

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of talent, he has made us see, and hear, and feel all the stir of the glorious strife which has led to consequences ineffably more glorious. But it would be tame and even unfair, to estimate the value of this part of the story by the interest which it may create in the present generation of readers. It deserves to be considered with more extended views. It deserves to be appreciated by the effects which it must produce, as a portion of our national literature, upon the young and ardent lover of his country, in those days when distance of time shall have somewhat blended and softened the ruder features of reality, which now we can hardly help associating with events so near us both in time and place. How much more delightful to an author, must be the consciousness that he is destined, perhaps, to contribute to the formation of the future character of a part of his countrymen, by mingling his own productions with their earliest and most sacred national associations, than the barren and temporary triumph of having succeeded at last in wringing from the foreign arbiters of literary fate, by a studied and constant conformity to their prejudices, the wretched privilege of literary naturalization. To this consciousness we think Mr. Cooper has an undeniable right; and however our duty may have compelled us to notice the minor blemishes of his book, he has no readers who regard with more complacency than ourselves, what he has already done, or who await with more earnest expectation, what we hope he feels himself bound to continue to do.

8. From an unsigned review, Literary Gazette ix (March 1825), 149–51

A British view of Cooper’s revolutionary patriotism. Mr. Cooper, the writer of these novels, is placed by acclamation in a high rank in his country’s literature; and he appears to consider himself to be quite as clever a fellow as the good-natured world gives him credit for being. But this is not very extraordinary in an American, or man of the New World, since it is a very common idea among men of the Old, who ought to know better. But notwithstanding every opinion on the matter, including his own, Mr. Cooper is not equal to the Great Unknown, whom he imitates (at a long distance), and tries to ridicule with marvellous small success. The present work is connected with a sort of history of the early movements in American war, and remarkable for being pretty particularly American, considerably AntiAnglican, and genuine Republican. We have the Battle of Lexington, (heaven help the name!) and the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, and the siege, or leauger forsooth, of Boston, and the immortal patriot Washington, and the oppressive English government, and the bloody British grenadiers, and the glorious plough-boy heroes of Massachussets who beat them, and all the rest of it, shown up as seen by trans-atlantic optics, as truly and clearly as the Sea Serpent itself. But we have also fictitious personages introduced (though Mr. Cooper maketh oath and saith they are only so in name), and are thence instructed that the separation of the colonies from the mother country was effected principally through the agency of a mad old gentleman, called Ralph, (after the Ravens we suppose, for he is a deuce of a croaker,) and an ideot lad called Job Pray, who ran errands at Boston, and delivereth his oracles in real Bostonian attic, and fires his rifle with real backwood accuracy. We cannot compliment the American Waverley on these two characters. To find in the end that the supernatural Ralph is only a maniac who has escaped from his keeper, and yet not only sails fromEngland to America, but traverses that country as a being of power, is too wide a stretch for the swallow of the imagination, though like that of any other gull: and the Imbecile Job is ill defined—a poor copy after the Naturals of the Scottish Shakspeare, who takes care not to set down more for his clowns than they can do; whereas Mr. Cooper gifts his with ubiquity, and a wonderful quantity of influence upon events entirely beyond the scope of possibility. For a long while we expected that Job Pray would turn

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out to be some Brutus assuming ideotcy to cover his designs; and were surprised at his dying of the small-pox, a mere fool at last; but perhaps the revolution did not produce any Brutuses. If the present portrait was really meant for one, it is at least as new as the land of its origin.

9. John Neal on Fenimore Cooper 1824, 1825, 1826

John Neal (1793–1876) —novelist, poet, tragedian, critic, literary hack— was born in Portland, Maine, wrote unpopular novels before publication of The Spy, and, in 1823, sailed to England where he became a chief critic for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Neal’s three commentaries on Cooper are an entertaining amalgam of nonsense, insight, envy, humour and a refreshingly colloquial prose style. (a) Extract from an article ‘American Writers’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, xvi (October 1824), 426–8. But let us finish with Brown.1 Irving is not alone under this charge of purloining from him —his face and eyes. —There are Neal and Cooper—both of them have stolen his catamounts, and played the devil with his Indians. Neal, however, is content with ‘catching the idea’ —and working it up, till it scratches his own fingers. But Cooper—so far as he can—steals the broom ready made!… The only catamount, that ever he ventured upon, was a tame one, which had escaped out of Brown’s clutches, first, with his nails paired; and out of Neal’s office, at last, with a bell on…. Cooper—Novelist: formerly a midshipman in the United States navy: wrote Precaution; The Spy; The Pioneers; and The Pilot. —Style without peculiarity—brilliancy, or force— very much improved of late: considerable dramatick power; very fine talents in filling up a picture: —imitates the great Scotch Novelist—not so much in any one thing—as altogether: has done his best. —Precaution is mere newspaper stuff. —There is hardly a fine passage in it—with which our memory is afflicted. The Spy—the most popular novel ever produced in that country, by a native, is very good—as a whole: but rather too full of stage-tricks and clap-traps. Thus, the Spy himself— (who is a failure by the way—a dead

1

Charles Brockden Brown, the American novelist, one of whose romances (Edgar Huntly, 1799) contains vivid descriptions of both a panther attack and an Indian raid.

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hum—anything might have been made of him, after the allusion to his father—nothing is) —appears whenever he is not expected—it is a pretty rule in the drama—bad in a novel…. (b) Review of Lionel Lincoln in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, xviii (September 1825), 323–6. We never thought very highly of Mr Cooper; he has been greatly overrated by his countrymen; he is too amiable; too good a man—too popular, by half; we never thought much of him; yet are we disappointed, bitterly disappointed in this book. Still; though it is not the very thing that we require, it is a type, a shadow, a somewhat, in the shape thereof; the ‘shadow,’ perhaps, ‘of a coming event’ —Who knows? It is not a real North American story, to be sure; but where shall we go for a real North American story? is there such a thing, on earth? It is not such a book, as we might have, and shall have, we do hope yet; a brave, hearty, original book, brimful of descriptive truth— of historical and familiar truth; crowded with real American character; alive with American peculiarities; got up after no model, however excellent; wove to no pattern, however beautiful; in imitation of nobody, however great: —nay, it is not even so good a thing, as we might have looked for, from Cooper— (the Sir Walter Scott of America!) —for he was never the man to set rivers on fire; but, still— and we are glad of an opportunity to so speak, — still, it is a thing of the right school. If not altogether American, it is not altogether English; wherefore, let us be very thankful. It is not, as ninety-nine out of a hundred, of all the American stories are, a thing of this country—a British book tossed up, anew; worked over, afresh; and sent back, with a new title-page. Hitherto, if we took up here, a novel, or a poem, or aplay, from the United States of North America, it has been with a sinking of the heart; for we knew that we should find it, altogether English—in purpose, though not in language, perhaps; English, in the character; English, in the plot and scope; English all over—bastard English, we might say—as if they, on t’other side of the great waters, were going to drive the British out of their own market, by counterfeiting their capital wares; crowded with worn-out Scotch characters; with cast-off Irish, and superannuated Welsh ‘ditto,’ with lords and ladies, butlers and footmen, to help off the story; crowded, in fact, with whatever was not American. The very pictures would be English; the whole scenery. At every page of the American tale, you would meet with something or other, which had never been met with, anywhere else, in America; a yew tree, perhaps; a fish pond, with a live hedge to it; a lawn; a blue lake, with a green turf border, rolled smooth; a pheasant, or a cottage, perhaps. The very dialect, in every case, though put into the mouth of a Yankee, or a Virginian, would be a wretched compound of Yorkshire, broad Scotch, Cockney, or bad Irish—and why? Because the writers of America will persist in writing after British models; because, they will make use of British literature, as they should not—prose and poetry—novels and plays; —grinding them over, all in a heap, every part and parcel thereof; incident, character, thought, phrase— beauty—rubbish and all; working up the British material, over and over again, after the British have worn it entirely out, or thrown it by, for ever….

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Though Mr Cooper’s book is unworthy of him, still we cannot be very severe with it; because, after all, if it be not a real North American story, as we have said before, it is very like one; if not exactly that, for which we have been longing, it is the shadow, and perhaps the forerunner of it. And, although Mr Cooper has not given us a single page of what is purely and absolutely American—a single phrase, we might say, in all that he has ever written; or a single touch, either of language, or thought, or character, which is absolutely true, yet has he done that now, for which we would give him great praise, very great. He has undertaken to write a story, altogether at home. He has made a picture, the plan, the drawing, the rough outline of which is American, though the characters, their costume, their look and attitude are not…. Cooper has done much, although he has done it, like a boy, without well knowing what he was about. He has broken up a new quarry; or broken his way to it, rather—a quarry which will never be exhausted; a quarry, which, till the Spy appeared in his country, had never beenapproached, or disturbed. —He touched a spring, while he was half asleep, one day, rolling about, in the great unvisited store-house of North-American riches; overwearied with playing marbles there, in the hot sunshine of public favour, with a people gazing at him, a whole nation, for spectators. The touch electrified him—he was unprepared for it. He started up ‘thrilling to the bone’ —half crazy with astonishment, while the rocky doors flew open, with a great noise. He could not endure the sound, or the sight; so, he ran off—scampered away— cleared out, like Aladdin; freighted with treasure, accidentally gathered in a fit of childish curiosity—wealth plucked, by handfuls— huge, overgrown jewelry, which he mistook, one day, for a strange fruit, another for stained glass. But although Mr Cooper was not aware of the value of that which he carried away, for a while, nor of that which he left behind, others were; others, who caught a glimpse of the brief, bright, momentary, hap-hazard revelation; others, who are at work now; others, who will not be interfered with. (c) ‘The Last American Novel’, review of The Last of the Mohicans in London Magazine, n.s. xvi (May 1826), 27–31. The Last of the Mohicans is clearly by much the worst of Mr. Cooper’s performances. He has for several years past littered annually, and in fecundity at least, if in no rarer quality, has proved himself a genuine descendant of his great English father, beyond the salt-water lake. The family-failing too, is as conspicuous in the American, as in the parent tree—the produce has grown worse and worse every year; it is now dry, jejune, and trashy. No writer, indeed, be he great or little, known or unknown, can be trusted long with the duty of manufacturing fictions for the public. The workmanship, after a time, is certain to deteriorate with every successive experiment; for a novelist writes first to please himself, and next to please the public; and when his name has become current in the market, he writes for a purpose needless to mention. Hehas not to build his reputation, but to use it, and the experiment is how far that will supply the place of real merit in his productions, and how long the public will continue to purchase his wares, before they perceive the inferiority of the workmanship. The public is not the most discriminating public

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imaginable; but if Lionel Lincoln—Mr. Cooper’s novel for 1825-was not enough to convince them that they were defrauded of the portion of talent, which they tacitly stipulated for in an American Waverley novel, this last affair must bring conviction with it. The most fortunate of these trans-atlantic productions had all a more than sufficient proportion of very questionable matter; but this is a composition of bran and alum, with but few particles of wholesome ingredients. The first symptom of deterioration is observable in the style. Mr. Cooper has never discovered much ease and spirit, and has always resembled his Waverley father most in the parts that have most evidently been written by the latter invitâ Minervâ; but though heavy and tedious, his style was still free from the grosser faults of American composition. In this work, however, the native taste is indemnified by an unrestrained indulgence; and the arts of amplification and circumlocution are exemplified in every page. An army is roused at daybreak by beat of drum. This fact it is his pleasure to communicate to the reader, in the following terms:— ‘According to the orders of the preceding night, the heavy sleep of the army was broken by the rolling of the warning drums, whose rattling echoes were heard issuing, on the damp morning air, out of every vista of the woods, just as day began to draw the shaggy outlines of some tall pines of the vicinity, on the opening brightness of a soft and cloudless eastern sky.’ —Mr. Cooper seems to have remembered the lesson which the author of Don Quixote somewhere delivers upon the art of writing: —‘If you have occasion to mention the Tagus, be sure you call it the silver Tagus, that flows over sands of gold, past the far-famed city of Lisbon, and is engulphed in the wide roaring ocean,’ —or something to that effect. When the army, in its march, enters the forest, and disappears from the sight, —‘the forest appeared to swallow up the living mass, that had slowly entered its bosom,’ and, ‘the sounds of the retiring column ceased to be borne on the breeze to the listeners.’ There is a personage described, of singular proportions, who, when erect, surpassed his fellows in height, but when seated, ‘he appeared reduced within the ordinary limits of our race.’ The twilight of evening is ‘the graver light which is the usual precursor of the close of day,’ and in the morningagain, ‘the thick darkness which usually precedes the approach of day began to disperse, and objects were seen in the plain and palpable colours, with which they had been gifted by nature.’ The morning itself ‘they met, as it came blushing above the green pines of a hill, that lay on the opposite side of the valley of the Horican.’ A father in pursuit of his daughter, who had been carried off by the Indians, is shown the print of her footsteps— ‘The aged soldier examined it with eyes that grew dim as he gazed; nor did he rise from his stooping posture, until Heyward saw that he had watered the graceful trace of his daughter’s passage with a scalding and heavy tear.’ But enough of this. Mr. Cooper may find some excuse for his propensity to amplify, though none for his slip-slop in the example of his great father, who is but too apt to load his style with similar redundancies, and is a dangerous model to imitate. But there is this difference between the author of Waverley and his American follower, that the former, in his descriptive flourishes, shows himself an amateur of nature, whilst the latter proves himself only an amateur of the author of Waverley. The story is a tissue of common-place Indian adventures, abounding with hair-breadth escapes and surprisals. Fancy has entire possession of the field, and it is seldom that any

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thing occurs which looks like the result of observation and experience. The readers of Mr. Cooper well know that his most successful efforts have not discovered any extraordinary reach of imagination, and will therefore be prepared to expect a total failure, in a work which, from the nature of its subject, was entirely dependant upon the exercise of that faculty. The fertile genius of the ‘Unknown,’ added to Mr. Cooper’s opportunities of information on Indian manners and character, might have made a good deal of the natives of the woods, the interminable solitudes of the American forests, and the habits, half savage, half civilized, of the first Europeans who hunted within their precincts. Add to these a few historical events, and the introduction of Montcalm or Wolfe, or any other martial hero of the times, and nothing is wanting to constitute the foundation of a good Waverley romance. Mr. Cooper is an American, and has a native’s interest in the scene and subject of his story; the vicinity of Ontario and the Champlain is as good a field as the banks of Lomond or any other Highland loch, and the red Indian is a name to conjure with better than that of the Children of the Mist. But it is vain to sigh over the thought of what might have been—let us rather see what is. With the exception of a chapter or two, in which there is a bit of a siege, with Montcalm and Munro, and regulars, and other paraphernaliaof war, and an almost entire volume in an Indian encampment, with the usual accompaniments, the rest of the narrative consists of a game at hide and seek, played by very adroit performers, in the endless mazes of the forest. The improbabilities of the author’s great prototype are generally reserved for the last volume, and are then dispatched with a haste that shows at least the writer’s sense of his own weakness in the art of constructing a story. Should the Waverley novels, by any fortunate mischance of after times, be curtailed of their windings up and explications, the author’s reputation would stand many inches higher with posterity. But Mr. Cooper is not at the pains even to defer the evil which he cannot remedy. Improbabilities crowd in upon us from the outset; and, indeed, it is to a series of them that we owe the whole tissue of the subsequent adventures. Munro, the commandant of the English fort of William Henry, on the Horican, as the Indians called it; or Holy Lake, as the French called it; or Royal George Lake, as the English called it, is closely besieged by the French under Montcalm. His two daughters, the fair-haired Alice and the dark-eyed Cora, ‘whose complexion was not brown, but rather appeared charged with the colour of the rich blood that seemed ready to burst its bounds,’ very naturally select this as the most convenient moment for paying papa a visit. They might have been escorted by a regiment of regulars which marched the same morning to reinforce the besieged, but military movements are slow and tedious, and a sapient major of the 60th, a lover of one of the young ladies, recommends a short cut through the woods, which were known to be swarming with parties of hostile Indians, on the look-out for waifs and strays, as more agreeable and interesting than the regular road. Then of all the persons, natives or others, employed in the army as scouts or guides, none seemed so fit for acting on the present occasion as an Indian runner, of very doubtful faith, and suspected of cherishing peculiar animosity towards the commandant in particular. Finally, seeing that there was great reason to suppose the Indians would be quickly on their traces, the domestics of the party are dismissed, in order that the trail, or marks of their route, may be as much as possible diminished. Having taken these pains to

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leave them defenceless, and to throw them in the way of the enemy, the author is successful in accomplishing his object, viz: their capture by a party of Indians. But before this takes place much is done and said, too long to tell, and new personages, friendly to those already mentioned, are introduced upon the stage, by one of those lucky rencontres, more common in the pagesof a Waverley novel than in the solitudes of a vast forest. These new characters are two Indians of the tribes in alliance with the British, and a sort of scout employed by the latter, a hunter of the woods, European by birth, but Indian in his habits, and so like a red man in every respect, that he deems it incumbent upon him to end almost every speech with the assurance that, notwithstanding appearances, he is a white man born, and without a cross in his blood. He is the principal personage in the drama—the hero and the bore in one—and no other than our old friend Leatherstockings, with his long rifle— ‘the foremost in that band of “Pioneers,” who are opening a way for the march of our nation across the continent.’ The elder of his two Indian comrades is also a person well known to Mr. Cooper’s readers, the very Indian John, Mohegan or Mohican, but at present known by the more warlike title of Chingachgook, a name every way becoming the tomahawk, who dies in a manner so little edifying to the episcopal minister of Templeton. Age, it is obvious, had very much changed our friends for the better. Leatherstockings, in particular, or Hawk-eye, as the Indians called him, appears in his youth to have been a very silly, prating, garrulous character, and possessed of but few of the recommendations which on his first appearance conciliated for him some portion of the reader’s regard. A scout, a tracker of Indians by the trail, and engaged in the warfare of the woods, he is a proser as intolerable as Dugald Dalgetty,1 among the Children of the Mist, and ought to have shared a similar fate. Always talking, he is always enjoining silence, and he keeps up an incessant cackle that would have been sure to bring half the Indians of the forest upon his trail. We made sure, at the end of almost every long dissertation on the inefficiency of smooth bores and short-barrelled guns, to see the unseasonable speaker, like our friend Dalgetty, brought low by the fire of some lurking native, whom the alarum of our hero’s tongue had advertised of his propinquity and place. Of the other characters little need be said, as they are such as people the pages of every novel of adventures and hair-breadth escapes. Mr. Cooper, by his earlier productions, approved himself an inheriter of no small portion of the rare talents of his great English father; and we rejoiced in the idea, that if we possessed that incomparable personage, America was the first, and indeed the only country, to supply a genius of a kindred turn. An American author of Waverley might make his countrymen better known to, and more justly appreciated by, foreigners, than almost any other description of writer; and it is sad to see the only person on whom the Great Unknown’s mantle appears to have descended, abandoning the realms of his experience to manufacture stories out of an imagination, which nothing that he has written has shown to be either very nimble or very forgetive.

1

A garrulous military captain in Scott’s novel, The Legend of Montrose (1819).

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS 1826

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10. Unsigned review, New-York Review and Atheneum ii (March 1826), 285–92

The editors have attempted to provide a reasonably comprehensive study of the critical reception of The Last of the Mohicans. The three American reviews (Nos 10, 11, 12), two British reviews (Nos 9c, 13), and comments on the novel by Francis Parkman and George Sand (Nos 43, 44) have been included in this collection. See Introduction, pp. 9–11. On reading the title of this last production of our distinguished novelist, the pleasing anticipation of the delight we were about to receive from perusing the volumes, was somewhat damped, by observing that a sister city had the honour of their first publication. While they were in the press, Mr. Charles Wiley, whose name the author has given to enduring remembrance by a former epistle dedicatory, was removed from the cares of this world; and took his long journey to another, where there is no writing, publishing, nor reviewing. We record, with regret, the loss of a publisher who was acquainted with the inside as well as the exterior of books; and are sorry that our metropolis, in which the literary career of Mr. Cooper was begun, with a popularity which no other American has ever succeeded in approaching, should no longer be the source from whence his works first emanate. The comparison which the tattle of the novel-reading generation persists in suggest between his tales and those of the author ofWaverley, is idle in every respect but one. There is the same anxiety in the reading public here, for the appearance of the creations of the Ariosto of the north, and of him of the west; they are devoured with the same appetite; and the interest they excite leaves even the eye of criticism no leisure to rest upon doubtful parts and proportions of the structure, during the first rapid and restless survey. And even when curiosity has been satiated, and cooler reason is free to analyze the incongruities or defects in the magic web of fiction, in which the imagination has been enthralled, without the power of examining its texture and consistency, we approach the suspicious portions with fear and trembling. We have been under the influence of a highwrought spell, and feel a natural timidity, in calling the necromancer to an account for the reasons of his proceedings, or the manner of conducting his cunning operations. On the first reading of The Last of the Mohicans, we are carried onward, as through the visions of a long and feverish dream. The excitement cannot be controlled or lulled, by

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which we are borne through strange and fearful, and even agonizing scenes of doubt, surprise, danger, and sudden deliverance; while, like some persecuting dæmon of slumber, the fiendlike image of a revengeful spirit scowls every where, and haunts the powerless fancy, from the moment when the malignant eyes first glared in the wilderness, with the unutterable meaning of hatred, upon those in whom we are interested, until they are extinguished for ever in the dreadful catastrophe. And, as in the changes of an uneasy dream, the monarch Reason sometimes lifts up his head, and suggests that it is all an illusion, a wholesome counsel which the soul assents to, but is yet dragged away by the irresistible power, which hurries it into new fantastic perplexities; so, in the ‘long trail’ which we are compelled to follow in these volumes, we are unable to pause awhile for judicious deliberation, when a seeming improbability, or an event without a sufficient cause, for a moment awakens our scepticism. We swim rivers, navigate cataracts, recognise the marks of the desert, climb mountains, and penetrate fogs and armies, as easily—and mind rifles and tomahawks as little—as did Hawk-eye and the natives, whom we accompany in their perils. Sober judgment can only exercise its functions on a second perusal. If any doubt had remained as to the author’s power as an imaginative writer, it must be removed by this experiment. He is a poet; and if his creations should not be immortal, it will be the work of the perverse and incalculable accidents of time; for multitudes, less worthy, have aniche in the temple of memory. But a poet, with all his license, immemorially claimed and granted, is bound to make the creatures of his fancy act consistently with their assigned attributes, and with the circumstances into which they are thrown. If he introduces, for example, a flock of harpies, they must act with proper voracity; and not say grace, and sit down to dinner like Christians. If he mounts a hero on a flying horse, the man and the nag must do no more feats than the qualities bestowed on them will justify as probable. And if, as in the present instance, he deals with human agents only, however the wildness or peculiarity of their education may be supposed to have influenced their feelings and actions, he is still bound to show sufficient cause, and assign intelligible motives for their conduct, consonant with the premises either conceded to him from historical facts, or assumed by himself at the outset. With such feelings from a first perusal, and such ideas of what is becoming in the management of a romance, we sit down to give our passing notice of The Last of the Mohicans, not to write a review of it, or to make long extracts. The latter would be a work of supererogation; for whoever has not read it by this time, is either a Galleo about such matters, or an exceedingly wise man, who does not care to dilute his graver meditations with the notions of your ballad-mongers and romancers. The former task would require an investigation of the raw materials from which this splendid fabric has been woven; for which we candidly confess we have not immediate time and opportunity. The task must therefore be left to our more sedate trimestrial brethren, who appear before the public only with the seasons, pouring forth the collected wisdom of a quarter of a year; while we, who are but ‘knights of the moon, Diana’s foresters,’ must exhibit our faces as regularly as she does her horns, with such light as we may be able to borrow in the intermediate intervals. Your quarterly people have time to observe the progress of every thing, until its arrival at maturity; and to gather the full harvest in their garners, from which they may

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draw forth their stores at pleasure for the use of the community. But we must pluck the flowers and fruits as they blossom and form, or, for us, they will be withered and tasteless. A brief analysis, with such occasional comments as may suggest themselves, is therefore all we shall attempt in speaking of this novel. One word, in passing, of the preface, which, barring the beginning and the end, is the best our author has written; inasmuch as it is useful in explaining particulars, which might otherwise confuse the mind inperusing the story. The beginning and the end are not, by any means, the most intelligible prose we have recently encountered. Our author’s forte does not consist in writing prefaces, but romances; and it were better for his fame if the former were suppressed in subsequent editions, since posterity will wonder, as much as his contemporaries do, at the drift of these enigmatical prolegomena. The writing of a preface is generally a gratuitous taxation of the author’s wits; but in cases of absolute necessity, there ought to be a distinct tribe of literati, whose particular profession and business it should be to open the case; for when the party concerned does it himself, it infallibly leads to egotism, affectation, or obscurity. Dryden, indeed, did for his own productions what a modern review could not have done as well; and the introductions to the Waverley novels are morceaux fit for the private reading of the gods— But we find we are willing to play about the brink of this well of imagination too long, timorous of exploring its depths. We are introduced at the commencement to two delightful females, daughters of one sire, though by different mothers, —personifications of Claude Halcro’s Day and Night. In the veins of the former ran a mixture of Creole blood; or, in other words, one of her female ancestors, in the Occidental Indies, was of African extraction. This sufficiently accounts for her differing in complexion and character from her fair-haired and bright-eyed sister, the daughter of a Scottish mother: but what capital points the author meant to make out of this distinction, we confess ourselves obtuse enough not to have discovered. Cora, the eldest sister, is sometimes made to assume all her dignity, when a casual observation suggested the recollection of her descent; but the effect is unpleasant, and in no wise poetical. Munro, the father, when he learns from Duncan Heyward, (who, as in the Waverley novels, is the romance hero, though not the hero of the romance,) that he is a suitor for Alice, the younger sister, gives vent to a transient paroxysm of indignation, as if he suspected that the young soldier, born in southern latitudes, slighted his elder daughter on account of the sable tinge in her escutcheon. But Duncan was certainly at liberty to make his election, independent of any such peculiarity. Cora had likewise a secret partiality for Duncan, which her maiden pride and delicacy properly controlled; but we cannot discern how the purposes of the fiction can be helped, by the supposition that his preference of her younger sister was in anywise to be ascribed to his prejudice of education against the descendants of negroes. It was natural, too, for Uncas to be moreattracted by the fuller proportions and brilliant colour of the noble girl, who was ready, at any moment, to sacrifice herself for the more fragile Alice; but this does not render a frequent, inartificial, and painful allusion to an hereditary taint, at all necessary. Enough, however, of this. The difference between the sisters is finely conceived and beautifully supported throughout.

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We find these young ladies, in the third year of what is commonly called the French war, leaving the camp of General Webb, at Fort Edward, to visit their aged father, Munro, the commandant at William Henry, on Lake George, distant about five leagues from the former place. The army of the French general Montcalm, with his fierce Indian allies, a mixed multitude both of Iroquois and Delawares, numerous, according to the reports that reached the English camp, ‘as the leaves of the trees,’ was pouring down to the assault of William Henry. Here we must mention our second difficulty. Filial piety had urged these maidens to penetrate the wilderness, to visit a father whom they adored; but the motive is scarcely sufficient to justify their leaving the safer quarters of Webb, for a besieged and ill provided fortress; where, however amiable on any other occasion, they could do no possible good, and must necessarily be rather in the way than useful. To accomplish the journey of fifteen miles, they leave Fort Edward, not with the powerful body despatched by Webb to assist Munro, but escorted solely by Heyward, and under the guidance of an Indian runner, of malign aspect, who had already apostatized, or rather been expelled from his native tribe; and who, as was known to the party, had no good reason to love Munro or his family; having been once flogged, in a most exemplary manner, for intoxication, by the orders of that veteran disciplinarian. The reason assigned by Heyward for preferring the route he took, ‘that enemies might be found skirting the column, where scalps abound the most,’ seems scarcely a satisfactory solution of this too great confidence in the runner. Previous to the setting out of the party, we are made acquainted with another of the dramatis personæ of this narrative, who drops from the clouds; of a shape strangely uncouth, and attire equally singular. This person was a singingmaster, with a ‘tooting instrument,’ as Hawk-eye calls it, in his pocket. Why he came to the camp, why he followed the route of the little party, and persisted in attaching himself to them and their fortunes, the author does not explain. His character is minutely drawn, and amusing; and he is of undoubted service in carrying through the plot; still we cannot help inquiring,

‘Que le diable allait il faire dans cette galère?’ As he is the bore of the romance, we cannot help making a general observation about species, in the tales of this writer, which must have struck every one. They stick too close to their own peculiarity, with a want of variety, which we do not find even in real bores; and which is sometimes tiresome, and by no means ingenious. Their ‘single mindedness’ is unaccompanied with the ‘viridity of intellect,’ which, in her husband’s opinion, distinguished the schoolmaster’s lady in Sayings and Doings. Captain Polworth, or Pollywareth, as the paddies called him, could talk of nothing but mastication and deglutition; and David Gamut never opens his mouth, unless it be to uplift a stave, or to descant on psalmody. Reinforced by the pertinacious ‘tooting-man,’ the party follow the guidance of the runner ‘Magua,’ until, it appears, he gave them to understand he had lost the track, and suspicions of his fidelity crossed the mind of Heyward. We are now introduced to three interesting characters; in supporting two of which—the scout, (our old friend

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Leatherstocking of the Pioneers,) and the young Mohican, Uncas, the last of the tortoise blood—the author has put forth his power with admirable success. The father of Uncas, Chingachgook, whom the readers of the Pioneers must also remember as an old friend, forms the third person of the groupe, whom the travellers encountered on their journey. We can find nothing to quarrel with Hawk-eye about, unless it be the too frequent repetition of his ‘silent and heartfelt laugh’. Not but that he had a right to perform this noiseless agitation of his diaphragm, as often as he found it natural or refreshing; but the reader does not require to be perpetually reminded of this accomplishment of the woodsman, or ‘gift,’ as he would have styled it. Uncas is an Indian Apollo; a living personification of one of those active and graceful forms, which an Indian’s fancy might dream of, as bounding over the hunting grounds of his Elysium, lighter than the air he seemed to tread, with eye, and limb, and thought alike untiring. No legend of which the love of an Indian has been the theme, has ever approached in beauty the occasional references made by our author to the respectful attachment of this young Mohican to Cora —to the delicacy with which its manifestations appeared, and to its tragic termination. From the moment when Magua makes his sudden escape from Heyward, the intense interest of this narrative begins, and does not flag an instant until the conclusion. As, however, it will be utterly impossiblefor us to follow the trail of this story through all its windings, we must condense our remarks, stating our doubts, and our particular points of admiration, as concisely and intelligibly as our limits admit. In the first place, then, no reason is assigned why the ancient Sagamore, and Uncas, were ‘out lying on this trail,’ except it was to keep Hawk-eye company. The people over whom they had authority were at Fort Edward. When the hunter is talking in the Delaware tongue to Chingachgook, why does his poet, in his translation, employ idiomatic vulgarities, such as natur, &c.? In the character, conduct, and operations of Magua, although we are willing to allow ample scope and license for the subtlety and revengeful spirit of an Indian, are there not some things unaccounted for, and many pushed too far beyond the verge of probability? How he meant to mislead the party at first, and failed in effecting his purpose, is very obscurely hinted at. His own escapes are always too miraculous; and, in one instance, when Hawk-eye, after the deliverance of the ladies and Heyward from their first capture, recalls his Indian friends from the pursuit of their powerful, cunning, and deadly enemy, the reasons he assigns are actually too weak; and we are compelled to ascribe the escape to the judicial blindness of the worthy trio, or to the irresistible course of destiny. In a high wrought romance, we have no right to find fault with the extraordinary nature of circumstances, which, however startling and unexpected, are possible. But the motives of the agents must be sufficient, and consistent with their actions, or our credulity is staggered. That an Indian should be capricious in his revenge, at one time ready to immolate his victims, at another thirsting for their more protracted and dreadful torments, we can well conceive: but not that he should so often, in such hazardous circumstances, permit the golden opportunity to escape. The slaughter by the Indians, after the capture of William Henry, is not more mysteriously narrated in the romance than it is in history. According to the latter, the wrath of the savages was principally directed against their red brethren, who served in the opposing ranks. It strikes every reader, however, with some little wonder, that so many men who

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had retained their arms, should have made such slight resistance, and suffered the horrible butchery to proceed without interruption. Through the whole of the second volume, the bereaved Munro is an encumbrance, which the author, with all his ability, finds it a difficult task to support. When we are occasionally reminded of his presence, it is that of one who was a dead weight upon the operations of the other actors in the scene, listless and half exanimate, and alike painful to theinvention of the author, and interest of the reader. But we must put a stop to captious exceptions, many of which are, possibly, not well founded. There are no scenes in modern romance which can surpass the long and agonising struggle at Glen’s Falls, —the approach to the fort through the mists and besieging army—the capture of Alice and pursuit of Cora after the massacre—the escape in the canoe —the adventures in the village of the Hurons—the judgment of Tamenund, —and the last, closing scene of danger and death, which ends this strange eventful history. There is a power, and a fearful interest in these descriptions, which, it needs no prophet to predict, will excite the feelings, and entrance the attention of generations that are to come long after our own. The superstitious customs of the natives are employed with admirable skill; the writer seems to be at home in every spot trodden by the contending armies, or wandering captives and pursuers, and in the language and occupations of his characters. If he fails any where, it is in the management of his female personages; a nice matter for Shakspeare before him has been accused of want of knowledge in this province of poetry. The conversations are unquestionably better sustained, throughout, than in his previous works. Our author stands alone among his countrymen; in solitary and enviable distinction. He has proved the capabilities of our history and varying manners, for all the purposes of high or pleasing fiction. We hope that his career may be yet long; for the delight of his contemporaries, and the still increasing progress of his own fame. He is one of those who, like his favourite Hawk-eye, gathers his materials chiefly from an acute observation of men and things, rather than from the labours of others as they have left them in their books. And the reputation of ‘this kind passeth not away’ with the caprice of popular appetite; for truth is immortal; and the gifted few whose quick perceptions enable them to paint from realities, are sure of being remembered while human nature is the same.

11. Unsigned review, United States Literary Gazette iv (May 1826), 87–94

See Introduction, pp. 10–11. The Last of the Mohicans has probably been more generally popular than any of the preceding productions of its author. Even those who have not hitherto been his admirers, acknowledge, that they have read this work with a strong interest. In many respects, it exhibits an improvement upon those which have gone before. It is superior to them in point of literary execution. It is more like the offspring of a practised writer. His style is free from many of those imperfections, which have formerly been pointed out as existing in it. It is more chaste and manly, though still susceptible of farther improvement. We take it for granted, that we are speaking to those who have read this book; for would be evidence of an overweening vanity to suppose that we are read where Mr Cooper is not. We shall, therefore, enter into no account of its plan or contents, and make no extracts. The plot has little complexity or variety. There is hardly, indeed, what we call a complete connected plot at all. There is no one principal object, at which all the events are made to aim, and to which they all tend. It presents to us a certain number of personages, and exhibits them in a series of situations and under circumstances which excite a powerful interest. But they do not move forward in a very connected manner, each contributing towards the accomplishment of the business of the piece. The events, as they occur, are well described, and individually produce a full effect upon the feelings, but there is nothing like the effective tendency of a grand campaign, in which every position and every action is made to contribute to the main object, and advance the principal design. There is a great fault in the very circumstance from which the work derives its chief attraction with most readers. The interest is too muchforced; it is kept up wholly by artificial means. The persons engaged in carrying on the story, are in perpetual danger of their lives. We cannot feel at ease for them a single moment. They run the gauntlet, beset on every side, by hungry savages, thirsting for their blood, through two whole volumes. We are told on every page of ‘such disastrous chances, such hair-breadth ’scapes, such moving accidents by flood and field,’ that a sympathy is excited in our minds totally independent of any merit in the execution. This may be either good or bad. But whether good or bad, we are forced into a certain degree of interest. Situations of this kind are the

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resource of many very inferior writers, and a resource of which they avail themselves to very great advantage. But it will never do to make up the whole story of our novels of such materials as these. The artifice grows stale. A battle, a murder, a, scalping, or even a massacre of defenceless women and children, may be well introduced now and then. Served up only occasionally, they retain all their relish, and relieve us from the dull monotony of lovemaking conversation and bad jokes. But to make an every-chapter business of them is too much. A yankee once asked a British officer, who was boasting of the signal success of His Majesty’s arms at Bunker Hill, how many such battles he could afford to gain. We put the same question to Mr Cooper, how many novels can he afford to write. How many changes can he ring upon scalping, shooting, tomahawking, &c. and still keep up a wholesome and palatable variety. This mode of doing things must soon come to an end. We get used to these horrible scenes and they cease gradually to excite us. By the time one has gone nearly through with these adventures, he feels such an entire confidence in the abilities of Hawk-eye and his savage associates, that he ceases to feel any anxiety on their behalf. He is able to read on of more escapes, more murders, and more scalping, with the most entire composure; and he may well exclaim I have supped full with horrors. Direness familiar to my slaughterous thoughts Cannot once start me. The principal action of a work of fiction should relate to events of a more even and ev day kind. The continuous interest should depend upon the development and the display of passions, emotions, and affections under ordinary and probable circumstances. Extraordinary events may be occasionally introduced to relieve the monotony of this course and produce a temporary excitement. But to make of them themain business, is stimulating too highly for an every-day diet. Another fault we find is with the improbability of most of the principal events, and, in fact, of the whole course of the story. That two young ladies should have had the audacity to penetrate through the wilderness to the fort at all, during so critical a period, is full enough; but that, having determined upon this measure, they should reject the escort of a large body of troops, of which they might have availed themselves, and instead of taking the beaten road, strike off into the woods, protected only by a major of the gallant 60th, a crackbrained psalm-singer, and a suspicious Indian guide, passes all reasonable credulity. It is true we may be brought up by the remark, that had not our heroines been thus adventurous, there would have been an end of the matter at once, and we should have had no novel. But that, we reply, is none of our business. The author has his book to write, and we dare say could have found some other course; for when were young men and women deficient in ways and means of getting themselves into difficulty? Not that an author should be confined to such characters as have really existed, or such events as have really taken place. He should have wider scope. He may avail himself not only of all probable, but even of all possible combinations. But in using this liberty he is to

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be upon his guard, lest he crowd these extraordinary, though possible combinations, too closely together and in too great numbers. For although singly the mind may admit them to be possible; in conjunction they become incredible. It was sufficiently within the bounds of possibility, for a novel, that our whole party should have escaped as they did, after the affair at Glenn’s, with a whole skin. Yet, we confess, had there been either limbs or lives to spare, we should have preferred a small return of killed, wounded, or missing upon our side, considering the tremendous slaughter upon the other. But when we are led through successive perils, all equally alarming; and successive escapes, all equally marvellous; it becomes a matter of plain demonstration, that the loss could not be always thus on one side. What makes this matter the more provoking is, that the author, after having thus exercised our credulity through the whole piece, and saved his dramatis personæ through fire, wood, and water so many times, should, in the conclusion, wantonly sacrifice two of them in whom we felt the chief interest; at a period too, when they were upon the eve of final success, and when the dangers surrounding them were not nearly equal to those from which they had been repeatedly rescued. This brings us to the catastrophe, with which we are by no means satisfied. We are in general disposed to have works of fiction terminate happily. We like a good wedding or two, to set all right. Still we know that this cannot always happen in real life, and that, for the sake of variety, as well as probability, the dark side must be sometimes turned towards us in fiction. But we had reason to believe that Cora and Uncas were preserved through so many dangers for some good end. Every event as we go along points to a favourable termination, when just at the winding up, the design seems to be capriciously reversed, and these two unfortunate persons are most summarily and unnecessarily disposed of. The vessel, having braved all the dangers of her voyage, sinks as she is floating into smooth water. We are aware indeed of one objection to this disposition of the catastrophe, in the passion of Uncas for Cora, and of Cora, as we conclude, for the major; but this is a part of the business that might with ease have been differently arranged. Uncas would have made a good match for Cora, particularly as she had a little of the blood of a darker race in her veins, —and still more, as this sort of arrangement is coming into fashion, in real life, as well as in fiction. But the main objection is, that this termination does not harmonize with the general strain and spirit of the preceding part of the work. Now we hold it to be a fundamental law in the construction of a narrative, that the catastrophe is to correspond to and be the natural result of the preceding events. It is to be of a piece with what has gone before. It is not to be brought about by an accidental concurrence of circumstances at the conclusion, unless that accident be necessary to make it correspond to the general strain and spirit of the composition, as in King Lear and Hamlet. In short the catastrophe should correspond to the state of mind into which we have been brought by the tenor of the preceding part of the work. Our feelings are violated if it is not so, as any one knows very well, who, after having been moved, melted, filled up to the brim with sacred grief, in witnessing Shakespeare’s part of Lear, sees the old man, in the last act, come in, figuring to Tate’s blank verse, with a smile upon his countenance; like a jest at the end of a sermon. As if

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Lear could do any thing but die. This is putting new wine into old bottles with a vengeance. In Kennilworth and The Bride of Lammermoor, those two noble tragic romances, there is a concurrence of circumstances which gradually thicken upon us as the story is developed, and which render the termination inevitable. There is no evading it. It is true, in such cases, we hope and hope on to the end, that something may turn up—as we do with a friend in a consumption. Ourfeelings, warmly interested for some particular characters, lead to this; for, if we reason the matter at all, we see that there is no remedy, and that the conclusion is absolutely demanded. And, as we have before said, although the means may be accidental, and the final event depend upon a moment too soon, or a moment too late, this does not lessen the intrinsic propriety of the catastrophe. But it is a very different case, where an accident is made to bring about a catastrophe not consistent with the preceding narrative, not corresponding to the first expectations which have been excited, not consonant to the state of feeling which has been produced. This is that sort of violation of probability upon which the novelist should not venture, and this we apprehend is the case with The Last of the Mohicans. The representation given of the Indian character, is probably, as far as it goes, accurate; it is certainly interesting. We should have preferred to see more of it in the social and domestic state, instead of being introduced to a few wandering and solitary individuals. Still it seems as successful as any which has been attempted, and is apparently the fruit of much pains and considerable attention to the subject. One thing, however, is carried somewhat too far, and occupies too much time, the trail hunting. With due deference to the better judgment of our author, we must venture to express our incredulity with regard to some of the wonders performed by Hawk-eye and his Indian friends. Had we been barely told of their results, it might have passed off very well. But when we come down to a minute detail of the particular methods employed, signs observed, and processes of reasoning entered into by the savages, our belief is staggered. Here is a great want of shrewdness on the part of the writer. As long as we merely look on and perceive that the savage, by some means peculiar to himself but inscrutable to us, is able to follow in the track of his flying foes, and, as if by intuition, to determine their number, sex, and age, there is something obscure and mysterious in the faculties which has an imposing effect. But when he is shown to us, squatting down among bushes and dried leaves, measuring footsteps, discussing the length of this heel and that toe, the charm is lost. It is like surveying the beauties of a grand painting through a microscope. The whole poetry of this faculty of the Indian is annihilated. We have only a few words to say about the principal characters which take a part in The Last of the Mohicans. Hawk-eye, or, as he is half the time called without any obvious propriety, ‘the scout’; or, according to another alias, Nathaniel Bumppo, is by far the best drawn, as well as the most important person of the whole. It is true that he isonly a second edition of Leather-stocking in the Pioneers, and he is by many supposed to represent the same person at an earlier period of his life. But it is no small merit, to have taken up the same character and carried it through a second novel, with complete success. We would gladly travel over a third in his company; only remarking in the meantime, that he has some habits which might well be corrected before another appearance. He might in

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future be taught to laugh like other people, for of his own peculiar ‘silent, heartfelt manner,’ most readers must have been, we think, as tired as we were. The delineation of the Indian character, as has just been remarked, is successful. The heroines are as well set forth, as such persons generally are; Cora, perhaps, a little better. But then she has the best part to play. It is easier to describe equally well an efficient, than an inefficient character. Duncan Heyward, or the major, is the hero, which is saying perhaps all that can well be said. That he was a major, was his misfortune, but it is surely Mr Cooper’s fault; who certainly has a most unaccountable propensity, in ‘these weak piping times of peace,’ for bemajoring and be-captaining his heroes. David Gamut is a bore in every sense of the word. Invested with that official situation of bore, which is a necessary appendage of the modern novel, as the fool was of ancient royal courts, he is also a bore in his own proper person. His introduction into a story like this, is one of the strangest conceits that ever entered into the head of a romance writer. He is not only in himself, a caricature, an absolute monster of his species, even admitting such a species to exist; but he is totally out of place; there is nothing for him to do, either in amusing the reader or advancing the plot. He is so much dead capital on the author’s hands, and should have been reserved for some occasion on which he would at least have brought lawful interest. Another individual, Colonel Munroe, fails sadly. His character, as exhibited in the first volume, is well sustained, and excites a good deal of sympathy. Such a change from vigor and spirit to absolute dotage in so short a period, is totally unnatural. The natural tendency of such misfortunes as befell him, would be to call forth energy, not to annihilate it; to rouse the powers both of mind and body to action, not to put them to sleep. Here is a fine veteran soldier transformed all at once into a whining, pusillanimous old man; who, although he had just before defended his post like a hero against superior force, upon the occurrence of a family calamity, wanders about the woods as if he were half asleep, and not like a distracted father in search of his lost children. He exhibits nothing of the tenderness or dignity of grief in his deportment. There are many other circumstances in this work which render it very open to criticism, but we do not wish to dwell too much upon its faults. The notice now taken of them does not proceed from any want of sensibility to its beauties; but it seems to be more important, in speaking of a book of this kind, so popular and so universally read, that its faults rather than its merits should be enlarged upon. The majority of readers are fully able to appreciate the latter themselves, but are not so likely to consider the former. And although it would be a very illnatured thing to dwell upon faults merely for the pleasure of exhibiting them; it is still very desirable that it should be done, for the sake of its influence upon the public taste. By the critical and candid discussion of the merits of works generally read, the public is to be aided in settling the standard of taste, —in forming an opinion not merely of this or that particular work, but upon the merits of literary performances in general. Not that we have the presumption to claim the privilege of dictating to any man his opinions upon such subjects, or of saying authoritatively, what is or what is not conformable to good taste. We only claim a right to take part in that free discussion which is going on now-a-days about every thing, and which, however

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unimportant its products may seem with regard to each individual who enters into it, results, upon the whole, in the establishment of sound views and well-founded principles. So far Mr Cooper certainly has had no just cause of complaint, either against the critics or against the public. The public have read him, have applauded him, and, above all, have been proud of him. The critics have not been sparing of praise where it was deserved, whilst censure has been administered with a gentle and unwilling hand. His peculiar excellencies have been often commented upon. We acknowledge them to be very great; they are universally and fully appreciated, and this very circumstance renders it more desirable that his works should be critically examined and their character thoroughly canvassed. This we say by way of apology, if any apology be indeed necessary, for the sort of notice taken of The Last of the Mohicans. Upon the whole we should think it superior to any of the family, and there are parts of it which would do honour to almost any pen.

12. W.H.Gardiner, North American Review xxiii (July 1826), 150–97

Because the North American Review ignored both The Pioneers and Lionel Lincoln upon their publication, Gardiner’s review of The Last of the Mohicans was extended to incorporate The Pioneers and a general survey of Cooper’s five novels after Precaution (1820). See Introduction, p. 10.

The experiment of adapting American scenes, events, and characters to historical romance, was suggested but a few years ago. It has since been abundantly tried, and is still going on to such an extent, that we should have ample cause to regret the little countenance we may have given it, did we feel ourselves called upon to review, or even to read, half the trash which appears daily under this disguise. Mr Cooper, however, has the almost singular merit of writing American novels which everybody reads, and which we are of course bound to review now and then. For these last five or six years he has supplied the reading public annually with a repast of five or six hundred pages of such matter; so that we have a right to consider him as publicly professing this department of elegant literature. It is too late to say, that he does not excel in it; or at least, that he has not some considerable merit; for however far he may fall short of our ideal standards, or wherever we may rank him among living writers, the public voice has long since confirmed to him the appellation of the American novelist, a title which was but sparingly and timidly suggested for the author of the Spy. No one has yet appeared among us who has been wholly able to cope with him in his proper walk; and we see no good reason why he should not be allowed, for the present at least, to maintain the distinction. We have heretofore devoted a few pages to the Spy and the Pilot; but time and our author have not ceased to be at work, and Lionel Lincoln, together with the Pioneers and the Last of the Mohicans (which are linked together by our author, and for that reason by us), are beforethe world. The American novelist must be set down, therefore, as having fairly entitled himself once more to the operation of a review; and we have it not in our hearts to deny any popular writer such a reasonable gratification as often as we can afford it. The five tales which have been named above, certainly exhibit variety of original charac and novel incident, which entitles thei author to the praise of great powers of invention; and with all their faults, they have that redeeming virtue of a novel, a power of warming the imagination and exciting, for the moment, a glowing interest in fictitious personages

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and visionary scenes. We have met persons, indeed, deficient neither in sound judgment, nor refined taste, nor yet with minds wholly destitute of fanciful association, who are bold enough to say, that they cannot work their way through one of Cooper’s novels. Such readers we are strongly inclined to suspect of unfair dealing. They take up Cooper and are exceedingly disappointed, that he does not turn out to be Scott. In the first place, it is ten to one that they cannot abide an American novel from any quarter; or they have become entirely satisfied, that the author of the Spy is a very vulgar writer; or, without wholly prejudging the matter, they suffer their sensibilities to be so utterly shocked at some little indelicacy, or awkwardness, or inelegance, which is likely enough to occur in the ten first pages, that they throw down the book in disgust, long before the author has arranged those preliminaries, which he esteems necessary by way of groundwork, and which are apt to be somewhat dull with the most vigorous and imaginative writers. But let him take up one of these tales, not as a subject of perpetual comparison with the Great Unknown, but for the bonâ fide purpose of suffering his imagination to be amused with scenes of fictitious life; let him read, as a child would read, for the sake of the action, rather than the argument or the style, and busy himself about disentangling the thread of the narrative, and watching the fortunes of the actors, instead of philosophizing on their characters or criticising their conversation (all which we take to be a clear usurpation of our own province), and we will venture to say, that no such unsophisticated novel reader ever called for his nightcap, until he had arrived at some of those natural resting-places, which every judicious author, consulting equally his reader’s health, and his own reputation, will take care to intersperse at proper intervals; and which, by the way, it is sometimes a fault with our author, that he neglects to provide. The same sort of magical authority over the spirit of romance, which belongs in common to Scott, Radcliffe, Walpole, and our countrymanBrown, is, for us at least, possessed by this writer in an eminent degree. Places, for example, familiar to us from our boyhood, and which are now daily before our eyes, thronged with the vulgar associations of real life, are boldly seized upon for scenes of the wildest romance; and yet our imaginations do not revolt at the incongruity. We land with Lionel on the Long Wharf of Boston, and, under the guidance of Job Pray, tread its blind alleys, and wind through its crooked streets, the same which we pass daily in our common avocations, with much of the same feeling of adventure, with which we make our way into the Heart of Mid Lothian, or to the Sanctuary of White Friars. A military conclave at the Province House possesses something of the same interest as if it were holden before the walls of Tillietudlem; and we attend a midnight marriage at the altar of the King’s Chapel, and feel our blood curdle at the overshadowing arm upon the wall, with the same superstitious terror as when the gigantic armor rattles in the purely imaginative Castle of Otranto. In short, we are borne along by the author through a crowd of romantic incidents and marvellous adventures, without stooping from the flight to consider the reality of things as they exist in the same places at the present day. This seems to us no inconsiderable proof of the power of the writer over us and his subject. Indeed, if we are called upon to state what, in our judgment, constitutes the characteristic excellence of this writer, we should say, without hesitation, that it is exhibited in the rapidity of his incidents, the vividness of his action, and the invention of the machinery of the piece, by

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which we mean all that answers in the modern novel as a substitute for the mythological divinities of the ancient epopeia, or the grants and enchanters, fairies and weird sisters of Runic poetry and the elder romance; those subtile agents, bordering upon the preternatural, who weave, and, at pleasure, unravel the mysteries of the plot, and effect such surprises of the imagination as are essential to its dramatic effect. It is the creation and adaptation of a kind of machinery, which may be adequate to its objects, original in its character, and yet within the narrowed limits of modern probability, that stretch to the utmost the inventive faculties of the novelist; and our author has uniformly succeeded in producing something far enough from faultless, but sufficient to answer this great end. On the other hand, we do not find that he describes with great effect the secret workings of the passions of the human heart; or that he moves our affections, by any other than mere external agents, and such commonly as are calculated to excite no softer or more sympatheticemotion than terror or surprise. He weaves the web of mystery, and our intellectual faculties are interested to disentangle the thread; in the progress of the task, our attention is constantly kept alive by rapid changes of scene and unexpected events; we find ourselves travelling in a strange country; we meet with sudden dangers that alarm us, and are astonished at miraculous escapes; there are great battles and a hot pursuit, and a rapid flight, passing before our eyes; we are kept hurrying on through numberless difficulties in a state of wonder and uneasiness; but our feelings are cold, and our hearts all the while unwrung by the distresses of our companions, or the shocking accidents which befall them; and when we have arrived at the end of our pilgrimage, when the mysteries are all unravelled, and the catastrophe is fully accomplished, we feel much the same sort of satisfaction, as if we had solved some intricate problem; but experience neither heartfelt joy nor deep regret for the good or ill fortune that may have chanced to the actors of the scene. The tender passion of course fills an important space in these tales; as where does it not? But we never fall in love with the heroine ourselves, nor can we, for our lives, conceive why any one else should; and we cannot bring ourselves to sympathize in her sweet sorrows, unless we perceive that she is about to be scalped, or is menaced with some other enormous bodily harm. The descriptions of natural scenery, which abound in some of these productions, are highly picturesque, and full of striking characteristics of the wild American landscape. They prove that the author has studied for himself in the great school of nature. But he succeeds best in imitating her extravagant and gigantic features. He chooses to paint upon the grand scale, and with a bold outline; and the numberless little beauties, which serve to fill up, and soften, and adorn the real scene, are wholly overlooked. His tendency is always to exaggerate. He aims at something striking and overwhelming; and in the attempt often becomes confused. We find ourselves in the midst of huge rocks, and overhanging woods, and tumbling cataracts, with a great mist, and a great noise, and we are utterly unable to settle the relative positions of these objects, so as to form any distinct picture from them in the mind. The fictitious characters, which figure in the several scenes, are various enough, and show a great range of observation. Of whatever class, if not too much given to talking, they are commonly spirited and well sustained; and we are even very happy to converse with such of them as do not profess to belong to the upper circles. But the moment we set foot

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in a fashionable drawing room, we find the gentry there soabominably stiff in their manners, and with so much vulgar good breeding, and so dull, or flippant, or affected in their discourse, that we are heartily glad to escape from elegant society, and take a walk with our author into the woods, or step over to the neighbouring inn, where we are very likely to meet with somebody who can talk to the purpose in his own way. Real personages are also occasionally introduced; but we do not think they add much to the interest of these tales, which have but slender merit as pieces of historical painting, so far as individual characters are concerned. How far may be expedient to mingle history and romance, and to make use of fictitious scenes to illustrate the leading characters of former days, may be matter of argument among the metaphysicians. For ourselves, we do not believe in the train of shadowy evils, which have been conjured up by some ingenious commentator on the Great Unknown, as attendant on the genius of historical romance. Why has not the same ingenuity detected the same fatal error in the historical dramas of Shakespeare, and in nine tenths of the tragedies that ever were written? But be this as it may, every one confesses a heightened interest and a new delight, when he sees the pedantic James, the haughty Elizabeth, and the lionhearted Richard, appearing unexpectedly on the theatre of romantic action, with the same look and the same deportment, which we had pictured for them in our imaginations from the pages of history; though should they look or act differently from what we had a right to expect, they become instantly intolerable. Mr Cooper has done little in this way. His great attempt, that of Washington, in the Spy, was a miserable failure. Paul Jones, in the Pilot, can scarcely be called a portrait; and the slight sketches in Lionel Lincoln are by no means touched with a master’s hand, and give, we apprehend, but faint representations of their originals. In the Pioneers and the Last of the Mohicans, to which it is now time to advert, the author has shackled himself with no characters of this delicate description. In the latter he makes use indeed of names which are known in history; but they belong to persons who have left nothing but their names behind them, connected with one or two striking events in the provincial politics of the times…. [Gardiner here summarizes the plot of The Last of the Mohicans, then resumes:] This is the simple outline of the plot; and we cannot forbear to express our astonishment, that our author, who has exhibited so muchingenuity and invention in the interior conduct of the piece, should have suffered its claim to regard as a ‘narrative’ to rest on such a wretchedly improbable foundation. But il n’est que le premier pas qui coute, and after stretching our credulity far enough to overcome the first startling absurdity of such a tour as our author has here imagined, and having actually set forth in company with a Major of the Royal Americans, like a knight of the Holy Land with two distressed damsels under his wing, in search of all possible adventure, we enter instantly upon a continuous scene of intense and breathless interest; there is no break, no pause, no abiding place of rest; but we are urged incessantly forward by an irresistible power, hurrying on to the final catastrophe through forests and cataracts, over lakes and mountains, by forts and ambushments, in the midst of bullets and bayonets, tomahawks and scalping knives, with the crack of ‘la longue carabine’, or the yell of a dying Indian, forever ringing in our ears; until we are heartily glad to draw a long breath at the end of the volume. Often enough, indeed, are we called upon to believe to the utmost; but it is

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not as it was at the outset; our imaginations have become excited; we have entered upon the haunted regions of romance; and the spell is too strong for the spirit of scepticism to dissolve; at least we found it so upon a first and rapid perusal…. [After quoting at length from David Gamut’s speeches, Gardiner remarks upon Cooper’s fondness for eccentric characters:] Our author has uniformly followed the example of the great lord and master of modern romance, in endeavouring to relieve his reader from the more painful and serious emotion of the tale by introducing some uncouth, ungainly, and unnatural being, bearing no imaginary likeness to anything on the earth or under it, merely to flounder through a saraband for the amusement of the spectators, playing over the same awkward and extravagant gambols again and again, and uttering forever the same stupid jest in season and out of season, until our very hearts are expected to ache with delight. This being is and does nothing more than the queen’s dwarf and the king’s jester were wont to be and do of old; which concomitants of royalty, like many more important jewels of prerogative, have long since ceased from the face of the earth, and become extinguished in the progress of civilization. It would be difficult to find a good reason why they should not also be exterminated from the regions of modern, and especially historical romance. We are not among those, however, who are for tying downthis species of composition to a very strict observance of the laws of congruity, any more than we are for perpetuating the dramatic unities in all the rigor of the French Academy. We have not objection to the occasional introduction of a caricature, and a pretty broad one too, provided it be well done, and really serve us a good turn, by affording reasonable excuse for a hearty laugh. But we do not think our author has usually been happy in this order of creation; and as for the present instance, we can truly say, that so far from having moved our merriment in the slightest degree, the unfortunate David Gamut never appears without wrapping us in a feeling of profound melancholy, and bringing on a fit of lugubrious reflection. He is, beyond comparison, the most stupid, senseless, useless, and unmeaning monster we remember ever to have met with. He does nothing towards the conduct of the piece, which could not have been better done without him; and performs no feat in the world for our amusement, save uplifting a New England psalm whenever he, or any one else, is in danger of being scalped. In short, he deserves no better appellation than such as the merry cavaliers of Charles the Second, had he flourished in those licentious days, would probably have bestowed upon him; but which we are far too polite to repeat to readers as polite as ourselves. [Gardiner quotes passages describing Alice and Cora, then considers Cooper’s conception of a heroine:] The respective characters of these young ladies are as opposite as their complexions. Alice is timid and sensitive, always shrinking and shrieking at the approach of danger; while Cora is quite a bold young woman, and makes rather free, we think, with the savages. This, probably, she felt the better title to do, in respect of the dark blood which flowed in her own veins. There is no task of the novel writer more difficult, we suppose, than that of delineating a good female character; at least the frequency of the failure seems to justify this presumption. Whether it be, that the softer sex is less marked by striking and individual

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character, or because we are less accustomed to see them in scenes which call it forth, or because their genuine peculiarities are of too ethereal a cast for the rude nature of man to imitate successfully, or because our tastes are somewhat capricious upon this interesting topic, are questions which we shall leave to the philosophers. Certain it is, that the heroine is commonly the least agreeable article in a good novel, and quite intolerable in a bad one. Scott himself has but seldom succeeded; our author, we think,never. In the present case, we are free to confess, that so far as Cora is concerned, our judgments, like Major Heyward’s, may be somewhat biassed. We mean no offence whatever to the colored population of the United States; on the contrary, we have a great esteem for them in certain situations; and we acknowledge it to be a vile and abominable prejudice; but still we have (and we cannot help it) a particular dislike to the richness of the negro blood in a heroine. But supposing this extraordinary and superfluous blemish wiped out, what is there in the character either of Cora or of Alice, which adds to the interest of the piece? We are deeply interested in certain scenes of peril, which they encounter; but we are so simply because of the character of the perils themselves. We are moved at the sight of a young female bound to a tree by a troop of fierce and inexorable savages; we shudder at the stroke of the tomahawk which severs her tresses, without much considering whether they be raven or sandy; nor, under the feverish excitement of the scene, do we stop to ask ourselves if this helpless victim be a lady of high degree, or a simple washerwoman. It is certain, that the emotion of the scene would be immeasurably heightened if the fair being, who seems doomed to a lingering death, were one who had already wound her way into our affections, and created a peculiar interest for herself by some touching and attractive traits of female loveliness. But the spectacle has a horrid interest of its own, apart from all considerations of the character of the sufferer; and this species of interest it is, an interest derived from the novelty, the rapidity, the horror of the incidents, and this only, we think, which carries us through the book. Does the author ask why we are neither satisfied with the feminine timidity of Alice, nor with the proud bearing of the ardent and noble minded Cora? We answer, chiefly for the same reason, that we were dissatisfied equally with Isabella Singleton and Frances Wharton, or with Katharine Plowden and Cecilia Howard; for the same reason, that we are now dissatisfied with all the heroines of the Pioneers and of Lionel Lincoln; it is, that they are all miserably deficient in the grace and ease, gentility of deportment, true delicacy, and unaffected refinement, which properly belong to the sphere of life in which they are designed to move; or in other words, because no one of them exhibits, according to our conceptions, what we suppose, each of them is designed to exhibit, the true notion of a well bred lady…. [After quoting passages which illustrate Cooper’s ‘stiff and inelegant’ dialogue, Gardiner complains of Cooper’s idealization of the Indian:] The main design of this work, however, is manifestly to exhibit the characteristics of savage rather than civilized life, as they exist or once existed in the wilds of North America. The Aborigines of our soil constitute the great machinery of the piece, and the few civilized whites, who appear to take an active part in the plot, are in fact introduced merely as objects on whom the Indians may operate to advantage. We have long since looked upon the character of the North American savage as one admirably calculated to

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form an engine of great power in the hands of some ingenious master of romance, who had a true notion of this part of his subject; and the success with which it has been managed by Mr Cooper in the present work, is a striking example of its effect. Beings that went by this name, and were in fact meant to represent North American Indians, have acted their parts, more or less important, in the world of fiction, almost ever since the discovery that such creatures existed. But the representation has commonly borne no greater similitude to the red warrior of the woods, than it has to a chieftain of Timbuctoo, or the solitary hero of the moon. They have not been copies from nature; but mere creations of the poet’s brain, the half formed dreams of a disturbed imagination. Mr Cooper’s Indians are somewhat of the visionary order too; but then he has dreamed a more consistent dream upon the subject than most of his predecessors, and has interwoven with his vision more of what really belongs to the aboriginal character than any other writer of poetry or romance. The great difficulty is that which we suggested, by the way, in a late article on this interesting subject; namely, that he has relied exclusively upon the narrations of the enthusiastic and visionary Heckewelder, whose work is a mere eulogium upon the virtues of his favorite tribe, and contains, mixed with many interesting facts, a world of pure imagination. So far as things have fallen under his own daily observation, the account of an old man who had spent a long life among the people whose manners and usages he attempts to describe, is doubtless valuable, and to be received cum grano salis only by reason of his enthusiastic temperament, and ardent prejudices in favor of his adopted children; but beyond this, we think, it has been pretty clearly demonstrated, that he is not entitled to belief, being himself the victim of an easy credulity. It is therefore with great regret, that we have seen his wild traditions adopted by an author so generally read, and so deservedly popular, for the sober voice of history, and the whole fable of the superior virtues and glories of the Lenni Lenape, incorporated into this tale, and made the basis of its Indian mythology, for such it must becalled. This would be of trifling moment, perhaps, and in general not to be complained of in a work of fiction. But the extreme minuteness with which the rites and ceremonies of this singular people are described, when by no means necessary to the action of the piece, render it apparent, that the author really supposed he was doing the fashionable world some service, in familiarizing them with the manners of a race but little known. And in fact we are given plainly to understand in the preface (so far as anything certain can be learnt from one of Mr Cooper’s prefaces), that we are not to look here for ‘a romantic and imaginary picture of things, which never had an existence’; but are to take the work to be ‘exactly what it professes to be in its title-page, a narrative.’ And in this particular we protest against it, as presenting altogether a false and ideal view of the Indian character. We should be glad to know, for example, in what tribe, or in what age of Indian history, such a civilized warrior as Uncas ever flourished? … [Gardiner quotes passages describing Magua’s devilry and lust for Cora, then turns to Natty Bumppo:] But it is time to advert to the real hero of the piece. Nathaniel Bumppo, called by the Delawares Hawkeye, from his quick and accurate sight, was a provincialist, who from early life had associated with the Indians as a hunter, and become attached to them, or at least to the tribe of the Mohicans, and their wandering mode of life. At the time our

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author takes him up, he had been for some years employed as a scout and partisan warrior in the Canadian wars. In these hazardous services he was joined with Uncas and his father, the great Mohican chief; and the three had rendered themselves so formidable to the enemy, that they were universally known and dreaded by the French and their savage allies under certain nicknames, which they had bestowed upon them as indicative of some peculiar qualities. Uncas, from his agility and swiftness of foot, was called Le Cerf Agile; Chingachgook, either from the manner in which he secretly glided upon his enemies, and again eluded their grasp, or because they esteemed him perhaps little better than the arch fiend himself, was Le Gros Serpent; and Nathaniel Bumppo, from the tremendous effect of his long rifle, was named La Longue Carabine. These wars were particularly formidable to our ancestors from the number and ferocity of the savage allies of France; the vast American forest presented no field for regular tactics and scientific warfare; so that it became necessary for the English to meet the invaders with some arm better fitted to the nature of thecountry and the character of the enemy, than the well drilled mechanical soldier of Europe. For this purpose they did not scruple to employ such tribes of Indians as were not already enlisted against them; but their main dependence was upon the hardy yeomanry of the country, who were more interested to defend the soil, and who had learnt from long experience how to meet their wily and remorseless foe. These men were sometimes formed into regular companies and battalions of rangers; but more often mingled with the natives of the forest in desultory warfare, and formed small independent skirmishing parties, in which the red and white man fought side by side, and shared together the hardships and privations of the wilderness. When this course of life was pursued year after year, it is not surprising that many a white man should have partially adopted the habits and manners of his red associates, and become averse to the restraints of civilized life. Similar instances, though rare, may be found even at the present day. Who has not heard of the white hunter and warrior, famous in his day, who had settled himself down in some distant and secluded spot to pass the remnant of his life, as be imagined, far from the encroachments of civilization? But after a few years a settlement of whites is formed in his vicinity, and he becomes so much annoyed by this interruption of his repose, that he voluntarily abandons his habitation, and plunges into the wilderness anew. To the suggestions of some such fact, we probably owe the character of the scout, a bold and original conception, which we think, upon the whole, the best piece of invention our author has ever produced; one, we may say, which deserves to be ranked in the first class of the creations of genius. The scout, though averse to the modes of life ‘down in the settlements’, is neither a savage, nor a misanthrope; on the contrary, he has a vast deal of the milk of human kindness in his composition, with an excellent moral code of his own manufacture, and religious notions which certainly do great honor to the wilderness. He adopts many of the prejudices, but few of the superstitions, and none of the barbarous practices of the people with whom he lives; and notwithstanding his attachments to savage life, he yet piques himself upon being ‘genuine white’, or as he more often expresses it, ‘a man without a cross’. It is true, that he considers it but an act of justice to spill the blood of a Mingo, being the natural enemy of his Mohican friends; but then, if it falls to his lot to do the deed, he chooses to do it in a civilized way, by bringing him down at a long shot

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with a rifle; or perhaps, if it comes to close quarters, by knocking his brains out with the butt; forthe use of a tomahawk or a scalping knife he esteems ‘contrary to the gift and nature of a white man,’ though allowable enough in an Indian. His feats of skill with this favorite weapon are indeed prodigious; he accounts for it by informing us, that he has ‘a natural turn for a rifle,’ which he concludes belongs to the Bumppos, and ‘must have been handed down from generation to generation, as our holy commandments tell us, all good and evil gifts are bestowed; though,’ he modestly adds, he should be ‘loth to answer for other people in such a matter.’ He has a great share of untutored sagacity, which gives him a deep insight into human nature, according to his means and opportunities of studying it in the wilderness; and he rivals the Indians themselves in his skill at following the hidden ‘trail’ of an enemy, or concealing his own, as well as in all other peculiar learning of the woods. He has, moreover, a great deal of natural poetry in him, without being in the least aware of it; and some of the most poetical sketches of wild scenery, which our author has given, seem to fall by accident from the lips of the scout. [Gardiner here provides a lengthy plot-summary of the events of the latter half of the novel. In so doing, he anticipates Mark Twain’s ridicule of the tracking feats of Cooper’s heroes:] Although the pursuit is in general admirably managed, yet we cannot help thinking our author has occasionally exaggerated Indian ingenuity, and taxed white credulity a little too far. That an Indian should be able to follow up a forest trail continuously from one end to the other, we can readily conceive; but that after once leaving it, and paddling forty miles over a lake, he should be able to strike it again within a short distance from his landing place, with no better guide than a surmise of the general direction of the flight, and some knowledge of the localities, seems to us to approach the marvellous. We do not know, that it is going beyond nature to make Uncas divert the course of a rivulet for the purpose of inspecting its bottom, where the trail seems otherwise to have come to a premature end; but is it not somewhat too ingenious to suppose, that the flying Indians should not only march in the stream, so as to conceal their track, but also, as if anticipating that the course of the rivulet might be turned, and its bottom thus be exposed, should tread in each other’s footsteps with such admirable accuracy, and that under water too, as to leave but the trace of a single man? … [Gardiner discusses the concluding scenes and defines the ‘greatest fault’ of the novel:] These hundred pages, from the entrance of Magua into the village of the Delawares to the end of the tale, are wrought in part with a more delicate and in part with a bolder hand than any in the book. They possess unusual interest and much excellence of execution. The appearance of the venerable Tamenund, the patriarch of his tribe, ‘an old, old man, whose locks were white as snow,’ borne down with the weight of years, and loaded with the emblems of the achievements and renown of days long gone by, is a highly imposing and poetical vision. His feeble and dreamy attention to the scene before him, his perpetual recurrence to the events of his youth, and utter oblivion of those of yesterday, his deep rooted and bitter prejudices against the pale faces, from whose arrival he dates the ruin of his race, are all perfectly natural; and his general demeanor during the examination of the prisoners is entirely consistent with his years and his honors. The several appeals of

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Magua, and Cora, and Uncas to the justice and magnanimity of the Delawares have a good deal of appropriate eloquence, and the whole scene is admirably dramatic. But the pertinacity of Heyward, in arrogating to himself the title of La Longue Carabine, with the view of saving its real owner at the hazard of his own life, seems to be somewhat out of nature even for a hero of romance, considering not only that there was enough of doubt and danger hanging over his own fate, but that the fate of the fair Alice also depended somewhat upon his. The anxiety of the scout, on the other hand, to maintain his personal identity against this unexpected impeachment, ‘although it should cost him his scalp,’ seems to us much more in character. The preparations for battle, and the battle itself, are given as our author usually gives scenes of that character, with much force and effect. We do not think the flight and death scene of Uncas and Cora, however, by any means the best part of it. It seems to us somewhat confused, partly owing perhaps to the hurry of the action, but chiefly to our slender acquaintance with the geography of those parts, as derived from our author’s descriptions; and the death of Cora affects us no otherwise than as a striking incident which comes upon us by entire surprise, while we are yet looking for the tomahawk of Uncas or the rifle of Hawkeye to interpose in her behalf. The funeral obsequies are probably thus minutely described as a means of illustrating the manners and customs of the Indians, which are very well depicted, here as elsewhere, throughout the book, excepting so far as the Delawares have been beautified beyond aboriginal nature. The funeral of Cora reminds us of a considerable defect in the story, by bringing the old Colonel again to light. After he had arrivedat the end of the trail, being found wholly unfit for service, he was stowed away for safe keeping in a beaver’s hut, under the guardianship of Le Gros Serpent. Thence Chingachgook is made to thrust his head out now and then, and when the fight ensues, his rifle bears its part in the destruction of the day. He does not do indeed all we had a right to expect from the Last of the Mohicans; his glories are somewhat too easily eclipsed by the rising sun of Uncas; but still he does enough in support of his own character to dignify his sorrows and move our respect. The Colonel, on the other hand, having travelled a long journey with no other object than to find and rescue his lost daughters, does no one thing towards the effecting of that object, but after burying himself with the beavers whilst others are fighting his battles, emerges again at last only to blubber over the grave of Cora. The greatest fault of this work upon the whole is a little overdoing of the very thing which constitutes its chief excellence. The incidents are too crowded; there are too many imminent dangers and hair-breadth escapes; far too much of the same sort of excitement; too many startling sights, and unearthly sounds, and amazing accidents. We scarcely set out ere we meet some shaggy monster thwarting our path; and as we advance ‘on Horror’s head horrors accumulate,’ so that there is not a moment’s feeling of ease and security, and comfortable recreation from one end of our journey to the other. If a horror is not actually going on before our eyes we know at least that it is in preparation and not far off. There is a sort of perpetual consciousness that we are seated upon a barrel of gunpowder; and after one grand explosion is past, instead of finding a fit occasion for thanking our stars that the danger is all over, we have only time to wonder what the conjurer will do next, before we find ourselves again up in the air. This results in part from the nature of the subject, scenes of war in a wilderness and among savages. But these might

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have been relieved, and their effect consequently heightened, by the mixture of a little quiet domestic life, if our author had any turn that way; a few indoor pictures something above those at the quarters of Colonel Munro, and a few strokes of humor, a little better, we should hope, than David’s intolerable psalmody, would have been a prodigious improvement. At any rate, without the introduction of new characters, or material alterations of the scene, we might have been horrified, and alarmed, and astonished less frequently than we are, to great advantage. The Indians are admirable instruments of romance; but our author works them to death. Besides he is constantly going out of his way to show us a series of unconnected, extraordinary spectacles,and to put his actors in strange postures and unusual situations, which contribute little to the development of their characters and nothing to the accomplishment of the plot, for the mere sake of a momentary effect…. [Gardiner concludes his long review with remarks on The Pioneers:] Our author informs us that the Pioneers was written expressly to please himself. From his repetition of Chingachgook and Nathaniel in the Last of the Mohicans, we presume it is still a favorite, and on this point we have the pleasure to agree with him. The numerous characters introduced to play their respective parts in the rise and progress of Templeton, and whom we have no opportunity to notice, are drawn with great spirit and originality, and are precisely such a collection as we uniformly meet when we visit a young thriving village in the interior of our country. But the Leatherstocking is a natural, and yet highly poetical being, not only far above the ordinary run of fictitious personages, but even superior to the scout, whom we nevertheless esteem highly. It is the same Nathaniel Bumppo; but his native peculiarities are bolder in the full development of a green old age, and rendered more striking by a judicious contrast. His description of the Catskill is much in the style of the scout’s description of Glen’s, which we have quoted above; but we think it better, and regret that our limits will not permit us to extract it; and but for the same cause we could make extracts to great advantage from any of the several scenes in which this son of the wilderness is brought into collision with civilization, and made the subject of laws and customs entirely adverse to those of the woods…. The Last of the Mohicans, we believe has generally been the more popular of these two books. But for ourselves, we still hold to the Pioneers, and trust our author will in future always write to please himself, although we are not sure we might not have as long a catalogue of errata to correct in this production, as in that which we have so copiously noticed, if time and space did not fail us. The truth is, we have concerned ourselves chiefly to notice our author’s faults, because Mr Cooper is already too far advanced to stand in need of our praise; and we desire, not only that the public taste should be correct on the subject of our native literature, but also, if it be possible, and any suggestion of ours can effect it, to see something from this pen free from the numerous defects which deform its present productions, and every way worthy of the great powers and far spread fame of the American novelist.

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13. Review, Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres x (April 1826), 198–200

Extract from an unsigned review. This is not the first time we have had to express our very cordial approval of Mr. Cooper’s productions; and the volumes before us will, we think, do any thing but diminish the just reputation of the American novelists. Never was the character, the original and interesting character, of the native Indians so well, so truly, and so vividly drawn as in his pages. They are not heroes of romance, talking Cockney sentiment, as if taking a moonlight row in a boat from Battersea; but the real stern sons of the woods, whose wild passions, like race-horses, burst into fiercer flight for their temporary restraint: we feel their individuality. The narrative part of the present work is wrought up with unfluctuating interest; but certainly the skill with which the characters are drawn and developed, is where the author’s talents have been the most strikingly successful. The English scout, alias Hawk-eye, alias La Longue Carabine, is brought into admirable contrast with the simple, yet, in his way, generous David Gamut, the psalm-singer; and these, with the young, the generous, the heroic Uncas, would of themselves be sufficient to establish the fame of any novelist.

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THE PRAIRIE 1827

114

14. Article, Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine xx (1827), 79–82

Extract from an unsigned article entitled ‘Tales of Indian Life’. We turn now to The Prairie, which belongs to an opposite class of romance, and is an extreme example of that class. Its very species may be regarded as new; and if it does not actually owe its origin to Sir Walter Scott, certainly owes to him the popularity which at present attends it. The object of this mode of fiction is not to invest persons and scenes with ethereal hues, but to detail heroic deeds and sufferings with the minuteness of a witness; to bring near to us the scenes which lie in dreamy perspective, and to make them speak with their own natural power to the heart. The success of the writer depends on the fine tact with which he selects his materials from the true poetry of history and life, on the graphic skill by which he presents them to us, and on the gradations by which he enables us to believe in them as part almost of our own personal experience. In this Sir Walter Scott has been most happy; he has made us feel romance not as a dream of childhood, but as interwoven in the tenor of existence; he has brought out the magic threads which are twisted in the web of our own being, and introduced us into the bosom of history. Mr. Cooper has, no doubt, taken his cue in some degree from the Waverley Tales; but that is all. His compositions belong to the same class, but are not further imitations, and have no approach to mimicry. In variety of endowments he is greatly inferior to Sir Walter; but in the exercise of his own peculiar faculty—the power of simple description, he excels him. He has smallportion of that sympathy with the beautiful, none of the delicacy, none of the humour, none of the chivalrous grace, which belongs to the novelist of Scotland; but his pictures of scenery are more vast, more vivid, more true. His works are the effusions of a man accustomed to study the mightiest forms of nature—not for the sake of any associations which the force of imagination has connected with them, not for the gratification of impregnating them with sentiment and thought, but for the sake of their own sensible grandeur. To him her colours and images ‘have no need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied or any interest unborrowed from the eye.’ A sailor and an American, he has had noble opportunities of forming an acquaintance with her; and nobly has he used them! He is not her poet; but her secretary and copyist. His Pilot is truly a Tale of the Sea; —‘native and endued into that element.’ He makes us hear all the sounds of the water, from the gentlest ripple to the roar of the tempest; become conversant with all weathers and all signs of the deep; and discriminate every change of light cast on the waves.

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Compared to him our poets are fresh-water sailors, who know nothing of the matter; he alone gives us the plain but mighty truth. In the Pioneers how various and huge are his pictures of the mountains and forests, whose old silence man has just begun to disturb; and how insignificant do the encroachments of civilization appear amidst regions ‘consecrate to eldest time!’ Here is the adventure of Elizabeth Temple with the panther, which glares out on us with all the animation of one of Landseer’s pictures; the magnificent conflagration of the woods, and the escape of the young lovers from the flame; and the festal death of the old Mohican in the cavern amidst the black vestiges of the fire, which is most heroic and affecting. His Last of the Mohicans is a succession of splendid scenes in the woods, more soft and luxurious than his former works, and perhaps of higher character than any of them; but all made out with the same spirit of literal accuracy in the detail, which, however extraordinary may be the facts or manners portrayed, renders it almost as impossible to doubt their truth, as if we had ourselves seen them. This naked and masculine power is put forth with at least equal force in The Prai although the subject is less attractive. We have not here the ocean, in all its sublime varieties, ever prompting thoughts of mysterious awe; nor the fairy course of a rapid river, studded with green islands, and overhung with castellated rocks; nor the interminable shade of deep and untrodden forests; nor the quiet of mountains unvisited before by human footstep; but the interminable waste of hugemeadows, covered by long grass, sublime only from their magnitude and their distance from human dwellings. Yet even these level wilds become interesting by the vividness with which they are presented; and the few relieving objects which are scattered through them with a daring parsimony, impress us with tenfold force. A single rock, which may serve a family for an encampment; a little hollow, marked only with one blasted tree, or a small grove of tangled underwood—which are scenes of some of the most striking of the events—stand out to view, and hold a place in the recollection as realities which we have visited on some long-past journey. The persons are for the most part as rude as the scenery, but they are marked with the same distinctness. Of these, the most original are Ishmael Bush, one of the adventurers called Squatters, and his seven sons; a race ignorant, sluggish, slow, but of tremendous bodily strength and unwieldy size, and capable of being aroused into decision and energy. The predominance of the animal in frames so physically potent is almost grand; and the awakening of the faint sensibilities of the group, on the murder of one of the sons, is striking, as a proof that even in such as these the great instincts of nature cannot die. Few things in modern romance are finer than the journey which the family take in quest of the lost son; the mother withered, yet strung into energy, leading the way, till the marks of his blood are seen, and his huge corpse, yet convulsed with mortal struggle, is found in a brake, and buried by the parents in terrible silence. In the result, it appears that the murder has been committed by Abiram White, the knavish uncle of the youth: and the Squatter, whose command is absolute, determines to put him to death, and carries his judgment into effect with a natural solemnity, which is most awful and impressive. As the criminal implores a respite in terms the most abject and piteous, he is left bound, beyond all possibility of escape, on a narrow shelf of rock, with a cord suspended from a branch of willow, so that he must ultimately perish; and when the

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waggons stop at evening, his dying cries are heard from afar, and all is still. His sister and her husband who had been his judge, return and bury him: at which scene the frozen apathy of the poor woman gives way—she weeps over the murderer of her son, and the pair pass on their miserable journey! In noble contrast to these, is a brilliant portrait of a young Indian, like the Uncas of the Mohicans, most generous, graceful, and brave. One scene, in which, having fallen into the hands of cruel enemies, he is about to be tortured, but, at the last moment, hears the distant approach of his own band, cleaves the skull of the executioner, cuts thethongs that bind him to the stake, dashes through his astonished foes, and reaches his countrymen unharmed, in contrast and rapidity stands out beyond all others. Among the whites is Paul Hover, a bee-hunter from Kentucky, quite a specimen of his race—bold, boisterous, coarse, and a little oppressive, as persons of loud voices and high spirits are apt to be in real life; a young officer in the American service, as well-behaved and insipid as a young officer should be; two fair ladies, one of whom is an exquisite blonde, and the other a more exquisite brunette; and a certain Doctor Bat, or Battius, a naturalist travelling on an ass, who is an intolerable bore wherever he is found, and who proves abundantly that Mr. Cooper has not the least touch of the humorous in his genius. But the most popular character of the whole will probably be that of the old Trapper, who is already familiar to Mr. Cooper’s readers, as Hawkeye, the scout of the Last of the Mohicans, and the Leatherstocking of the Pioneers. This character is the most felicitous of the author’s creations, and, having borne a good part in two previous novels, does not fall off in the end. The elements which are mixed in him are few and simple. But to the general traits of a passionate fondness for a roving life and sylvan freedom; entire coolness in the midst of danger, though with more sense of the value of life than the Indian heroes; and an almost paternal regard for the desolate and afflicted, wherever he meets them—he adds some peculiar characteristics, which mark him for a personal regard. Amidst the exuberant bounty of nature, he has a painful sense of the least waste of God’s creatures; the needless slaughter of birds, or the felling of trees, pains him like an affront to himself; and his quiet and reflective enthusiasm flows on in even tenor, in dangers, sufferings, and prosperity. In this work he is reduced in condition— ‘a warrior once, a miserable Trapper now,’ —yet still he is strong at heart, and maintains a dignity amidst his privations. The last moments of his life, which has been bound together by natural piety, and extended far beyond the ordinary age of man, are worthy of its progress: we feel when he dies that we are parting from an old friend; and seriously lament that we can hope to meet with him no more in a future novel. The merits of this and other works of the author are essentially national; their spirit, as well as their scenes, is American; and they belong to the infancy of a literature which may one day become gigantic. Their grasp and compass; their boldness and occasional coarseness; the strong sense of almost unlimited power which they betray; and the absence of all the blandishments of rhetoric and fancy, bespeak them the genuineproductions of a new country rising on the confines of barbarism. They are the first true American novels. Brown, like Godwin, gathered his materials from his own mind; they are ‘all made out of the carver’s brain,’ and therefore bear the impress of individual thought, not the stamp of any country or age. Washington Irving is English in

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his tastes and style, and even inclining rather to the more sentimental and delicate than the robuster cast of feeling among us. But Cooper is a true honest American; his works, in more than one sense, do honour to his country; and they will not, we are sure, for that reason, be the less welcome in ours.

THE RED ROVER 1827

120

15. Paris Globe reviews Cooper 1827, 1828

Goethe was a warm admirer of Le Globe, which was probably the most distinguished intellectual journal of its day. Sainte-Beuve was a young man, enthusiastically avant-garde, when he wrote this piece. The full title of the articles signed ‘F.A.S.’ is ‘The United States: American Literature, Novels of Mr. Cooper.’ Its author consistently treats Cooper’s writings as the artistic expression of a national, republican temperament. Beneath the fulsome praise is a wealth of sensitive, intelligent commentary. See Introduction, pp. 29, 41–2. (a) Extracts from two reviews, both signed F.A.S., which appeared in the Globe, 19 June 1827 (vol. v, n. 33, 173–5) and 2 July 1827 (vol. v, n. 39, 205–7). Translated by J.P.McWilliams. If we now turn to American belles lettres rather than to American political writings, we observe that the earliest American literature crept sterilely along British paths. At the very beginning we find the Columbiad of Joel Barlow, a national subject to be sure, but treated without originality and without local color, using all the outdated conventions of the epic poem. Of Brockden Brown we have read only his novel Arthur Mervyn. We do not know if we are wrong in judging him by this one work, but it seems to us that any reader who neglects this original portrait of uniquely American customs is unfortunate. It is not without hesitation that we place Washington Irving among American men of letters. Born, it is true, in the New World, he has courted his literary naturalization in the Old World. Failing to recognize the new, rich field open to his talent in his own country, he ran away and laboriously harvested the vestiges of the Spectator school, and found even more outmoded means of getting by in its overworked manner. Several national sketches, too near to caricature and of too exclusively urban an interest, had already made Irving his reputation, but he insisted upon making further, feudal homage to his former mother country.1 This literary servility seemed to justify both the scorn which the British press loved to heap upon its former colony, and the insulting pictures which Britain drew of America for Europe. What good is it that a bold man from a ridiculed country may learn

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to paint, if he only uses his paint brush to sketch flattering portraits or servile copies of an untrustworthy master? It was precisely at this time that Cooper revealed his talent.* Consequently, it was the truly popular success of Cooper’s early works which first brought American literature to the attention of the French public. We are glad that these works were novels, for we regard the novel as the most reasonable and fruitful of literary forms. Cooper has been called an imitator of Scott, and it is said that Cooper draws his inspiration from Scottish sources. We declare ourselves utterly unable to understand the basis for this judgment, a judgment which has become rather banal. We do not see much resemblance between the entirely new culture portrayed by the republican author, and the feudal customs which the Scotch Baronet has exhumed from old chronicles. If we compare the fidelity with which the two authors portray human nature, always the same under the diverse customs which different ages and climates produce, we have yet to learn that the author of Ivanhoe has acquired so exclusively a privilege to his genre that one cannot imitate the grand model of human nature without imitating Sir Walter Scott! The American novelist has drawn his inspiration from his own observations; he has imitated what surrounds him. On the one hand, a society essentially moral, religious and enlightened, a society that combines liberty with order, and equality with law, a society whose polity is established and sensible, a society which we do not hesitate to call the most reasonably constructed in the universe. On the other hand, a population divided into two colors, of which the white members, enthusiasts of liberty for themselves, hold in bondage all members of another race, curse all servitude except the servitude they impose, and, gracefully seated at their splendid tables, drain to liberty the goblets which their slaves must refill. And yet, everywhere in America one senses a spirit of enterprise, of braving all obstacles, of pursuing one’s fortune over the seas and through the wilderness. On the borders of wilderness and civilization, hosts of pioneers are rolling back the limits of the wilderness, men strangely shaped by these two influences, men who combine the vices and the virtues of these two opposing orders. And, in the depth of the wilderness, there is a race of men almost unknown, generous and ferocious, crafty and brave, independent and savage, despoiled of a domain formerly their own, beaten down but never enslaved, a race for whom the light of civilization has never been anything but a devouring fire, and a race which, surrounded on every side, seems, like the scorpion in the circle of fire, to wish to be annihilated. Thus we find the three great human races mingling on the same soil, all the European racial strains represented in the numerous emigrations, an extraordinary colonization, adventurous warfare, an astonishing progress of civilization, a revolution both glorious 1

In 1809 Irving had published, under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, his comic masterpiece, the History of New York. In 1815 Irving left America for England and did not return to the United States until 1832. * In these last few years, America has seen other writers of true merit appear, whose names are not mentioned here.

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and fruitful, and, finally, an immense, varied movement of peoples—these, all these, comprise the characters of Cooper’s novels. An entire continent still half-explored, embracing all climates in its vast extent; covered with virgin forests and with clearings, with cities and plains; cut lengthwise by chains of mountains which the ancient masters of the country called Sans Fin (Alleghenies); watered by immense rivers and by lakes the size of seas; civilization progressing over these grand waters and across the wilderness; and especially the powerful contrast between untamed and civilized nature—these, all these, comprise the settings of Cooper’s novels. And the man of genius, to whom such wealth appeared, would he have considered imitating a foreign model? No. There were his only models. He saw them, and said to his conscience: ‘I too must become a painter.’ If we now make a comparison between the two novelists, not as between an original and a copy, but as between two powerful rivals, we should say that we prefer the American to the Scotsman. It seemsto us that, whatever literary form the writer adopts, but especially if he chooses the historical chronicle or the historical novel, readers in these grave times have a right to demand of that author that he be partial, not in falsifying or burlesquing facts, opinions or characters, but in judging them, in taking a side in the grand struggle which so strongly preoccupies the human race. The reader demands that some moral idea dominate an author’s pages, that an ideological conviction lend dignity to an author’s work. Well, we ask, what moral idea can we observe in the writings of the Scotch novelist, unless it be the Voltaireian ideal of tolerance, a tolerance founded on indifference, and on universal scepticism—those spiritual vices that are death to all that is enthusiastic or grand in the human soul? One tiredly observes Scott’s perpetual impartiality between papism and reformation, between Tories and Whigs, between revolutionaries and men in power, between religious or civil liberties and doctrines of loyalty or service, and, finally, between all those ideas which ennoble man and all those ideas which enslave him. One would willingly implore the Tory Baronet frankly to unfurl his flag, however unpopular and illiberal it might be, however difficult it might be to believe that a man of such genius could follow, in good faith, a banner so discredited. In our day more than ever before, one may apply to the writer the definition which Quintilian applied to the orator: ‘The good man is skilled in speaking (writing) to the point.’ One knows that, in his political life, Sir Walter Scott falls sadly short of Quintilian’s ‘good man’. Such a reproach cannot be directed at Cooper’s novels. Cooper writes as citizen and as philosophical man at the same time. In him one finds human reason that is remarkably free of prejudice, enlightened moral feeling, profound faith in liberty, in equality, in religion, in his country, in the dignity of human nature—in everything that is good and generous in human nature. Above all, one recognizes in Fenimore Cooper the noble type of an American republican. The differences between Scott and Cooper would doubtless be even more apparent if we could compare the two eminent writers on grounds where the individuality of the author might appear more directly, — where he speaks in his own voice and personally

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subscribes to all his words. If ever, as we wish, Mr. Cooper publishes his reflections on our country, we believe that the French public will possess a work equal to Paul’s letters. The maiden effort of Mr. Cooper revealed very little of his talent; itrecalled the passably pale manner of Miss Edgeworth. But Cooper quickly pulled himself out of this well-used rut. His second work, The Spy, made his reputation. In this novel, Cooper’s striking portrayals of the true state of American society first surfaced. The action is full of movement and of life. The grand figure of the spy, who dominates the entire tableau, is an original conception, strong and profoundly moral. Our memory recalls no character in the Scottish novels that is more morally beautiful; and, if we wish to find points for comparison, it would be necessary to look among the characters whom Scott presents as fanatics. This fact alone seems to us to indicate the line of demarcation that we have formerly drawn between the two writers. Some critics who are difficult to please have judged Washington’s role in the action to be unworthy of the historical man. As for us, we find his role to be constantly dignified. He appears at great intervals as a kind of beneficent genius of a superior order, and this role seems to us to accord sufficiently with the glorious aura with which history has already surrounded him. The novel, The Pioneers, to which we shall later return, is principally a descriptive work. A small number of events, which make up an engaging plot, seem placed in the novel for the purpose of introducing the descriptive passages. What movement there is in this picture of a settlement rapidly developed by the spirit of enterprise! And what quiet control in the manner of the author! One senses Cooper’s delight in revisiting the scenes of his youth and the places which fostered his growth. No American reader fails to recognize that Cooper has laid the scene of The Pioneers in his own countryside, amid his own landscapes. It was on the untouched banks of Lake Otsego, at the sources of the Susquehanna, in the bosom of virgin forests scarcely opened to the light of recent settlements, that Cooper passed his first years, in the community of Cooperstown, newly founded by his father, one of the most distinguished citizens of New York. And with what love, with what truth, with what charm of detail, Cooper paints, in turn, the entire heterogeneous society of a new settlement, the contrast of diverse customs that have been brought together, but not yet fully assimilated, that kind of patriarchal, republican feudality exercised by the founder of a settlement, the pleasures and dangers of the forests, even the hearth of the great house! Cooper presents us a tableau of the interior, but the interior is that of a new settlement, and on every side there is relief from the sight of the wilderness. Cooper’s portrayal of the sea, The Pilot, was also written con amore. The second half of Cooper’s youth was passed in the navy of theUnited States. The energy and fidelity, by which Cooper succeeds in holding his reader through four volumes, fill the sequence of sea scenes, in which, to borrow an expression from Long Tom Coffin, one scarcely finds any little corner of land on which to throw an anchor. These volumes are filled with that kind of sea humor which, in The Pioneers, gave so original an air to the character of Ben Pump. The author, in telling of an audacious expedition upon the very shores of the British Isles, seems to have wished, in the name of his nation, to take a sort of literary possession of an element of which England long dared to claim a monopoly. There is, in this third work, an astonishing variety in the numerous, successive descriptions of death.

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The pilot remains a mysterious character—dominant without often mingling in the events of the action. The figure of this character, in which every reader has recognized the famous Paul Jones, is less purely, but perhaps more vigorously traced than the figure of Washington. Nothing simpler, since Jones plays a principal role. Among several skilfully contrasted characters, and among a throng of sailors drawn with subtle shading, we wish to single out Long Tom Coffin. This characterization, much more original than any of Smollett’s sailors, seems to us a true masterpiece. That sort of honesty and rude sensibility which Cooper excels in conveying, that singular love for his country the sea, that entire identification with his beloved schooner—all of these make Long Tom an entirely engaging man. And his death, undergone with such calm and resolution atop the debris of his battered ship, as if the thought of outliving his ship never had occurred to him, and as if his very existence was tied to those planks that were so soon to be riven asunder —how fitting and dignified an end for so extraordinary a character. One understands, after reading The Pilot, that a man can attach his whole self to a frail bark, as to a mistress. There is an astonishingly magical quality to the interest the author evokes through his two ships. To him, they are like two leading characters, and he invests them with a kind of life, a kind of individual existence, that is deeply compelling. Through reading The Pilot, one perceives why Englishmen use the feminine pronoun ‘she’ in referring to ship names. We now come to an entirely different kind of composition. The setting of Lionel Lincoln is the oldest and most refined city in America; the novel opens when America was still only a colony. We find the representatives of the mother country still masters of the soil, but the crisis of emancipation has been imminent for ten years, and works itself out under our eyes. The descriptions of the Battle of Lexington and ofthe siege of Boston, all the details of the great revolutionary movement, are traced with the hand of a master and with a warmth of patriotism which doubles the interest of the subject. The descriptions of localities and of local customs are flawless; Seth Sage is an excellent characterization, not a little aggressive, like all New Englanders, and especially like men from Massachusetts. In the first volume we noted a striking expression. Lionel Lincoln, recently arrived from London, tells his friend Polworth that he had, before his departure, taken temporary leave from military service, and that such a decision was not only well received by military men, but was ‘exceedingly popular with the king’. This bizarre association of words seem to us to characterize the bizarre mélange of loyalty and of independence which characterizes the English nation, and the democratic strain with which the English language and spirit are strongly saturated. The principal character, who lends his name to the novel’s title, seems feebly portrayed. Without individual coloring, without any marked character, without any other merit than that of being a perfect gentleman, he remains unable to decide between two sides. Cecil Dynevor also seems to us much less winning than Cooper’s heroines usually are. Nonetheless, the work is of great interest. Despite the flaws of the principal characters, our interest is nourished by Cooper’s secondary characters. The mysterious Ralph, the no less mysterious Nab, and, especially, the original conception of the idiot Job Pray, a sort of chorus of popular political opinion, furnish the work’s most dramatic effects. We will refrain from quoting the last scene, a passage which contains appalling truths.

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But we must level a far more serious criticism at the author, if we wish to be consistent with the ideas we have set forward in our first article, and if we wish to render a faithful account of our own impressions. In the last pages, the moral idealism which we have attributed to the works of the American author seems to flag badly. After having seen the hero remain a stranger to the republican cause, which the patriotic Cooper presents to us as sacred, one is painfully shocked to discover, at the end of the novel, that the mysterious old man, who has engaged our interest and respect, whose speeches have been full of enthusiasm, of exalted devotion, and of generous idealism, and who has represented liberty and independence, is actually a maniac escaped from Bedlam! This disappointment recurs when, after the first unexpected revelation, we see the hero, who has just witnessed the glorious spectacle of his country’s enfranchisement, going to England to retrieve his English baronetcy and his rotting castle, and to solicit acoronet from the British court—and doing it all as if it was the most natural thing in the world! Thus it seems that the moral of this history is that love of liberty, love of country and love of republican equality is madness; crowns, rotting castles, aristocratic distinctions and court favors are supremely reasonable things which comprise the source of all happiness! The only slight consolation one can find, is that Lionel Lincoln, so much the gentleman, is so faint a character that he seems shady. To speak seriously, we know quite well that a spirit as highminded, independent, frankly patriotic and republican as that of our author could not have intended such ideas to arise. We thus shall limit ourselves to regretting that several unfortunate lines at the end of his book could have produced such impressions. The collective title given to this fourth novel (Legends of the Thirteen Republics) makes us hope for numerous treasures which the author is holding in reserve. Nonetheless, without releasing Cooper from one of the twelve legends yet promised us, while urging him even to add new states to his list, quite as fruitful as the old, we will risk the opinion that perhaps it would be well for Cooper not to imagine legends for each of the thirteen original states of the Union. We do not believe that the particular character of every one of them is sufficiently distinctive to be able to lend a unique coloring to a separate dramatic action. We think that several states could furnish materials for more than one novel, and that other states could not provide materials even for one. Finally, we think the author could, in good conscience, turn aside from the idea of federal equality and admit the existence of a kind of literary aristocracy among the American states. Whatever the merits of this last observation, we clearly recognize that Cooper has, at least momentarily, suspended the execution of his plan, in order to follow the inspiration which has created The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie. These two works, together with The Pioneers, form an ensemble divided into three parts in the manner of a Spanish Journée. They comprise a magnificent epic of the wilderness, which alone would suffice to place its author in the first rank of contemporary literature. Here everything is original, the scenes and the characters; for we do not consider the novel Atala1 to have broken into this untouched mine. Atala is an admirable work, but its descriptions belong for the most part to the rich imagination of its author, and its characters belong to our civilization, however removed from it they may appear. From experience, we know that to pretend to make a pilgrimage through the desert in the steps of Mr. Chateaubriand is to risk an ample harvest of disappointment. This is not the case, however, in the forest paths of Mr. 1

Atala (1801), a novel by the Viscount de Chateaubriand, is a tale of tragic Indian love set in eighteenth-century Louisiana.

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Cooper. We have traversed a great many of the sites which he has painted, and observed more than once the customs which he has described, and we can attest to having found Cooper’s pages scrupulously accurate. And what is more compelling than fidelity? What variety Cooper portrays in the incidents of the adventurous life of the forests! What a contrast between our civilization and the primordial customs of the Indians! What astonishing changes of scene in the action, an action which is limited to the short period of one man’s lifetime! The tale begins in the bosom of the wilderness, not far from the Atlantic shore, continues in the same area, now transformed by rapid industry into a flourishing settlement, and ends several hundreds of leagues farther back in the interior of the continent, where the hero has been driven in order to find wilderness once more! And what can one say of a conception so strong, so utterly new as that of the man of the forest—Hawkeye, Long-Rifle, Leather-stocking, the Trapper—who forms the bond between the three parts of this beautiful work. How strongly that rude being commands our interest— a man so honest and good, always simple yet always dignified, and always unexpectedly true. A kind of mediator between the Indian and the white race, between the savage life and civilization, he possesses everything that is good in them both. A stranger to every social tie, to every attachment derived from society, he plies his own vocation. He lives alone, because God, he says, made him for solitude, If a return of the instinct for sociability ever seizes him, even for an instant, it happens at the summit of the Catskill Mountains* where he goes to obtain a bird’s eye view of society. Even there he soon finds himself to be too near civilization and flees from it again into the depth of the forest. The very air of civilization stifles him; he gets lost in settlement clearings. However, though he does not seek out white men like himself, he sympathizes with them when he finds them. His simple heart has never been agitated by burning passions, yet he is full of touching feelings. Devout and unshakeable in his attachments, he loves mankind in general, takes pleasure in doing men good, but still prefers the servitude of nature to the servitude of man. He holds fast to his color, is proud to be a ‘man without a cross’ of blood, yet prefers the company of copper skinned peoples because he believes that their life is closer to nature. He deeply venerates everything which is a work of nature, and regards all natural facts as an expression of the divine will. Every attempt of man to modify nature, or even to assist nature, he detests as an outrage, for he believes that natural perfection can only be perverted by the hand of man. A man of nature, a poet like nature herself, he is the embodiment of the first dream of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

* The name Catskill recalls to me a rather futile circumstance which, at the moment, struck me vividly. I was visiting a too little known waterfall in the Catskills. The virgin forests surrounding the waterfall harmonized with its beauty. Far above me hung a semi-circular crag from which the waterfall came tumbling down in an arch, throwing its stream of water far from its blackish base. Half way up the height of the crag, I followed a slippery footpath with quite narrow ledges, when I suddenly saw a visitor’s card left, as if by accident, in a crevice. The fragility of such a memorial to man’s passage, in the presence of that natural magnificence, seemed to me to be novel and thoughtprovoking.

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The law is his enemy, for he sees in law a human invention foreign to the natural order. His spirit, accustomed to the vast reaches of the wilderness, simply cannot perceive that the civil law derives from a necessity of the natural order—the necessity of association, caused by human contact as uninhabited areas gradually contract. Even when he is finally bested by the civil law, precisely because he set himself against it, the reader cannot blame the law, though he may curse its existence. Sentenced to the pillory, the old hunter still engages the reader’s sympathy and respect. We continue to sympathize with him when, fleeing before a civilization which repels yet pursues him, fleeing before a social contract to which he has not consented, and which weighs heavily upon him, he abandons the soil of which he, like the Indians, had been the first occupant, and disappears towards the distant plains, in search of that sanctuary which the desert, for a few years at least, still offers to the independent individual hemmed in by society. Thus, in this profound work are embodied, under circumstances favorable to both, yet working one against the other to their mutual detriment, the two dreams of Rousseau: the man of nature, and a social contract unanimously agreed upon. Over the ruins of both these dreams triumphs the system of Benthamite utilitarianism; we glimpse the future realization of the terrible doctrine of Malthus. In the immediate situation, however, the adversary of the law is far from being merely perverse; he religiously observes every duty whose sanction antedates the conventions of society. His thoughts remain innocent, serious, and unswervingly moral. In his eyes, the sublime image of God hovers over the wilderness, and he attributes the concepts of true justice and true goodness to God alone. He trusts in God with a faith that is never shaken. The life to come is forever in his mind, but he describes hisparadise through images of his beloved forest. His Eden is the wilderness; he could not support the thought of not finding, in his Eden, his long rifle, Hector, the slut, and his old Indian friends. The beautiful conception of Leather-stocking hardly exhausts the vigor of our author’s paintbrush; there is both variety and originality in those characters who, appearing separately, group themselves around the grand figure of the half savage hunter: Billy Kirby and Paul Hover, who represent the greatest degree of independent spirit feasible for social man; Judge Temple, legality personified; Colonel Howard, Effingham, and Middleton, representing the rational passions and ideas of civilization; David Gamut the musician and Obed Battius the scientist, representing the ridiculous aspects of mankind; the female figures, delicately drawn in order to contrast to the essential savagery of the larger scene; Montcalm, whose military pomp and chivalrous manners form no less striking a contrast; the immigrant family of Ishmael Bush, a singular mixture of order and license, half barbarous and half patriarchal, so jealous of all social power that one of Bush’s sons, when a stranger’s presence is first known, cries out It is an enemy, he speaks of the law,’ a family that nonetheless is thoroughly impregnated with a rather precise idea of justice, though their justice is totally different from the benevolence of the old trapper. Another triumph of Cooper’s talent is the vivid pictures he has drawn of the ways of the copper skinned race, most especially in the two characters, Magua and Mahtoree. These two chiefs epitomize the Indian character, of which Uncas and Hard Heart represent the beau ideal, Chingachgook a sort of middle ground possessing neither the duplicity of the first, nor the generosity of the second, and, finally, Tamenund and Le Balafré, who

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represent the Indian character filled with the majesty of old age. Who has not been touched by the delicately suppressed love of Uncas for the black-eyed white maiden, a love which, suggested rather than described, continues half veiled even when the young Sagamore sacrifices his life for her? And who does not admire the effects which the author achieves by the language his Indians speak, a language full of metaphors and movement, of strength and simplicity, and sometimes of an ineffable, savage grace? For example, what could be more subtle than the words with which the old hunter explains to the ferocious Mahtoree the difference between the manner in which an Indian and a white man declares his love? We should like to be able to cite all the beautiful scenes of Indian life, in the forests and on the prairies, which Cooper has painted for us: thevaried battle scenes, the pictures of the interiors of Indian camps, the astonishing effects produced by the explosive contrasts of Indian passions, at once fiery and repressed. We shall limit ourselves to singling out a few scenes: Mahtoree’s visit to Inez in Tachechana’s wigwam, the funeral of Cora, the apparition of Le Balafré, the preparations for torturing Hard Heart, and, finally, the admirable scene with which The Prairie ends, the last moments and the death of the old hunter. We should like to be able to summon up here the happy successes of Cooper’s dialogue, the verve of his humor, the wealth of appropriate words which he finds, words which sparkle, not only in his savage epic, but in his other works as well. But at this point we should close; the limits which we set ourselves are already passed. It remains only for us to express the hope that Cooper will not consider Indian life and the ways of the wilderness as an exhausted mine; and that, after having led us again, in his new work1 amid the great expanses of the sea, he will return us again to the bosom of the forest and the plains. It seems to us that, among other fruitful subjects, the landing and first settlement of Europeans on the shores of New England or Virginia, with such romantic characters as John Smith and Pocahontas, would offer great resources. All that we would regret in such works would be that an interval of more than a century would deprive us of the hope of meeting our friend Hawkeye once more. (b) Extract from Sainte-Beuve’s review of The Red Rover in the Globe, 16 April 1828. Translation by D.B.Wood based on text in Sainte-Beuve, Premiers lundis, I (Paris, 1875), pp. 288–94. The Globe published a fine passage from The Red Rover when it first appeared. We shall return today, albeit rather tardily, to this excellent and widely read work; and, without seeking to submit it to a dry and unrewarding analysis, we shall discuss it for a moment with our readers as an old acquaintance one likes to recall from time to time. From the time of his first attempts, which placed him at the forefront of Walter Scott’s imitators, Cooper has gone on daily improving his craft; he has come to a better

1

The Red Rover (1827) was not yet published when these articles were written.

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understanding of his talent, by dint of putting it to work; his style, at first timid and doubtful, has become firmer, bolder and more original; he has had the courage to recognize his own peculiar strengths and weaknesses; in a word, whilst never ceasing to belong to the family of the Scottish novelist, he has pursued an independent path, —and the colonial has liberated himself. To begin with his failings, they are undoubtedly serious enough. For the most part, it is because of the plot that his novels fall short. So feeble and badly constructed, so contorted and difficult to follow, almost always so improbable, that one would say, on seeing it laboriously unfolding itself, that it had been conceived as an afterthought, and that the incidents in its development had been thought out and arranged for a quite different purpose. The stream, so to speak, is not allowed to flow along on its own, pursuing its natural inclination; the owner wants to make something of it, and uses it as a means to an end. Cooper, in fact, tells less as a storyteller than as a descriptive artist: that rather obvious remark gives us the key to his talent. Gifted with a sober and profound sensibility, with a vast and pacific imagination, he saw early on the most magnificent natural spectacles; he saw or he dreamed of, in the heart of these sublime scenes, human beings in harmony with the virgin forests, the wide-open prairies, where the sky seemed higher and more immense than elsewhere. The struggles, of civilization against nature, especially those of justice and liberty against oppression and force, came to endow these youthful tableaux with colours and shades no less varied than alive. A descriptive and imaginative poet, a sincere patriot, he sought above all, within the limits of the historical novel, an opportunity to pour out his soul, to throw open the gates of his imagination, and to celebrate a country and a cause which was close to his heart. He portrayed there in faithful and indelible strokes customs unknown to Europe, and which America itself saw daily retreating and disappearing. But, less versatile, less complete than Scott, he was unable like him in the midst of these preoccupations to keep in control, almost playfully, as if for his own enjoyment, a plot at once complicated and fluent, to ravel and unravel its threads, to let them go and take them up again by turns, and to mount its exquisite gems artfully within the whole close-knit fabric. It is not the case however that Cooper lacks that creative faculty which conceives and puts before the world new characters, a faculty byvirtue of which Rabelais produced Panurge; Le Sage, Gil Blas; and Richardson, Clarissa. One cannot forget, once one has made their acquaintance, Hawk-eye and Tom Coffin. In spite of their faults, the American author’s works excite the greatest pleasure and emotion; they possess enough superlative beauties to atone for a few obscurities and improbabilities. Nowhere do these beauties show themselves more often or more forcefully than in The Red Rover. After having been a sailor like Smollett, Cooper wished, like the author of Roderick Random, to describe the customs and scenes of the sea-going life; but he did it with more poetry and, one might say, with more love. No-one has understood the ocean better than he did, its voices and its colours, its calm and its storms; no-one has caught as vividly and as truly the feel of a ship and its sympathetic rapport with the crew. He unfailingly renders these indefinable and profound sensations. The Dauphin of the Rover, from the same dock as the Ariel of the Pilot, seems to have taken on a life of its own the moment that it felt the waves beneath its keel and the sailors’ feet on its boards. Sometimes it is a sea-bird, skimming the foaming brine with its wings and gracefully

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riding the contours of the waves, the next it is a charger which stumbles, draws itself up and then stands trembling with fright. Our good Richard Fid is not averse to comparing the slender elegance of the ship’s guy-ropes and stays to Nell Dalle’s waist ‘when the strings of her corset had been pulled tight’ and, according to him, all those pulleys, placed at just the right distance from each other, are like the eyes of a beloved infant on a face which it is a pleasure to look at. When the Caroline founders and is about to plunge to the bottom, Wilder hears hollow and menacing sounds which come from the depths of the ship, like the moans of some monster in its final agony, and Richard thus has us understand that a ship close to sinking performs its death-rites as surely as every other living thing. I would go so far as saying, if I might be so bold, that in this novel the ships are the two most important characters, and that the Dauphin is more interesting than the rover himself.

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16. Scott reads The Red Rover and The Prairie 1828

Entries for 14 and 28 January 1828, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1950) 472, 478 See Introduction, p. 39.

I read Cowper’s [sic] new work, The Red Rover, the current of it rolls entirely upon the ocean. Something there is too much of nautical language; in fact, it overpowers everything else. But, so people once take an interest in a description, they will swallow a great deal which they do not understand. The sweet word ‘Mesopotamia’ has its charm in other compositions as well as sermons. He has much genius[,] a powerful conception of character and force of execution. The same ideas, I see, recur upon him that haunt other folks. The graceful form of the spars and the tracery of the ropes and cordage against the sky is too often dwelt upon. I have read Cowper’s Prairie—better, I think, than his Red Rover, in which you never get foot on shore, and to understand entirely the incidents of the story it requires too much [knowledge of] nautical language. It is very clever, though.

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17. Unsigned review London Magazine x (January 1828), 101–2

The Red Rover is a tale of the sea, by an author who has taken the ocean for his element. A ship is the heroine of his stories, and men and women are merely accessories in his plot. He invests a vessel with life; he describes its walk on the waters with the enthusiasm of a lover; and dwells on its manifold perfections with an enjoyment that ensures the warm sympathy of his reader. After a ship, Mr. Cooper is great in his conception of a sailor—a true seaman; an amphibious creature, that only lives and breathes in connexion with the boards he treads, and the sail he handles—an animal incapable of a separate existence. This writer’s Tom Coffins, Ben Boscawens, and Dick Fids, are made to sink with their ships, but to exist eternally in the imagination. When Dick Fid is told by his commander that he is going on a service of an arduous and a dangerous kind, Richard in his simplicity says, ‘Not much more travelling by land, sir, I hope?’ Dick Fid was aware of his own incapacity to steer a true course on terra firma: his author and creator, however, is equally awkward under the same circumstances; but he is not so well aware of his defect. Mr. Cooper, in short, is only a man of talent when his foot is on deck—like Rob Roy, treading his own heather, at the first touch of the wood, at the first snuff of the sea breeze, he feels the inspiration of his genius, while we must in justice say, a duller, more prosy, tedious dog never had his day than the same Mr. Cooper, among builded houses, paved streets, and green fields. The Red Rover, as a story, is undoubtedly a puerile affair, and contains a vast deal of arrant stuff, by way of dialogue and description: but the portions of it which are good at all, are truly admirable displays of power.

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18. Review by Grenville Mellen, North American Review xxvii (July 1828), 139–54

Mellen (1799–1841) was a minor poet and storywriter; also a friend of John Neal, whose attacks on Cooper are represented in No. 9. Ostensibly reviewing The Red Rover, Mellen is primarily concerned to prove that Indian romances are artistically barren.

We venture but little, we apprehend, in saying that the public is exceedingly obliged to Mr Cooper for these volumes. For ourselves, we shall not be backward in declaring, that he has, in this instance, done more and better things for his name, than upon any former occasion. We the rather rejoice at this, as we have sometimes had fears of his falling off as he advanced, by a sort of échelon, that is melancholy in any writer, and eminently so in the novelist. Happy the popular writer, who is thus able to stand the test of frequent appearance at the public bar; and who, if he sometimes falter, is yet able to renew his strength, and resuscitate his slumbering energies at those secret fountains of power, that are ever flowing clear and strong in the deep and, to common minds, inaccessible places of genius. He thus comes with something like surprise upon a world that is getting even weary over his books, and at one wave of his ‘enchanter’s wand’ dissipates every shadow of distrust as to his efficiency, or of conspiracy against his good fame and empire; as an energetic king may be supposed to put an end to all treasonous murmuring against his authority and name, by his sudden appearance among the malecontents, in his panoply, and with all the ensigns of his royalty about him. It may be observed, moreover, though not an unfailing concomitant of superior powe that this alternation of excellence and mediocrity in their productions has been common to eminent writers. Sir Walter Scott has evinced this peculiarity to a degree quite uncommon, which, in one less gifted, would have been absolutely dangerous. Some of hisworks anterior to the Crusaders, had been singularly tame and nerveless, considering their lineage and pretensions. But, in the meantime, Maturin, with his Albigenses had appeared in astonishing power; and forth-with we find Sir Walter before us again, in his strength and stateliness, and in the transcendent grace and vigor of the Talisman, not only outdoing himself, but defying the possibility of being outdone, and, by one masterly effort, vindicating his great name.

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This alternation may very naturally be the effect of a tendency to relaxation, consequent on strenuous exertion; and in the instance of Sir Walter Scott, to recur to the standard illustration, we think we can easily discern the author of Napoleon taking some hours of gaiety and ease to himself, when he determines to dedicate a little work to Mr Hugh Littlejohn, and to write essays on agriculture. As to his Sermons, he needs frame none better, or more effectual, than he has aforetime put into the mouths of his own Covenanters. Upon the same principle therefore, that we have ever hailed the return of an author to the style of composition in which he seems peculiarly adapted to excel, we are pleased also to meet Mr Cooper once more on his favorite element. It strikes us, that there is something a little peculiar in the history of novel-writing in this country. Starting with a principle, correct in itself, but like other correct principles requiring judicious application, that works of imagination should represent the character and manners of the country where they are written, our novel-writers, at least those of the second class, have made their works too purely of the soil. As though treason lay in too near an approach to the waters, or as though there were a fear that something transatlantic would there creep into their fancies, they have even avoided the lakes themselves, and make a dry-land story of it, among woods and ravines, and wigwams, and, tomahawks. The Indian chieftain is the first character upon the canvass or the carpet; in active scene or still one, he is the nucleus of the whole affair; and in almost every case is singularly blessed in some dark-eyed child, whose convenient complexion is made sufficiently light for the whitest hero. This bronze noble of nature, is then made to talk like Ossian for whole pages, and measure out hexameters, as though he had been practising for a poetic prize. Now, though we may applaud the spirit which has led some of our novelists to place the scene of their stories invariably and pertinaciously somewhere between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic, —and the deeper in the forest the better, —still we must wonder at the taste thatpeoples them with such a mass of wild and copper men; and moreover question the necessity, on the whole, of going back, as a matter of course, to the precise time when the struggle was the fiercest between the colonists and these barbarians. We are aware that we are disputing the first principle which these writers set out upon; but it appears certain to us, that there is a barrenness of the novelist’s peculiar circumstance in the life of a savage, which cannot be easily got over, when we set about a story of him in his hut and in his wanderings; and it must necessarily be a troublesome tax upon the ingenuity to throw a moderate share of interest round a narrative, founded upon events connected with these simple, silent creatures. This tax has rarely been paid to our satisfaction. In fact, the species of writing, we believe, began in mistake; heretical as it may seem, it strikes us that there is not enough in the character and life of these poor natives to furnish the staple of a novel. The character of the Indian is a simple one, his destiny is a simple one, all around him is simple. We use the expression here in its most unpoetical sense. But mere simplicity is not all that is needed. There must be some event in the life of a hero, to keep us from growing weary of him. He must not lie upon our hands; the author must keep him in business, and he must have more business than is comprehended in the

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employment of the scalping-knife or the paddle, to become the subject of our refined sympathies, or to gratify a cultivated taste. He must be mentally engaged. The savage says but little; and after we have painted him in the vivid and prominent colors which seem necessary to represent him amidst his pines and waterfalls, —after we have set him before our readers with his gorgeous crown of feathers, his wampum and his, hunting-bow, it would seem that we have done as well as we could for him. Beyond this bare description, which indeed may be one of the most beautiful in the world, it is not easy to advance. Nature leaves us, as soon as we leave nature, in this case, and put our calm, taciturn son of the desert into the attitudes of civilized life. The Indians, as a people, offer little or nothing that can be reasonably expected to excite the novelist, formed as his taste must be on a foreign standard. View them in New Zealand or Otaheite, go through all Australasia, and then come to the wilderness of America, and the native will still be found nearly the same being on the continent as on the island. The cannibal or the rude hunter will alternately present himself; but neither, we apprehend, with much distinctness or individuality of character. Occasionally an individual will start forth from the herd, whom skill or strength may have raised to eminence among his brethren, and whose mind gives token of whatit might have been and might have done under the hand of civilization. But the Indians exhibit little of that mixture of character in the same person, which arises from an acquaintance with the arts and artifices of life and the world, and which is the source of that adventure and interest, that must belong to a good novel. Such seems to be the insuperable obstacle in the way of those, who venture into our early wilderness for a plot. They leave the abodes of civilization, the places where incident grows out of the nature of circumstances, and where it is probable we may realize many of those pictures and variations of life that give interest and grace to the works of fancy, —all these they leave for the reeking hut of the Indian, to hurry a hero through the ordeal of Indian cruelties and Indian mummery, through a series of scenes that have been a thousand times presented to us, and which admit of no change. Apart from the impossibility of remaining true to his subject, and still making the native a being of true interest in the bustling and social parts of his book, the Indian novelist has to contend with the spirit of the age, which demands, for the most part, descriptions of real life, and the display of characters who talk and act like ourselves or our acquaintance, and who have not cast off allegiance to common sense. Many by no means grey-haired among us, can remember reading the works of Mrs Radcliffe, and of Lewis, with all due reverence for their secret passages, their murtherous castles, their spectres, trap-doors, and dungeons. We can ourselves recollect, with what supreme horror we read the Mysteries of Udolpho in broad daylight. But how does our terrible respect for Ambrosio diminish before the dignity of Father Eustace, and Udolpho lose its glory beside the Tolbooth of Auld Reekie. The reign of terror is over. Eidolon has but waved his wand, and the castles of romance, those formidable piles of mystery and mischief, have vanished before its flourish, as monks and monasteries vanished before the heretical hands of the ‘defender of the faith.’ But the public taste has undergone a change. Manners, as peculiar to some chosen period, and associated with certain events of importance that have become matter of history, must now fill up the descriptive department of works that aspire even to the title of romances. Dialogue has superseded

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narration; and in the true spirit of the drama, into which many of the best tales of the day may be resolved, characters are made to act their parts. This change of taste subjects the Indian novelist to an arduous task. He will feel the necessity of going wide of nature, in any attempt to make a varied and imposing story out of such materials asthe situation of the colonies, considered in their isolated state, or in their relation to the Indians, would probably afford. Hardly, indeed, from our young annals could a tale be woven, that should meet the prevailing feeling of propriety and interest in relation to this subject. Moreover the elements of society, considered implicitly as the society among the early settlements of this country, offer little in the shape of sects or classes, that is calculated to meet and satisfy the popular taste. Our retrospection affords us no privileged and important tribes of togati, full of lore and prophecy; no bands of merry archers whose very thievery is full of romantic adventure; and no minstrels overflowing with chivalry and song. We have no Robin Hoods, or Blue Gowns, no Vidals nor Cadwallons, and no gypsies to lend just mystery enough to our stories, and preside over the destinies of our heroes and ladies. We have none of these dim and ancient things to season our fiction withal. But it will be said, if we have anything like legendary lore, we must seek for it among the children of the forest, for the good reason that it is nowhere else to be found. But there is a fallacy in this. We belong as a people to the English school of civilization. It is not necessary that the scene of an American work of imagination should be laid in America. It is enough that it represent our character and manners either at home or abroad. Whatever of romance, or tradition, or historical fact England may boast, as material for her novelists and poets, rightfully belongs as well to us as to herself. Neither would we be understood to say, that a stirring novel may not be drawn out from Indian life and character. It can be, and it has been done. But we hold, that once done, it is, comparatively, done for ever; and our complaint is, that we are overdoing the matter, or have been overdoing it. It is a mistaken idea also, that to constitute an American novel, either the scene must be laid in the early wilderness of this country, or that events of so recent date as those connected with our revolution, must occupy a prominent portion of its pages. It is the author, not his theatre or his matter, that nationalizes his work. Our accomplished countryman Geoffrey Crayon in his beautiful Sketches of Old England, has given us a book as essentially American as it is possible for any book to be, which is written in good taste, by a person belonging to the English school of civilization. An American work of taste cannot differ from an English, as a tragedy of Racine differs from one of Shakspeare. We have been thus diffuse in our observations upon this species of fiction, which we cannot better distinguish than by the denomination of Indian novels, because a class of our best writers have been drawn to it,by a mistake, as it seems to us, of principle, that ought to be corrected, and because our author himself has contributed his share to this class of productions. On him, indeed, the severity of our remarks will not fall; yet he certainly must be considered as coming within the scope of them. He had portrayed to us enough of the Indian before the appearance of The Prairie, and we mistake if the public had not begun to give signs of impatience. With full sensibility to the merit of Mr Cooper’s occasionally admirable and extraordinary descriptions, we believe that Indian life and character have never been touched off to better effect than by Brown, and we doubt

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whether any one can improve upon his portraits. The great difficulty now is, that to fit the savage for our modern novel, the author cannot rid himself of the idea, that he must strip him of half the solitary but still homely and revolting royalty of his nature; and when he does that, he is apt to render him ridiculous. The case is still worse with the native heroines of the forest, in the attempt to bring them upon the stage, arrayed for eyes polite; and thus, instead of a faithful example of Indian character, we have before us a piece of mere fancy-work, and are gazing on a poetic savage, instead of the true aboriginal in the naked and strong relief which he naturally presents. While we acquit Mr Cooper, therefore, of gross violations of probability and truth, in these delineations, and charge them upon others, who may be called his imitators, still we cannot release him from all responsibility on this score. We are consequently disposed to greet him the more heartily on his own element. We are always well inclined to take a sea-breeze, after toiling for long days in tangled wildernesses and heated towns. To no one, moreover, are we better inclined to submit ourselves on ship-board, surely with no one are we more ready to pass away the time, either above or below, in calm or tempest, than with our author. The quarter-deck is his home. Upon an element that has been heretofore occupied by a spirit of poetry rather than real life; where fancy has found little else to revel in, save the solitary and the mighty; and where it has been considered as desperate a matter to carry through a substantial plot, as it would have been to establish houses and highways, —even here has our novelist contrived to keep us through nearly two sizeable volumes, not only contented, but absolutely delighted; and not only with enough to see and wonder at, but with as much to interest the active mind, as can be found in the complicated intrigues of the thronged world. Throughout this tale, the interest excited is intense and untiring. There is in the very movement of a warship through the waters, something stirring and beautiful. The dangersshe may encounter, and the glory she flings over the deep in her prosperous career, come upon us with their peculiar associations of anxiety and wonder. But when, in addition to this, the characters of the drama are all clustered on the narrow deck, and our regards are thus concentrated, it is difficult to conceive of a locus in quo of deeper or more absorbing interest. The management of the vessel, the descriptions of her in sunshine and storm, with her straight, mysterious, low, black hull, her gliding approach to her prey, and her various graceful evolutions upon the bosom of the ocean, —all these things are sketched by the hand of a master…. [Mellen outlines the plot of The Red Rover, approvingly quotes a number of Cooper’s descriptions of seas and ships, and then concludes:] Indistinctness is a fault into which Mr Cooper is apt to fall in the closing scenes of his story. This is an unfortunate failing at a moment when we naturally require a bold relief of every circumstance, and when our regards are concentrating on the converging personages of the drama. All this may arise from a very poetical state of feeling, that throws a kind of glare over every object; and it no doubt very naturally accompanies the peculiar excitement of the finale. But it is to be avoided, as there is a chance that the mass of readers are looking forward to a clear catastrophe, and are not always able, perhaps, to participate fully in the emotions of the writer.

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In the delineation of the Rover, again, it occurs to us that there is something objectionable. There is too much poetry about him. It is not, in all respects, the natural character of a man who has so long led a life of peril and depravity, and spent the better part of his days in the reckless swing of desperation. There is, perhaps, too much of the genteel villain, and too little of the Ishmaelite, in his composition. Upon the whole, we apprehend the American public has more than cause to be satisfied, with this last present from Mr Cooper; and will look with an interest proportionably increased to what he shall next send us, from his elegant retreat. What may we not expect from the native genius of the West, kindled into new warmth at the altars of Vaucluse?

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19. Extracts from three unsigned British reviews 1828–9

Reviews of Cooper’s Notions of the Americans provide a telling example of the strains in British-American cultural relations during the 1820s. These extracts reveal that British critics did not uniformly condemn Cooper’s republican principles. Nonetheless, those who praised Notions of the Americans were defensive, and the many critics who attacked the book were as contemptuous as they were patronizing. The silence of American reviewers, however, indicates embarrassment over Cooper’s outspoken republicanism. American deference to British opinion bespeaks a persisting colonial complex. See Introduction, pp. 28, 37–8. (a) Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, xxiii (July 1828), 164–73. The present attempt of Mr. Cooper, the well-known American novelist, to give a correct view of his countrymen, their manners and institutions, has been treated by some party critics in this country with affected ridicule, and by others with most unmerited vituperation. The Servile of England, as of Spain or Austria, bears an inflexible hatred to republics in general, but more particularly to that of the United States. Their greatness is gall and wormwood to him. His system is to conceal their prosperity, and belie facts which none but he could have theaudacity to contradict. He considers love of country in an American a crime; and the love of freedom any where a damnable heresy. For years past, every high Tory publication, from the Quarterly down to Blackwood, has laboured to increase the spirit of dislike to America, among the partisans of their own man-degrading doctrines. Where America is worthy of imitation here, as in her economical government and rigid exclusion of favouritism, interest, and bribery, her merit is denied, or facts are wilfully perverted; her faults are magnified; and however essential it is, upon political grounds, that the truth relative to this rising empire should be thoroughly understood in England, they endeavour to blind and deceive as many as they may respecting her actual situation. It is not against Americans personally, but against their free and energetic institutions, that these malignant arrows are launched. Yet it is but natural that they who, under a constitutional monarchy like our own, are for ever grabbing, mole-like, to

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undermine all of a free and generous character we possess, should spit their venom against every thing of the like description in other countries…. The first charge brought against Mr. Cooper is that of praising his country too much. This is a charge never brought against Englishmen by their own critics. We must place ourselves midway between the two countries, in the midst of the Atlantic as it were, and show no favour to either party. English tourists and travellers never assert that all out of England is a mere caput mortuum! They never go swearing from city to city abroad, against and at every thing they meet with, because it is not what they have been accustomed to at home, good or bad! They never make notes of every thing obnoxious among foreigners, that they may put them in array with all that is excellent at home! It is notorious that twothirds of them do this; is it then just to censure the comparatively moderate exaggerations of Mr. Cooper respecting the land of his birth, when he is stimulated by misrepresentations and falsehoods on these very subjects? Is he guilty of a crime for asserting his countrywomen to be as charming as any in the world? and the advance of useful knowledge, among the mass in America, to be greater than in any nation of Europe? The next charge is prejudice against England. Now, there is not in these two volumes one half the prejudice against England that might be found in a single article in the Quarterly against America. Mr. Cooper is a man of fancy, and a novelist; and he frequently goes to the superlative, where the comparative would have been far enough. This must be fairly admitted as his grand fault. From his previous writings, weshould not think him so well calculated for the present task as some others of his countrymen whom we have known; but there are topics in his work with which few could have been as familiar as himself. Take, for example, the accounts of the American navy, and our blunders respecting it. Another fault (an error in judgment only, we admit,) was the giving it as the work of a fictitious character, instead of boldly affixing his own name, and thus sanctioning his assertions openly…. Mr. Cooper’s Notions of America, to conclude, should be read and weighed by all gifted with the power of reflection. To write without partiality upon the subject of country, and that not merely to describe but to defend its character and institutions, is no easy task in a Republican author. What partiality may have dictated, the reader will excuse; and there is, we assure him, no greater call upon his magnanimity. We possess no other work from an authentic source, which contains so much truth about America. (b) Literary Gazette, xii (June 1828), 385–7. The Notions themselves are certainly pretty considerable specimens of bursting inflation, overweening vanity, and measureless boasting. We have often and often censured the propensity for this silly indulgence, so common in the English character; but the arrantest egotism and rankest braggardism of John Bull, are modesty and diffidence when compared with these qualities in his offspring Jonathan.

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‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!’ — ‘We ne’er meet our foes but we wish them to stay; They never meet us but they wish us away’ — and all such ebullitions of self-importance, are absurd enough symptoms of national pride and vain-gloriousness; but hereafter they shall be quoted as words of humility, and the essence of puff, puff, puff, shall be extracted from American sources, and especially from Mr. Cooper’s Notions of the Americans. According to this gentleman’s dicta, they are a people not only ‘Adorned with every virtue under heaven,’ but without vice, fault, blot, or blemish. According to his Notions, they are not only as perfect as it is possible for human nature to be already, but they are becoming every day more perfect, and they will in a few years be still more perfect still: an extraordinary phenomenon, it is true, and one that could be witnessed no where but in America; but there it is ‘the commonest thing i’ the earth;’ and though persons of the Old World may not be able to comprehend it, they must have faith in this historian, and believe that the New World does contain mysterious truths and absolute facts, even more unfathomable than these to wornout understandings. They must, within the first hundred pages of Mr. Cooper’s work, implicitly confess that the Americans are (we employ only the writer’s own epithets,) the most active, quick-witted, enterprising, orderly, moral, simple, vigorous, healthful, manly, generous, just, wise, innocent, civilised, liberal, polite, enlightened, ingenious, moderate, glorious, firm, free, virtuous, intelligent, sagacious, kind, honest, independent, brave, gallant, intellectual, well-governed, elevated, dignified, pure, immaculate, extraordinary, wonderful, (as Dominie Samson1 would add, pro-di-gi-ous), and improving (and that is the chief miracle of all, seeing they are now so superhuman and godlike in every respect,) people that ever existed, or ever can exist. Arcadia is to America what a row of pig-sties would be to a range of palaces; El Dorado a poor and miserable desert; Paradise itself a kail-yard…. But why should we proceed? Where every thing is the best, of the best, and for the best, there is no need of being particular. We have gone over only a few of the author’s pictures of the perfectibility of America and the Americans; and as he has informed us they are drawn in the most ‘unpretending’ manner, we reap the greater delight from their contemplation. The demi-gods of antiquity were somebodies, but they were not many in number, and perhaps fable mixed up in the descriptions which are handed down respecting them. Not so in these Notions of twelve millions of living people. —The castle and territory, and governors and inhabitants, of Thunder-tentronekh were passable enough for European optimism; but the metaphysico-theologicocosmolo-nigology of Mr. Cooper casts Pangloss entirely into the back settlements. The only thing in favour of the latter was, that by his fertile imagination he fancied le meilleur des mondes before it existed— the former has absolutely seen it in Virginia, Ohio, and the rest of the United States. 1

The talkative, eccentric librarian to Colonel Mannering in Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815).

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In conclusion, we have to repeat our entire conviction, that the good sense of America will reject this gasconading gallimawfry with more derision and dislike than it can excite in any other quarter of the globe. None have so much reason to be displeased with the author as his countrymen, and those who admire what is really valuable and estimable in the American character—of which there is no lack; but such sickening rodomontade is offensive to every reader of taste and discretion. The Americans are truly a powerful and great nation: that they may not be made a ridiculous one, let them throw these volumes into the Potomac; and let Mr. Cooper stick to his novels and romances, if he does not wish to discredit the land of his birth, and make himself a common laughing-stock. (c) Edinburgh Review xlix (June 1829), 473R525. Writers of fiction by profession make generally a sorry business of it when they descend from their poetical machinery to earth, and condescend to grapple with real life. They are apt to insist here, too, on having a world of their own, and on ruling, distorting, and colouring it in their own way, despotically as a girl deals with her first doll. The form under which these present Notions are couched is a very roundabout device for telling a plain story, whilst it may serve excellently well—according, it was thus originally invented and applied—as a vehicle for ingenious exaggeration and caricature. They are to be read as Letters on America, written by a quasi Citizen of the World, to the different members of a Bachelor Club, the representatives of some several kingdoms of poor obsolete Europe. When it is meant to be especially emphatical and authentic, the author lays aside his travelling domino, and puts on the genuine American, in the name of one MrCadwallader, at whose awful presence, as often as he comes upon the boards, our candles began regularly to burn blue. There is no accounting for tastes. We are very thankful to the said gentleman for any information; but he is about the most disagreeable personage we ever came across, either in life or upon paper; and is certainly the last that we should have chosen as the personification of a country to which we might have the honour of belonging. He is the knight-errant of American optimism, with his club for a lance, and a mammoth, or sea-horse, for his charger. The mysterious air with which he watches his full-blown bubbles traversing the empyrean, gets tiresome at last…. There can really be no great mystery in American character and intelligence, notwithstanding Mr Cooper’s transcendentalism about common sense. The people, we are told, are all alike, and remarkably like what common sense tells them they ought to resemble. Their ploughs and axes are better than are to be found in the whole of Europe, and are made by a peculiar common sense learned in their common schools. Their inability to laugh at the jests of an English player, who complained afterwards of the dulness of his audience, arises from their theatrical taste being formed under the dominion of common sense. The poverty of materials, which makes Mr Cooper call the composition of a successful American comedy almost a miracle, has the same honourable cause. Their

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subdued manner arises from their common-sense habit of viewing things. Their distaste for conventional politeness arises from their thoughts being too direct for such gross deceptions. The peculiar destructiveness of the American musket (as at Bunker’s Hill) is an unavoidable consequence of the general dissemination of thought in a people. It is common sense which makes a man refuse to fight a duel at all; it is common sense which makes the rest practise to acquire the skill, and go out with muskets, to make sure that an actual duel shall be as fatal as gunpowder can make it. Already they speak their language better than any other people, and in another generation or two, far more reasonable English will be spoken than is at present in existence. It is this common sense which is one day to change the literature of the world. ‘The literature of the United States is a subject of the highest interest to the civilized world; for when it does begin to be felt, it will be felt, with a force, a directness, and a common sense in its application, that has never yet been known.’ (Mr Cooper, passim.) Now, this wonderful common sense certainly wants explaining…. America must turn out of her natural path before she can cross oursfor ages. If she should rush on such a collision in very deed, as much as her imagination delights to revel over it in words, with her will be the guilt, fall the consequences where they may. Men that plume themselves on ‘the common-sense, high-mindedness, and humanity’ of their country, might have a nobler occupation than the hourly measuring of her swelling sinews and overshadowing bulk. There is enough of honest triumph for America in her actual position and reasonable prospects, without every morning sending up her statesmen to the high places of her Pisgah, and enjoying the prospective subjection of the globe. Such predictions of national policy may well place her in boasted alliance with the coarser half (with, as it were, the body and not the mind) of Europe—with that Russian iceberg, whose advancing and accumulating weight chills and withers the unfortunate regions where it may draw nigh. We ask, and fearlessly, of our deriders, whether English arms, arts, and literature, and, above all, English public character and example, have not done as much for mankind as its two proudest boasts—Greece and Rome? Let the nation that (we speak it not in reproach) has as yet done nothing, in this or any sublime department, deduct from the present condition of the world all that it owes to England, and then see to what point its thermometer will fall. There has been no period of history when England was more competent and more prepared for its high calling than now; or when, if it could be driven off the stage by one of the younger members of its house, the crude and impatient minor would find itself less qualified to take its place and discharge its duties. Braved and taunted, England is authorized to raise her tone, and put her language on a level with her deeds. America, in the meantime, must be contented to remain, as yet, for all purposes but that of animal strength, and those natural spirits of buoyant enterprise which belong to a rapidly-swelling and growing frame, a land of promise—of noble promise, we believe and trust—with a future in the horizon which we ardently pray she may realise and adorn. As that future approaches nearer to consummation, and in proportion as mens agitat molem et toto corpore moscet,1 we are confident that she will be less and less disposed to pour contumely on the Ithaca whence she sprang, or to break that bow of Ulyssæan greatness, which, to-day at least, she cannot draw. 1

‘The mind invigorates the mass and mingles with the whole body.’

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20. Hazlitt on American literature 1829

Extract from William Hazlitt’s anonymous article, ‘American Literature—Dr Channing,’ Edinburgh Review (October 1829), 125–31. Hazlitt used his review of W.E.Channing’s Sermons and Tracts as an opportunity to survey the progress of American literature. His critique of Cooper is not readily detachable from the context of that survey, which, though somewhat too condescending, shows Hazlitt’s usual incisiveness and breadth of reading. See Introduction, pp. 37–8. William Hazlitt (1778–1830), friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, was an influential essayist and literary critic of the Romantic period, whose most famous writings, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Table-Talk (1822), and The Spirit of the Age (1825) are distinguished by their lively style and pugnacious liberalism. Of the later American writers, who, besides Dr Channing, have acquired some reputation in England, we can only recollect Mr Washington Irving, Mr Brown, and Mr Cooper. To the first of these we formerly paid an ample tribute of respect; nor do we wish to retract a tittle of what we said on that occasion, or of the praise due to him for brilliancy, ease, and a faultless equability of style. Throughout his polished pages, no thought shocks by its extravagance, no word offends by vulgarity or affectation. All is gay, but guarded, — heedless, but sensitive of the smallest blemish. We cannot deny it—nor can we conceal it from ourselves or the world, if we would—that he is, at the same time, deficient in nerve and originality. Almost all his sketches are like patterns taken in silk paper from our classic writers; —the traditional manners of the last age are still kept up (stuffed in glass cases) in Mr Irving’s modern version of them. The only variation is inthe transposition of dates; and herein the author is chargeable with a fond and amiable anachronism. He takes Old England for granted as he finds it described in our stock-books of a century ago—gives us a Sir Roger de Coverley in the year 1819, instead of the year 1709; and supposes old English hospitality and manners, relegated from the metropolis, to have taken refuge somewhere in Yorkshire, or the fens of Lincolnshire. In some sequestered spot or green savannah, we can conceive Mr Irving enchanted with the style of the wits of Queen Anne; —in the bare, broad, straight, mathematical streets of his native city, his busy fancy

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wandered through the blind alleys and huddled zigzag sinuosities of London, and the signs of Lothbury and East-Cheap swung and creaked in his delighted ears. The air of his own country was too poor and thin to satisfy the pantings of youthful ambition; he gasped for British popularity, —he came, and found it. He was received, caressed, applauded, made giddy: the national politeness owed him some return, for he imitated, admired, deferred to us; and, if his notions were sometimes wrong, yet it was plain he thought of nothing else, and was ready to sacrifice every thing to obtain a smile or a look of approbation. It is true, he brought no new earth, no sprig of laurel gathered in the wilderness, no red bird’s wing, no gleam from crystal lake or new-discovered fountain, (neither grace nor grandeur plucked from the bosom of this Eden-state like that which belongs to cradled infancy); but he brought us rifaciméntos of our own thoughts—copies of our favourite authors: we saw our self-admiration reflected in an accomplished stranger’s eyes; and the lover received from his mistress, the British public, her most envied favours. Mr Brown, who preceded him, and was the author of several novels which made so noise in this country, was a writer of a different stamp. Instead of hesitating before a scruple, and aspiring to avoid a fault, he braved criticism, and aimed only at effect. He was an inventor, but without materials. His strength and his efforts are convulsive throes —his works are a banquet of horrors. The hint of some of them is taken from Caleb Williams and St Leon, but infinitely exaggerated, and carried to disgust and outrage. They are full (to disease) of imagination, —but it is forced, violent, and shocking. This is to be expected, we apprehend, in attempts of this kind in a country like America, where there is, generally speaking, no natural imagination. The mind must be excited by overstraining, by pulleys and levers. Mr Brown was a man of genius, of strong passion, and active fancy; but his genius was not seconded by early habit, or by surrounding sympathy. His story andhis interests are not wrought out, therefore, in the ordinary course of nature; but are, like the monster in Frankenstein, a man made by art and determined will. For instance, it may be said of him, as of Gawin Douglas, ‘Of Brownies and Bogilis full is his Buik.’ But no ghost, we will venture to say, was ever seen in North America. They do not walk in broad day; and the night of ignorance and superstition which favours their appearance, was long past before the United States lifted up their head beyond the Atlantic wave. The inspired poet’s tongue must have an echo in the state of public feeling, or of involuntary belief, or it soon grows harsh or mute. In America, they are ‘so well policied,’ so exempt from the knowledge of fraud or force, so free from the assaults of the flesh and the devil, that in pure hardness of belief they hoot the Beggar’s Opera from the stage: with them, poverty and crime, pickpockets and highwaymen, the lock-up-house and the gallows, are things incredible to sense! In this orderly and undramatic state of security and freedom from natural foes, Mr Brown has provided one of his heroes with a demon to torment him, and fixed him at his back; —but what is to keep him there? Not any prejudice or lurking superstition on the part of the American reader: for the lack of such, the writer is obliged to make up by incessant rodomontade, and face-making. The want of genuine imagination is always proved by caricature: monsters are the growth, not of passion, but of the attempt forcibly to stimulate it. In our own unrivalled Novelist, and the great exemplar of this kind of writing, we see how ease and strength are united. Tradition and invention meet half way; and nature scarce knows how to distinguish them. The reason is, there is here an

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old and solid ground in previous manners and opinion for imagination to rest upon. The air of this bleak northern clime is filled with legendary lore: Not a castle without the stain of blood upon its floor or winding steps: not a glen without its ambush or its feat of arms: not a lake without its Lady! But the map of America is not historical; and, therefore, works of fiction do not take root in it; for the fiction, to be good for anything, must not be in the author’s mind, but belong to the age or country in which he lives. The genius of America is essentially mechanical and modern. Mr Cooper describes things to the life, but he puts no motion into them. While he is insisting on the minutest details, and explaining all the accompaniments of an incident, the story stands still. The elaborate accumulation of particulars serves not to embody his imagery, but to distract and impede the mind. He is not so much the master of his materials as their drudge: He labours under an epilepsy of the fancy. Hethinks himself bound in his character of novelist to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Thus, if two men are struggling on the edge of a precipice for life or death, he goes not merely into the vicissitudes of action and passion as the chances of the combat vary; but stops to take an inventory of the geography of the place, the shape of the rock, the precise attitude and display of the limbs and muscles, with the eye and habits of a sculptor. Mr Cooper does not seem to be aware of the infinite divisibility of mind and matter; and that an ‘abridgment’ is all that is possible or desirable in the most individual representation. A person who is so determined, may write volumes on a grain of sand or an insect’s wing. Why describe the dress and appearance of an Indian chief, down to his tobacco-stopper and button-holes? It is mistaking the province of the artist for that of the historian; and it is this very obligation of painting and statuary to fill up all the details, that renders them incapable of telling a story, or of expressing more than a single moment, group, or figure. Poetry or romance does not descend into the particulars, but atones for it by a more rapid march and an intuitive glance at the more striking results. By considering truth or matter-of-fact as the sole element of popular fiction, our author fails in massing and in impulse. In the midst of great vividness and fidelity of description, both of nature and manners, there is a sense of jejuneness, —for half of what is described is insignificant and indifferent; there is a hard outline, —a little manner; and his most striking situations do not tell as they might and ought, from his seeming more anxious about the mode and circumstances than the catastrophe. In short, he anatomizes his subjects; and his characters bear the same relation to living beings that the botanic specimens collected in a portfolio do to the living plant or tree. The sap does not circulate kindly; nor does the breath of heaven visit, or its dews moisten them. Or, if Mr Cooper gets hold of an appalling circumstance, he, from the same tenacity and thraldom to outward impressions, never lets it go: He repeats it without end. Thus, if he once hits upon the supposition of a wild Indian’s eyes glaring through a thicket, every bush is from that time forward furnished with a pair; the page is studded with them, and you can no longer look about you at ease or in safety. The high finishing we have spoken of is particularly at variance with the rudeness of the materials. In Richardson it was excusable, where all was studied and artificial; but a few dashes of red ochre are sufficient to paint the body of a savage chieftain; nor should his sudden and frantic stride on his prey be treated with the precision and punctiliousness of a piece of still life. There areother American writers,

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(such as the historiographer of Brother Jonathan,) who carry this love of veracity to a pitch of the marvellous. They run riot in an account of the dishes at a boarding-house, as if it were a banquet of the Gods; and recount the overturning of a travelling stage-waggon with as much impetuosity, turbulence, and exaggerated enthusiasm, as if it were the fall of Phaeton. In the absence of subjects of real interest, men make themselves an interest out of nothing, and magnify mole-hills into mountains. This is not the fault of Mr Cooper: He is always true, though sometimes tedious; and correct, at the expense of being insipid. His Pilot is the best of his works; and truth to say, we think it a master-piece in its kind. It has great unity of purpose and feeling. Every thing in it may be said —‘To suffer a sea-change Into something new and strange.’ His Pilot never appears but when the occasion is worthy of him; and when he appears, the result is sure. The description of his guiding the vessel through the narrow strait left for her escape, the sea-fight, and the incident of the white topsail of the English man-of-war appearing above the fog, where it is first mistaken for a cloud, are of the first order of graphic composition; to say nothing of the admirable episode of Tom Coffin, and his long figure coiled up like a rope in the bottom of the boat. The rest is common-place; but then it is American commonplace. We thank Mr Cooper he does not take every thing from us, and therefore we can learn something from him. He has the saving grace of originality. We wish we could impress it, ‘line upon line, and precept upon precept,’ especially upon our American brethren, how precious, how invaluable that is. In art, in literature, in science, the least bit of nature is worth all the plagiarism in the world. The great secret of Sir Walter Scott’s enviable, but unenvied success, lies in his transcribing from nature instead of transcribing from books. Anterior to the writers above mentioned, were other three, who may be named as occupying (two of them at least) a higher and graver place in the yet scanty annals of American Literature. These were Franklin, the author (whoever he was)1 of the American Farmer’s Letters, and Jonathan Edwards. Franklin, the most celebrated, was emphatically an American. He was a great experimental philosopher, a consummate politician, and a paragon of common sense. His Poor Robin was an absolute manual for a country in leading-strings, making its first attempts to go alone. There is nowhere compressed in the same compass so great a fund of local information and political sagacity, as in his Examination before the Privy Council in the year 1754. The fine Parable against Persecution, which appears in his miscellaneous works, is borrowed from Bishop Taylor. Franklin is charged by some with a want of imagination, or with being a mere prosaic, practical man; but the instinct of the true and the useful in him, had more genius in it than all the ‘metre-ballad-mongering’ of those who take him to task.

1

Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782).

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The American Farmer’s Letters give us a tolerable idea how American scenery and manners may be treated with a lively, poetic interest. The pictures are sometimes highlycoloured, but they are vivid and strikingly characteristic. He gives not only the objects, but the feelings, of a new country. He describes himself as placing his little boy in a chair screwed to the plough which he guides, (to inhale the scent of the fresh furrows,) while his wife sits knitting under a tree at one end of the field. He recounts a battle between two snakes with an Homeric gravity and exuberance of style. He paints the dazzling, almost invisible flutter of the humming-bird’s wing: Mr Moore’s airiest verse is not more light and evanescent. His account of the manners of the Nantucket people, their frank simplicity, and festive rejoicings after the perils and hardships of the whale-fishing, is a true and heartfelt picture. There is no fastidious refinement or cynical contempt: He enters into their feelings and amusements with the same alacrity as they do themselves; and this is sure to awaken a fellow-feeling in the reader. If the author had been thinking of the effect of his description in a London drawing-room, or had insisted on the most disagreeable features in the mere littleness of national jealousy, he would have totally spoiled it. But health, joy, and innocence, are good things all over the world, and in all classes of society; and, to impart pleasure, need only be described in their genuine characters. The power to sympathize with nature, without thinking of ourselves or others, if it is not a definition of genius, comes very near to it. From this liberal unaffected style, the Americans are particularly cut off by habitual comparisons with us, or upstart claims of their own; —by the dread of being thought vulgar, which necessarily makes them so, or the determination to be fine, which must forever prevent it. The most interesting part of the author’s work is that where he describes the first indications of the breaking-out of the American war—the distant murmur of the tempest—the threatened inroad of the Indians like an inundation on the peaceful back-settlements: his complaints and his auguries are fearful. But we have said enough of this Illustrious Obscure; for it is the rule of criticism to praise none but the over-praised, and to offer fresh incense to the idol of the day. It is coming more within canonical bounds, and approaching nearer the main subject of this notice, to pay a tribute to the worth and talents of Jonathan Edwards; the well-known author of the Treatise on the Will, who was a Massachusetts divine and most able logician. Having produced him, the Americans need not despair of their metaphysicians. We do not scruple to say, that he is one of the acutest, most powerful, and, of all reasoners, the most conscientious and sincere. His closeness and candour are alike admirable. Instead of puzzling or imposing on others, he tries to satisfy his own mind. We do not say whether he is right or wrong; we only say that his method is ‘an honest method:’ there is not a trick, subterfuge, a verbal sophism in his whole book. Those who compare his arguments with what Priestley or Hobbes have written on the same question, will find the one petulant and the other dogmatical. Far from taunting his adversaries, he endeavours with all his might to explain difficulties; and acknowledges that the words Necessity, Irresistible, Inevitable, &c., which are applied to external force, acting in spite of the will, are misnomers when applied to acts, or a necessity emanating from the will itself; and that the repugnance of his favourite doctrine to common sense and feeling, (in which most of his party exult as a triumph of superior wisdom over vulgar prejudice,) is an unfortunate

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stumbling-block in the way of truth, arising out of the structure of language itself. His anxiety to clear up the scruples of others, is equal, in short, to his firmness in maintaining his own opinion. We could wish that Dr Channing had formed himself upon this manly and independent model….

21. Leigh Hunt reviews Cooper 1831

Hunt lacks the verbal and intellectual force which Hazlitt and Thackeray bring to their reviews of Cooper, but his Liberal political bias makes him a sympathetic and in some ways perceptive reader of Cooper’s earlier novels. See Introduction, p. 38. Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), English essayist and poet, edited various liberal literary magazines, befriended Byron and Shelley, and became a poetic mentor of John Keats between 1816 and 1818. (a) Extract from Hunt’s review of The Pilot, Tatler, ii (7 April 1831), 737. We know enough of the sea, and of the dangers of it, to take more than an ordinary interest in the most celebrated passage of this novel: and we have read few things that have left upon us a more lasting impression. We do not like the author’s domestic painting so well, though always very clever, and often something higher, with the exception of his minuteness in painting costume, the common error of the followers of Sir Walter Scott, among whom Mr. Cooper undoubtedly ranks the first, with a merit of his own, arising from the same local novelty. Sir Walter’s details of costume are warranted, not only by his masterly mode of treating even those, but by the remoteness and peculiarity of the times and persons with whom they are connected. We cannot feel so much interest in the skirt of a modern coat, or the way in which a gentleman avoids sitting down upon it, even though the gentleman be Washington. Mr. Cooper’s women are proper cold cousins of Sir Walter’s, with the melancholy advantage of impressing you as bearing greater resemblances to the understood character of American ladies, than Sir Walter’s do, to our preconceptions, of the bonnie countrywomen of Burns and Ramsay. They seem like women in glass cases;and seldom shew themselves alive, but when they are taking upon themselves to rate and lecture their admirers. At least this was the impression made upon us by the perusal of several of Mr. Cooper’s novels, when they first came out; the present one, if we mistake not, in particular. We admire and love the American institutions: we look upon the people of the United States as our fellowcountrymen, and as having as much right as ourselves to whatever fame can be given them

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from the works and deeds of our common ancestors; nay more, for they have carried the hard-earned wisdom of those ancestors further than we; but at present, we regard their national reputation as too much modified by the commercial and sea-faring condition of their nonage: and without meaning any disrespect to Mr. Cooper, himself a naval officer, we cannot help thinking that there is a certain want of refinement and liberal knowledge, arising out of the extremes of commercial timidity and marine license, in making women so straitlaced and precise, and afraid of committing themselves, as they appear in these novels. They seem like mere contradictions to the imprudence of prodigality, or the license of a sailor’s hop, not substantial flesh and blood, honest-hearted womankind, with faith in themselves and others, and a merit beyond a pane of glass. For similar reasons, it always appears to us that Sir Walter Scott must have a gross idea of women. (b) Extracts from Hunt’s review of The Bravo, Tatler, iii (21 and 22 October 1831), 385–6. In the long interval that has elapsed since the discontinuance of what have been not inaptly termed the ‘quarterly novels’ of Sir Walter; novels innumerable have been published, and several authors have gained reputation by them. But we know not that there is one whose name is a better passport for the volumes that bear it, than that of Mr Cooper, sometimes styled the American Scott. Inasmuch as Mr Cooper holds the first rank among the novelists of America, as Sir Walterdoes in this country, the appellation may be applicable; if the reigning novelist is to be termed Scott, as the Roman Emperors were styled Cæsar— as a title of dignity—we admit its propriety; but if it be meant to imply imitation or resemblance of style between the two writers, we think it scarcely does Mr Cooper justice. Each have their peculiar excellences; and without questioning the superior genius of Sir Walter, there are points in which we think the American has the advantage: his stories have more interest, his women more attraction, and his heroes more volition. It is not our object to enter into the comparative merits of the two monarchs; we desire only to assert the independence of him whom some consider as tributary to the British Scott. Our author has shewn such extraordinary power at sea, that many of his readers believed it to be so peculiarly his element, that he could not leave it without danger; but he took to the woods and the prairies, and his strength did not fail him. The scene of the present story is laid in Venice. The mischievous policy of the government of this ‘self-styled republic’ is admirably portrayed…. [At this point Hunt gives a lengthy plot summary and extensive quotations from The Bravo, pointing out how many of Cooper’s criticisms of Venice might be applied to England.] We do not recollect any one of the former novels of Mr Cooper, of which the interest is greater or more sustained than in this; and it has the advantage of them all, in exciting that interest early. We have not to wade through a heavy volume of introductory matter before it is awakened; a fault common to many modern novels, and one from which our author is by no means always free. Some of his best works have shewn very unequal power; and while some parts have kept the reader almost breathless with expectation,

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others have been weak, dull and prosing. The present work has nothing of this. Its interest gradually rises, almost from the immediate commencement, to the conclusion; and though we read it as though eager to reach the end, we close the last volume with regret. We are reconciled to the fate of the hero, because it is necessary to the consistency of that selfish policy which it is the author’s aim to expose. He is a victim to that narrow view of expediency which characterizes the hidden and inquisitorial government of a state which chose to style itself a republic.

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22. Charles Sealsfield on Cooper 1831

Extracts from an article, ‘The Works of the Author of The Spy,’ New-York Mirror, viii (1831), 252–4. Charles Sealsfield, alias of Karl Postl (1793–1864), was a Moravian monk who made at least six visits to America, wrote two travel books on the United States, and in 1828 published an Indian romance, Tokeah; or the White Rose, which owes much to Cooper. See Introduction, p. 12. The Prairie…is evidently written to follow up the success of the Pioneers; a dangerous experiment, since an author seldom if ever succeeds a second time in introducing a favourite character. The cream is generally skimmed the first time, and either the scum or sediment is served up at the second table. Our old acquaintance, Natty Bumpo [sic], verifies this observation. He appears again in the Prairie, but with increased garrulity, and becomes heavy and tedious by repetition. Of this the writer seems to have been aware, for he kills him by a natural death at the conclusion of the story, apparently apprehensive that he might be tempted to murder him by inches in a future work. One of the faults of our author, in fact, is a habit of copying himself, of giving his readers a second edition of the same characters. Nothing, for instance, can be more alike than the Red Rover and the Skimmer of the Seas. It is impossible not to perceive that one is a mere transcript of the other; and every reader must recognize their identity, notwithstanding they differ in size and in the colour of their hair. The Water Witch is the same wonderful vessel we see in the Red Rover, and there is the same disguised damsel, acting pretty much the same equivocal part in each…. As to those excessively odd, alias mysterious creatures, the Red Rover, and the Skimmer, cannot allow them to be called sailors. The only classification we know of that will suit them is that of ‘half horse half alligator,’ applied to the Mississippi boatmen before the invention ofsteamboats gradually annihilated that class of oddities. We must withhold our testimony of admiration from such heroes, either on land or water. We are inclined to think, that if works of fiction have any influence on manners and morals—and if they have not, what are they good for? —such examples, held up as they are to the admiration of the reader, must give a wrong direction to the imagination of young people. The class of light-fingered gentry, who make free with the rights and property of others, we think cut

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but a poor figure in society, every where else but in a modern romance, where they seldom fail to carry away all the honours…. Indeed, it seems quite indispensable to the full glories of a popular work of imagination, that the hero should be a pirate, a highwayman, or a pickpocket; and unite in himself the utmost sensibility of feeling with the most consummate hardness of heart. It is earnestly to be hoped that none of our romantic young ladies will, in their idolatry of this species of errant knights, take it into their heads or hearts to elope with some of the irresistible heroes of the quarter-sessions…. In the power of delaying a catastrophe, which seems every moment inevitable, and lengthening a tale that appears obstinately determined to come to an end, [Cooper] is also peculiarly distinguished. He travels with a drag-chain to his wheel; and contrives by the most studious, provoking delays, to excite a fidgety impatience to get on, which doubtless many readers mistake for an intense interest in the story. Like travellers on a deep and miry road, we are half mad to arrive at the end, not so much on account of any anticipated pleasure, as from the intolerable fatigue of the journey…. Our author certainly can write English, though his style wants simplicity as well as brevity. There is a mannerism about it which savours of affectation, and produces stiffness. He seldom goes directly towards his object, but purrs round and round, and round, seemingly afraid he will catch it, and peradventure burn his fingers….

THE BRAVO 1831

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23. Unsigned notice New-York Mirror x (February 1832), 262

American reviewers were frequently less approving of Cooper’s republicanism than were European liberals like Leigh Hunt (No. 21b) or Belinsky (No. 32a), both of whom responded enthusiastically to The Bravo.

Mr Cooper, the novelist. —We give place to the following, partly because it emanates from a most respectable source, and partly because there is some coincidence of opinion between the writer and ourselves. Mr. Cooper has done much for himself and his country; but, in our humble judgment, his fame will be as little promoted by unqualified eulogy as severe criticism. He has had the misfortune to be lauded to the very verge of his desert—we had almost said of his desire; and his surviving such friendship is proof enough of extraordinary talent. He holds, undoubtedly, a conspicuous place in American literature; we think he has fairly won the distinction; and, albeit his honors are not very meekly worn, we are free to render much homage to his genius. But we do protest against the indiscriminate plastering usually bestowed on his writings. We like the Spy, the Pioneers, the Last of the Mohicans, the Pilot, and the Red Rover, they are very good books, in their way. It is an honor to our country to have produced them; and although had Scott never lived, these would, probably, never have been written; still, but for Scott, they would rank high among modern novels; but they have their faults, and in no stinted measure. When, however, the poor Bravo comes in for a share (a very full share) of commendation, we must take the liberty of dissenting.It may be interspersed with sketches that are spirited and true; the traveler may be charmed at their coincidence with his own observation or remembrance; it may even contain (if the public please) the best description extant of Venice: but is it therefore a great novel? It is obvious to suppose that a man of Mr. Cooper’s descriptive power might faithfully and strikingly portray the prominent features of such a city, and the result of his pastime would embellish any periodical in the land; but a novel, at the present time, requires vastly more materiel than such commodities, and so long as his better productions are fresh in our memories, we believe the Bravo will occupy the place bespoken for it by the few reviewers who have had the independence to be impartial. We cannot assent to the position assumed in the following letter— that Mr. Cooper has received injustice from the press, either in Europe or America. We have, in general, fully

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coincided with the strictures on his writings, and have often marveled at their moderation and in-frequency. Nor do we appreciate the ‘sense of injustice’ which has compelled him to retaliate, and defy the critics and the press in-discriminately: we even doubt the taste of such defiance, and seriously question its efficacy.

24. W.H.Prescott on Cooper 1832, 1852

As a romantic historian, Prescott’s keen appreciation for Cooper’s poetic qualities is as evident as his regret that Cooper’s novels do not confront American social history more directly. William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859), a well-born New Englander who was nearly blinded as a Harvard undergraduate, devoted his life to panoramic, pictorial narratives of Spanish history, including the History of Ferdinand and Isabella (1838) and the History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). (a) Extract from an article, ‘English Literature of the Nineteenth Century’, North American Review, xxxv (July 1832), 190–1.

Our own countryman, Mr. Cooper, is admitted by very general consent to have distanced every other competitor in the route struck out by the author of Waverley. We would not be understood by this language, to imply any thing like a servile imitation, in the detracting spirit of some English journals; for Cooper is no more an imitator of Scott, than Milton is of Shakspeare, because they both wrote in blank verse, or than Scott himself is of this latter, whom he resembles in the fond, though not the form of his writings. If this be imitation, it is more glorious than most originality. Cooper complains, in his Notions of the Americans, that our country is deficient in the materials of society, most pertinent to the purposes of the novelist. This topic, like some others which we have run our heads against in the course of this article, is much too large for our limits, and we must refer the inquisitive reader to Mr. Cooper’s own remarks. He seems to attest his conviction of their justice, by escaping as often as his plan will permit into the back-wood settlements, or still further into the wilderness, or, more than all, to his favorite element of the ocean. In flying thus from the social haunts of men to these regions, which layas it were on the confines of fancy, the novelist, we suspect, has consulted his own capacity, quite as much as that of his subject. These are comparatively the regions of poetry, and any one whose eye has wandered over Mr. Cooper’s pictures of them, will confess how deeply his soul is filled with the poetic feeling. This is particularly apparent in his representations of his own element, the ocean, which he

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seems, like Byron, to have animated with a living soul. Let any one who would feel the superiority of his manner, contrast it with the no less accurate, but comparatively vulgar sketches of another poet sailor, Smollett. Cooper’s great defect is his incapacity to seize the tone of good society; we say incapacity, for his repeated failures, we think, put it beyond a doubt. Nothing can be more lamentable than the compound of affectation, primness, and pedantry, a sort of back-woods gentility, which makes up with him the greater part of its dialogue and its manners. Defects like these would seem to be the natural result of an imperfect education, as well as a want of familiarity with well-bred society. But this last can scarcely be imputed to Mr. Cooper, and his experience of late years must have abundantly enlarged the sphere of his social observation, for all practical purposes. Has he shown a corresponding improvement? (b) Letter to the Cooper Memorial Committee, February 1852 (Memorial of Cooper, New York 1852, 31). Surely no one has succeeded like Cooper in the portraiture of American character, taken in its broadest sense, of the civilized and of the uncivilized man, or has given such glowing and eminently faithful pictures of American scenery. His writings are instinct with the spirit of nationality, shown not less in those devoted to sober fact than in the sportive inventions of his inexhaustible fancy. His merits have been admitted not only wherever the English language is spoken, but all over Europe, as every traveller knows who has seen the translations of Cooper in the different languages of the Continent, holding their place beside those of the great masters of English literature.

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25. Review, Metropolitan Magazine i (October 1833), 409–10

Extract from an unsigned review. We fear that [Cooper] has been too much a sojourner in the old world, has become fascinated by its antique prejudices, and its feudal pomp; and, renouncing those healthy associations, the spring-tide growth of his young, glorious, and great country, has truckled to worn-out and despicable tastes, and feared to wed the supposed Headsman’s son, who is an heroic personation, to the lady of his love, until he had recourse to, the commonplace expedient of making him the son of a great prince, and thus sparing his aristocratic readers the misery of contemplating the solecism of a mésalliance. ‘Oh! what a falling off was there!’ The injustice, absurdity, and impolicy of hereditary and noxious privileges are admirably portrayed and insisted upon through the whole work; yet at the conclusion, the author first stumbles, and then bends his knees before Authority, and, in deference to it, refuses to consummate the sacrifice, though the altar is prepared, and the victim, Prejudice, is bound upon it. We did not expect this from an American, and least of all from American Cooper.

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A LETTER TO HIS COUNTRYMEN 1834

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26. Unsigned review, New-England Magazine vii (August 1834), 154–6

On June 7, 1832 a review of The Bravo, signed by ‘Cassio’, appeared in the New York American. The reviewer ridiculed Cooper’s novel and denounced Cooper’s politics with no regard for the book or the author. ‘Cassio’ was almost surely E.S. Gould, an American foreign correspondent who was avowedly anti-republican in his principles. S.F.B.Morse informed Cooper of Cassio’s identity, and Cooper, at first indifferent to the review, began to assume, not without reason, that Cassio’s attack was solely political. In A Letter to His Countrymen, Cooper treated Cassio’s review as an example of American deference to aristocratic politics. See Introduction, pp. 15, 18. If the old saying be true—that whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of his wits— we advise Mr. Cooper to make his will and set his house in order, for his time is at hand. His two or three last unreadable novels led us to form ominous conjectures that his genius was abandoning him; but this absurd letter makes us think that his common sense was the companion of its flight. We never read a production which gave us a more forcible impression of the meaning of Job’s prayer: ‘O, that my enemy had written a book.’ The letter is really, though not ostensibly, divided into two parts, the first be concerned with the writer’s own affairs, and the second with those of the country in general, and these two parts have aboutas much connexion with each other as one of the late Mr. Randolph’s1 speeches used to have with the subject before the House. It seems that there have appeared in the New-York papers certain critical notices of portions of his writings, by which notices Mr. Cooper deems himself aggrieved, and though the existence of these articles was, probably, unknown to ninety-nine hundredths of his countrymen, he feels himself called upon to make a formal appeal from these irresponsible tribunals to the bar of public opinion. He accordingly enters into an elaborate examination of the articles in question, and a refutation of the statements contained in them. He devotes particular attention to one of them, which appeared in the New-York American,2 and investigates its origin with as much zeal and earnestness as ever the authorship of the letters of Junius 3 was discussed…. Very few care a straw whether the article in the New-York American was written by a Frenchman in Paris, or by an ‘obscure clerk’ in a compting-house in New-York. He is also greatly mistaken, if he imagines that his countrymen have shown

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towards him, in his literary character, any decided coldness, and still more so, if he fancies there has been any thing like an organized conspiracy to depreciate him. His works have been tried upon their merits, and praise and censure have been measured out to him in due proportions. Every one remembers with what enthusiasm his early novels were received. It is true, that his late novels have been severely criticized; but why does Mr. Cooper rack his brains to discover secondary and remote causes for this, when the reason is to be found simply in the great inferiority of the works themselves? That is a view of the case which does not seem to have presented itself to him for a moment. The truth is, they are dull and heavy books, the Bravo not excepted, in spite of his elaborate explanation, and its success in Europe, so complacently set forth by himself. The charge, which he deliberately makes against those who control public sentiment in this country, of deficiency in patriotic feeling, shown in discouraging those young writers, who frankly take part with the institutions and character of our country, is, we believe, totally without foundation, and springs from wounded personal vanity and irritation of feeling. Was the Spy received with coldness and indifference? Did the directors of public opinion frown upon it or its writer? This portion of the letter is, from first to last, of this false and morbid cast. In writing it, Mr. Cooper takes counsel of his passion and not of his reason. It is undignified and un-manly in the extreme, and no less unwise and unjudicious. We wonder some of his friends did not interfere to suppress its publication, which must fill his enemies with triumph and his well-wishers with regret. The second part of the letter is a sort of political essay upon the powers of the various departments of the government, written apparently with the amiable purpose of enlightening the people of the United States, who have hitherto had no better teachers in constitutional law, than such shallow tyros as John Marshall, Joseph Story,1 Daniel Webster, and others. It deserves very little notice of any kind. He has some very original notions, such, for instance, as that the Union is more in danger from legislative than executive usurpation. He gravely censures the Senate, for passing their late vote of disapprobation upon the President, and maintains that they thereby transcended their constitutional powers. How unlucky it is that Mr. Webster did not know Mr. Cooper’s opinion upon this subject, before he printed his speech, as he probably would not, in that case, have so exposed his gross ignorance of the constitutional authority of the body to which he belongs. This half of the letter cannot be better described than by quoting a celebrated criticism: ‘it contains much that is good and much that is new, but the new is not good and the good is not new.’

1

John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833). ‘Cassio’s’ Review of The Bravo, New York American, 7 June, 1832. 3 A notorious series of anonymous political letters contributed to the London Political Advertiser, 1769–72. 2

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There is one point in which we cordially agree with Mr. Cooper, in his remarks on the slavish deference which prevails in this country to foreign opinions. It is a great evil, fatal to manliness of character and true self-respect. If Mr. Cooper will cure us of this by his writings, we will forgive him his stupid novels, and even his Letter to his Countrymen.

1

Joseph Story (1779–1845), Massachusetts lawyer, jurist, law professor, author of Commentaries (1832–45).

178

27. From ‘American Poetry’, Edinburgh Review lxi (April 1835), 23–4

Has America ever yet produced a work of original genius in literature, which has not instantly found admirers on this side of the Atlantic, as enthusiastic—though perhaps a little more discriminating, than at home? Was it in his own country, or in this, that the graceful humour of Washington Irving was most felt or most warmly acknowledged? We shall be told that the popularity of the author of the Sketch Book was owing to his English tendencies, —to his preference of our institutions, to his flattering pictures of our society, to his sensibility to all those historical and romantic associations, on which we love to dwell. It is true there was something uncommon and unexpected in all this: but we will venture to say that had Irving never written one word in praise of Old England: were all his flattering pictures of Christmas life in old ancestral halls, —of generous and noble landlords, honest yeomen, contented peasants, and the other personages whom he has arrayed in such holiday colours, —to be at once swept away, his fame would at this moment stand as high in Great Britain as it does: we should still point to the exquisite quaintness and subdued humour of his Rip van Winkle, and his Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and place him, in these respects, a little, and but a little, lower than Addison. We doubt very much if the powerful conceptions of Brown were ever duly appreciated in America, till the public mind in this country had felt the fascination of his mysterious sources of interest; and acknowledged in the author of Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn and Wieland, a spirit of kindred power and gloom with that which had portrayed the sufferings of St Leon, and the struggles of Falkland. Where, we would ask, has all that is really excellent in Cooper’s novels, been more warmly admired? The empire of the sea had been conceded to him by acclamation; in the lonely desert, or untrodden prairie, among the savage Indians, or scarcely less savage settlers, we equally acknowledge his dominion. ‘Within that circle none dares walk but he.’ But surely all this was not to blind us to the undeniable fact, that he who was a mighty magician within his circle, was but a verycommon person, nay, somewhat of the mountebank beyond it; that when taken from the quarter-deck or the desert, ‘Where wild in woods the noble savage ran,’ and placed on terra firma among civilized society, —particularly where he ventured a descent on the shores of Great Britain, —he sank rather below the mark of a second-rate novelist. Because he fettered our imagination by his powers, when he guided his vessel through rocks and shallows amidst the howling of the storm and the roaring of the sea, were we to be insensible to the childishness of the incidents on shore, the tediousness of some of the

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scenes, the melo-dramatic bombast of others? Let any one take up his later romances, in which, leaving his vantage ground, he has placed himself on a level with the writers of this country, and attempted to rest the interest of his tale on the associations of the past, and the delineation of stronger passions—as in the Bravo, the Heiden Mauer, and the Abbot, 1— and if he can venture to say that they rise in the least above the rank of second-rate novels, he must be less critical or more American than we can pretend to be. Cooper, in short, is the master but of one element; Scott moves with grace and security in all. America has reason certainly to be proud of her son; but if she persist in placing him beside his great original, it will be long before Europe be disposed to ratify the judgment.

1

The subtitle of The Headsman is ‘The Abbaye des Vignerons’. The reviewer is possibly confusing this novel with Scott’s The Abbot (1820).

THE MONIKINS 1835

182

28. Review, Knickerbocker Magazine vi (August 1835), 152–3

Extract from an unsigned review. See Introduction , pp. 18–19. We cannot describe this work, —for it is perfectly indescribable. As an enterprising Leaplowian, however, we shall try to convey our impression of its merits. We took it up with high expectations; and we read, with anxious solicitude that the coming page would be better than its predecessor. Vain hope! We were doomed to disappointment. A poppied and mandragoranean influence overtook us, and we slept under a weight of somnolency such as Rip Van Winkle’s could not have exceeded…. What the work is about, passes our comprehension. It is said to be a Satire; but the eyes of Argus, were they twice the fabled number, could not discern it. The volumes have neither consistency of plot, nor grace of execution. Every thing is cloudy, distorted, and unnatural. Man is degraded to a monkey, and made to play such antics as could scarcely be conceived of, except by one of the race. The author has become a convert, we should fancy, to the theory of Buffon: at least he has furnished, in the production of this work, the most plausible and practical illustration of the Frenchman’s hypothesis, that we have ever met with. We have no desire to disparage Mr. Cooper, —and with his political opinions we have nothing to do. Many of them are generally consonant with our own; and we honor, from the bottom of our hearts, his pre-dominant love of country. He has already done much to exalt her intellectual name; but if he perseveres in his pseudo-satirical emanations,he will do more to depress, than he has ever done to elevate it. We conjure him to pause on the barren thoroughfare upon which he has entered, and retrace his steps to those flowery ways, where he whilome disported with such pleasure to himself, and edification to the public. There are several isolated passages and scenes in The Monikins, that indicate his usual strength; but they are thrown away most unprofitably, amid a mass of husks and garbage, of whose elements or use no conjecture can be formed. While we firmly believe that the mind of Mr. Cooper has not been weakened, we yet as firmly believe, that it has been grievously warped and obscured. It is the unhappiest idea possible, to suppose that politics can be associated, in any effective way, with romance or fiction. One is the reality, the other the ideality of life. Cohere, they cannot; and if ‘the author of the Spy, Red Rover, etc’ desires to perpetuate the unsullied memory of his works of fancy, he must keep them divorced from all association with the abortive works of fact,

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hitherto uttered from his pen,—and henceforth abandon that sort of writing. It will not and it can not come to good.’

GLEANINGS IN EUROPE: ENGLAND 1837

186

29. J.G.Lockhart, from a review, Quarterly Review lix (October 1837), 327–61

This review by Lockhart (1794–1854), Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, vilified Cooper’s character and republican principles. Of all the European reviews of Cooper, Lockhart’s article was perhaps the most well-known in America. See Introduction, pp. 28, 38. If the Quarterly Review were, as Mr. Cooper asserts, the organ of a national antipathy to America, and if Mr. Cooper were, as he affects to be, the representative of his nation, these volumes would be the most acceptable present which our malevolence could receive; for so ill-written—ill-informed—ill-bred—ill-tempered, and ill-mannered a production it has never yet been our fortune to meet. But we deny both propositions— the first, that relates to ourselves, with mere contempt; and as to the second, we must say, in justice to every thing American that we have happened to meet either in literature or in society, that we never met such a phenomenon of vanity, folly, and fable, as this book exhibits —we say fable, because (whatever may be Mr. Cooper’s intentions) his ignorance and presumption betray him at every moment into mis-statements so gross, and sometimes so elaborate, as to have all the appearance and effect of absolute falsehood. We have had great doubts whether the book was worthy of our notice. As a literary wo it is really below contempt. Its style, topics, and arrangement are trivial, frivolous, and confused. It has nothingsolid but its ignorance, and nothing deep but its malice. It contains neither that class of facts from which an intelligent American could form a judgment of our manners, nor that species of criticisms by which a candid Englishman might profit. In fact the title-page is an utter misnomer. Instead of ‘England, with Sketches of Society in the Metropolis, by J.Fenimore Cooper, Esquire,’ the title should, in truth, have been ‘J.Fenimore Cooper, Esquire, in England, with Sketches of his Behaviour in the Metropolis.’ The subject of the book is not England, but Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper; and every object or topic is treated with strict and exclusive reference to the feelings and tastes of the aforesaid Cooper, who —being unfortunately cursed with a peculiar share of the common malady of narrow minds—namely a jealous, captious, and sour egotism—has produced what may be justly called an autobiography of excoriated vanity. We now and then read in the newspapers of some unhappy brewer’s workman falling into a vat of hot wash from which he escapes alive indeed, but with the loss of every particle of skin on his body. This is a very accurate

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image of the state of Mr. Cooper’s mind: a scalding vanity has stripped it of every inch of epidermis. He winces at the very breeze—writhes and groans under the gentlest touches of good nature or sympathy—and the ordinary contacts of society drive him to absolute frenzy. Knowing nothing of Mr. Cooper personally, we cannot tell what subordinate accidents may have inflamed his susceptibility to so extravagant a degree, but its first germ is, we think, obvious enough. Mr. Cooper, as he himself, with some circumlocution, confesses, entered early the merchant service as a common seaman— and there he spent the most important years of his life. This was no very promising school for the literature, manners, or morals of ‘the Author of the Pilot.’ We know not when he emerged into a higher course of life; but he evidently has had a late and scanty acquaintance with polished society. The success of some nautical novels (of which, after all, we believe the chief attraction lay in such professional technicalities and manners as are learned where nothing else can be) appears to have had an effect on Mr. Cooper’s mind—not unnatural in its direction, but extreme in its degree. It is rare, even in the sober and phlegmatic climate of England, and amidst a pretty general instruction and civilization, that the rise of lowbred talents is accompanied by modesty and discretion, and still more rare that early vulgarity in manners or ideas is worn out, or even softened down by sudden notoriety; but there must have been a concurrence of circumstances natural, professional, personal, and national, to have produced in Mr.Cooper such an intoxication of vulgar vanity, as, with all its consequent delusions and impertinences, is exhibited in the work before us…. Mr. Cooper evidently owes all the attention he received from the noblemen and gentlemen whose hospitality he so ungratefully repays, to Mr. Spenser’s letters to his Whig friends. The Tory circles, we will venture to say, never so much as heard of this western luminary. For our humble selves, we were not aware that he had honoured us with a visit till long after his departure, when we heard a Whig—who had happened to meet him—amuse a dinner-table with instances of his vulgarity and impertinence. But if the Tories had heard of him, he would not have been a step nearer their dinner or drawing-rooms. They do not condescend to hunt for popularity with a strange pack; and they have their reward: while the unhappy Whigs, who pursue so low an object, have also their reward in finding themselves gibbeted, either by absurd flattery or unmannerly censure, in the patibulary pages of such executioners as Puckler, Raumer, and Cooper.

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30. Review by Francis Bowen, North American Review xlvii (October 1838), 488–9

Bowen (1811–90), philosopher and editor of the North American Review during the 1840s, was a noted reactionary in politics. The recent productions of Mr. Cooper have added nothing to his own reputation, or to the stores of American literature. He has set up for a master of the elegances of life, and has discoursed learnedly, through volume after volume, upon the arbitrary refinements of fashionable society. Professing to be a sturdy republican, he has exhausted his powers of invective upon the manners and characters of his countrymen, who are, taking his own descriptions for truth, ignorant of the first principles of social refinement, and no better than a nation of brutes and savages. If such are the friends of Republicanism, she may well pray Heaven to save her from them. Mr. Cooper’s works, for the last three or four years, seem to have been written under no higher inspiration than that of spleen. They abound in uncalled-for political disquisitions, filled up with expressions of the bitterest scorn and hatred. They are deformed by perpetual outbreaks of a spirit, which might be expected to show itself in the pages of a ruthless partisan, careless of truth in aiming at the reputation of an opponent whom he wishes to ruin; but from which the writings of the poet and the man of letters, sitting apart, ‘in the still air of delightful studies,’ ought to be wholly exempt. He has added nothing to the range of characters in fiction, which amuse and occupy our hours of leisure, and to which the mind returns, as toold familiar scenes, or the faces of friends; he has told no new tale of human passions, for our instruction or warning; but he has given us, both in his books of travels, and his last novel, a few brilliant descriptions of natural scenery, both by land and sea. Homeward Bound is a sort of log-book of a passage from London to New York. We entertained ad nauseam, —until we are absolutely sea-sick, —with the rocking of the packetship Montauk, in fair weather and foul. These scenes, wearisome by repetition and prolongation, are diversified but not relieved, by the doings and sayings of a set of passengers, the like of whom, for stupidity and absurdity, could scarcely be gathered together, from the whole circuit of the British dominions and the United States. A couple of more tiresome gentlemen than the two Effinghams, the pet characters in the passengers’ cabin, it has never been our lot to meet, either in fact or fiction; and the heroine, Miss Eve Effingham, is a special nonentity. The newspaper editor, Mr. Stedfast Dodge, is plainly designed for a cruelly severe satire upon the editorial corps in the United

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States. But the character of this worthy is drawn in such exaggerated colors, that it shows the unskilfulness and ill-feeling of the author, but by no means the real faults and follies, — many and serious enough, —of the persons against whom the satire is aimed. The fact is, Mr. Cooper has no facility in drawing characters. With two or three exceptions, his personages are mere wooden images, with no semblance of life. Their conversation would be intolerable, or rather impossible, between men and women of flesh and blood; their actions would be inconceivable, out of the pages of romance. People never talk as Mr. Cooper imagines. There are far fewer blockheads, male or female, in the real world, than in that possessed by Mr. Cooper’s imagination. This novel has almost no plot. The characters, such as they are, figure in a few dull dialogues; and there are a few faint indications of an incipient love story, which is probably to be unfolded in the next work. As it stands now, there is no completeness, no conclusion, no plan, to be found in the book. Nothing redeems it from utter and deplorable dulness, save a few descriptive passages, and two or three animated actions. The battle with the Arabs, on the African coast, is the best of the latter; and the storm which precedes it, is the most brilliant of the former.

HOME AS FOUND 1838

194

31. ‘Cooper’s Last Works’, New-York Review iv (January 1839), 209–21

Extracts from an unsigned review. Home as Found is a still more malicious work. It is evidently the bursting out of superabundant bile, and that after the manner of a general deluge. Punishing offenders by classes, as he had before done, was too slow a process to satisfy his boiling ire; he integrates the mass, as a certain Roman emperor once wished to do, and lets fall the axe of his avenging satire on a whole city and community at once. We should respect a manly and fearless exposure of the vices and follies of our social system—for vices and follies it unquestionably has; —but there is a wide difference between faithful rebuke, proceeding from the spirit of true patriotism, and scornful sneers arising from morbid feeling, disaffection, disappointment, and assumed superiority. Under the convenient disguise of the characters of a novel, Mr. Cooper has given a picture of men and manners in his own country, especially in his own state, and in the metropolis of that state, darker and more falsely colored than was ever drawn by any foreign hireling. In any other point of view, the book is not of sufficient importance to entitle it to notice, and we mean not to weary our readers with any further remarks upon it, than will suffice to expose its slanders. And why, it may be asked, should we be more troubled about the slanders of Mr. Cooper than of any other writer, who disregards the sacred obligations which truth imposes? Because, being an American, he might be presumed to look with an eye of favor upon our faults, and therefore, on the common principle of evidence, his censures have double force; and because also,his literary reputation gives great weight to his opinions. That he writes in no such spirit of kindness, and that his opinions are entitled to no such consideration, it will be our object to prove, and out of his own mouth to condemn him. We should seek in vain, among all his observations upon the various countries through which he has travelled, for any other standard of propriety, elegance, and good manners, than himself; he has condemned and ridiculed all the usages and conventions of society abroad, and finishes by a like condemnation of the same things at home. Now mark the inconsistency; the whole tenor of Home as Found is to exalt foreign manners and customs at the expense of our own; the only persons held up as models of good breeding and good manners, are the elegant and polished Effinghams, ‘who had been taught by their European association to prize the refinement, grace, retenue, and tone of an advanced condition of society’; and mark also, the unphilosophical character of that mind; which in judging of the condition of society,

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takes not into account the political institutions, and the prevailing occupations of life, which determine it. The tests by which it may be decided whether we are a barbarous or a civilized people, are few and simple: —Is social intercourse here regulated by those principles and observances, which give it an humanizing and refining influence? Are the courtesies and charities of life practised among us? Is the condition of woman an elevated one—are her rights respected and her power acknowledged? The rules of etiquette and the usages of the fashionable world are purely conventional—they are not alike in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburgh; but in all of them there is a standard unknown to us, the court: the laws of genuine politeness and good breeding may be as well understood and practised here as there; for they have their origin in the heart, and their standard is the inherent propriety and fitness of things. What could be more absurd than to make the superior refinement of a nation depend upon the usage of eating eggs in the shell or in egg cups, as has been done; and how many questions of manners are equally trivial, and how contemptible for free born Americans to acknowledge the authority of such arbitrary precedents. In asserting our right to independence in all such things, we are far from implying that society can impose no restraints; but we claim for our society the right of legislation in this as well as in all other matters. Whoever has studied the history of man, and of the progress of society from the times of barbarism to the present day, must have seen that its organization has always been determined by political institutions, and the manner in which wealth is acquired and transmitted.The simplicity of a republican government dispenses with the splendid ceremonies imposed by a monarchical one, and a community in which it is not respectable to be an idler, cannot divide the day between dressing, eating, and visiting, as is often done in those in which it is scarcely respectable to be industrious. There is another point on which Mr. Cooper’s cavils have somewhat more the appeara of reason: we know but little, as he implies, of the art of making society agreeable, and we are not alone in the deficiency—the art, in its perfection, is found only in Paris, or rather was found, for it is in some measure an ante-revolutionary glory. And how many circumstances combined to create it: a temperament of natural gayety—a capital abounding in persons of fortune, who were at the same time persons of education and leisure—a language admirably adapted to the conversation of the saloon—above all, an ardent love for society, and a complete abandon to its fascinations. We want nearly all these things; we engage too intently in the objects of our pursuit to allow habitual gayety —we let the cares of life swallow up all our time and all our thoughts—our language for playful conversation is inferior to the French, and we prefer the tranquil pleasures of the family circle to those of a larger society. Hence the unceremonious evening visit, for the most part, falls out of our system of social intercourse, which in the cities is reduced to the formalities of morning calls, dinner parties, dances, and musical soirées; and hence, also, the other evil of the distribution of society in these several entertainments according to age, the feasting being assigned to the seniors, and the frolicking to the juniors. Were we to follow out the suggestions which the subject calls up, it would open too wide a field for discussion, and we must dismiss it with a short résumé of our charges against the fairness of Home as Found. It exhibits the state of society in this country, and especially in the city of New York, as provincial, enslaved to the fashions of London, vulgar in its

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character, and full of pretension; —the passages to support this charge are too numerous to cite; we can only refer to the description of the evening parties at Mrs. Jarvis’s, and Mrs. Houston’s, especially so much of the latter as relates to Miss Ring and her clientèle; the dinner party at which he meets Sir George Templemore; and the literary soirée at Mrs. Legend’s, with the ridiculous exhibition of the vulgar Captain Truck, with a cigar in each corner of his mouth. The only house in which it is not attempted to exhibit a Hogarth picture is Mrs. Hawkers, where the Effinghams make nearly the whole of the party. The religion of the country is represented as hypocrisy, in thecharacter of Mrs. Abbot, and her friends, Dodge and Bragg; and the harmless curiosity of old women as a system of espionage. In repeated instances, single cases are presented as evidences of general usage—the aggressions of the people of Templeton are a sin of the whole land, and prove a common disregard to private right— Aristabulus Bragg, who is said to be ‘a compound of shrewdness, impudence, common sense, pretension, humility, cleverness, vulgarity, kind heartedness, duplicity, selfishness, law honesty, moral fraud, and mother wit’, is pronounced ‘an epitome of all that is good and all that is bad in a very large class of his fellow citizens.’ Every page has a fling at something which belongs to us, our architecture, our literary institutions, our scientific associations, our political anniversaries, our foreign ambassadors, our laws, our liberties, and our modes of life. What though it be partly true, it does not lessen the offence when the truth is told in so ungracious and sneering a manner. And then it is arrogant in the extreme; Mr. Edward Effingham, whom he has placed in his house, and made to father his quarrel with the people of his village, must be regarded as intended for himself, and he and his are the sole judges of taste, refinement, manners, and elegance. We take leave of these volumes with a feeling far more of sorrow than of anger; as friends to our country, to justice, and to letters, we earnestly wish that Mr. Cooper had not written them; they bring discredit upon his name, and of that, the time was when every American was proud.

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THE PATHFINDER 1840

200

32. V.G.Belinsky on Cooper 1839, 1841

The most influential nineteenth-century Russian critic, Belinsky (1811–48), knew Cooper only through faulty French and Russian translations. Failing health and a hectic literary journalistic career prevented him from writing a projected detailed analysis of The Pathfinder, described by him as a ‘triumph of modern art’. Translation by M.A.Nicholson, based on texts in V.G.Belinsky: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1953), 13 vols. See Introduction, pp. 46–7. (a) Review of The Bravo, Moscow Observer (Moskovskii nablyudatel), pt II, no. 4, section IV (1839), 87–91. Cooper appeared after Walter Scott and is regarded by many people as his disciple and imitator. However, this is utterly ridiculous. Cooper is a completely independent, original writer, a writer of genius, every bit as great as the Scottish novelist. One of the few truly first-rate writers, he has created such figures and characters as will remain literary models for all time: remember his Hawkeye, who subsequently appears as the Trapper, remember his bee-hunter Paul, his Hard-Heart, his Harvey Birch, his John-Paul,* and many other characters, whose acquaintance you have probably made as often as have I. Moreover, he is a citizen of a young state, which sprang up in a young land, quite unlike our own world, and due to this circumstance, supposedly, he created a special kind of novel—American prairie novels and nautical novels. Indeed, in which author, other than Cooper, can you find all these marvellous pictures of the boundless plains of America, covered with grass taller than a man, inhabited by herds of buffalo, traversed by vast forests concealing in their depths the red-skinned children of America, locked in relentless conflict one with another and with the white-men? And as for the sea and ships, here again he is at home: he knows the name of every rope on board ship; like the most

* The reader may wish for the sake of interest to compare the last-named with Alexandra Dumas’s Jean Paul [hero of Dumas’s Le Capitaine Paul] in order to see the difference between independent creative genius and the sedulous aping of miserable mediocrity.

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experienced of pilots, he understands its every movement; like a skilful captain, he knows how to steer it, both when attacking a hostile vessel, and when fleeing before it. Within the narrow confines of a ship’s deck, he is able to create the most intricate, and, at the same time, the simplest drama. One is amazed at the power and profundity, the energy and grandeur of this drama; and yet, for all that, everything in it seems so tranquil, motionless, slow and ordinary. A great, wonderful, mighty artist! And it was this which led everyone to the erroneous conclusion that Cooper is only at home on the prairies, in the forests or at sea, and that if he transfers the scene of action of his novel onto dry land, then he is sure to run aground and be shipwrecked. But this great artist was not afraid of the cawing of critical ravens or crows; instead, he spread his mighty eagle’s wings and flew, in an alien continent and beneath an alien sky, in that same inimitable fashion as when he used to soar beneath the skies of his own mother-country. Evidence of this is furnished by The Bravo, a novel which Cooper chose to set in Venice. This novel recently appeared in Russian, in a translation so utterly illiterate as to be unimaginable, save by the most fervid daring and illiterate of imaginations. And almost all our periodicals reiterated that Cooper is a good novelist at home in America and on the ocean, but that he has failed in a European setting, and that The Bravo is a tedious and banal novel. That is what comes of thinking a lot! There is no denying that we set about reading The Bravo with a certain amount of apprehension. It would have saddened us to have ascertained that such a great artist as Cooper was capable of writing bad novels like some Bulwer Lytton1 or other. With great effort we managed to read one chapter through, then a second. Already the translation was beginning to exhaust our patience and our love of art, which was prepared to make great sacrifices—even to the extent of reading translations such as this. But then the gloom began to disperse, vague outlines began to be transformed into vivid figures, faint shadows into living images and characters. By now, despite the appalling translation, we were not so much reading as devouring with insatiable greed the remaining chapters and parts. And now that the novel has long since been read, these marvellous figures still drift before our eyes, such figures as can only be created by the fantasy of a great writer: here is the old fisherman Antonio, with his noble coarseness and vigorous simplicity of his ways; here is the profound, mighty, melancholic Bravo; here the tender, pure, sweet Gelsomina; here the flighty, cunning Annina—what figures, what characters! How intimately my heart has come to know them, with what sweet yearning I dream about them! The perfidious, murky cloak-and-dagger politics of the Venetian aristocracy; the customs of Venice itself; the regatto, or contest of gondoliers; the murder of Antonio—all of this surpasses description, is beyond praise. Yet it all seems so simple, so commonplace, so trivial: one man wants to go on a spree, another to make a bit of money, another to chase after women, and another to play the dandy. Every face is merry, the public fêtes are gay with masks, gondolas ply along the canals. Yet from all this there emerges a kind of colossal spectre, which paralyzes one with horror. And the whole action takes up some three days.

1

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), English novelist and dramatist, several of whose works Belinsky reviewed.

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There are no external levers: the entire drama springs from the clash of various personalities and the conflict of interests; all the events are of the most everyday kind— and yet, more than once as you read this book you will lower the hand that holds it and will gaze into the distance for moments on end, seeing nothing definite before you…. Before pronouncing such a categoric and contemptuous verdict upon a work by such a great master as Cooper, it would be a good idea to read it through in the original if you have a command of that language, or at least to read it in the French translation, since all French translators, quite unlike the majority of their Russian counterparts, have the laudable habit of taking trouble over the sense and accuracy of language. As for the translation of The Bravo, here are a few examples—not, incidentally, the most atrocious: [Belinsky proceeds to cite several sentences and passages exhibiting a variety of grammatical and syntactical howlers.] Excellent, is it not? And the whole novel is translated like this—and from the original as well! One cannot resist quoting the proverb: riches are no cure… [for a stupid son.] (b) Review of The Pathfinder, Notes of the Fatherland (Otyechestvennye zapiski), XIV (1841), 8–9. Since he did not begin writing novels until after Walter Scott, Cooper is regarded as Scott’s imitator, or even as an outstanding novelist, albeit after Scott. But this is a gross error, the opinion of the masses, who draw their conclusions not from the heart of the matter itself, but from external circumstances; that is to say, not from how this or that novelist writes, but from when he started writing, how his novels are selling, who praises them or who inveighs against them. Cooper is not in the least inferior to Scott. Yielding to him in abundance and complexity of content, and in vividness of colour, he excels him in that intensity of feeling which powerfully grips the soul of the reader before he is aware of it. Cooper surpasses Scott in creating vast, majestic edifices seemingly out of nothing, amazing us with the apparent simplicity of materials and poverty of resources from which he creates something great and boundless. The seething, energetic life of Europe, in all its complexity and diversity of colour, itself provided Scott with a rich and ready source of materials. Yet Cooper understands how to create, within the narrow confines of a ship’s deck, the most intricate and, at the same time, the simplest drama, whose roots are sometimes hidden in the soil of the mainland, whose stately branches overshadow the virgin land of America. One is overwhelmed by the power and profundity, the energy and grandeur of this drama, and yet, for all that, everything in it seems so tranquil, motionless, slow and ordinary! Think of his novels, The Pilot and The Red Rover. The truth is, rather, that Walter Scott ought not even to be compared with Cooper, nor Cooper with Scott: each of them is great in his own way; each is distinctive and original tothe highest degree; and both of them, by virtue of their creative activity, belong to the world’s greatest phenomena in the sphere of art.

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In addition, Cooper’s genius derives much of its originality from the fact that he is a citizen of a young state, which sprang up in a young land, quite unlike our own old world. Consequently Cooper’s works bear a certain special stamp: one thinks of them and is at once transported to the virgin forests of America, to her boundless prairies, covered with grass taller than a man—prairies across which roam herds of buffalo, where the redskinned children of the Great Spirit hide, locked in relentless conflict one with another, and with the conquering palefaces… In our minds we connect Cooper’s novels as much, if not more, with the sea: the sea and ships—this is his world, here he is at home; he knows the name of every rope on a ship, and, like the most experienced of pilots, he understand its every movement; he knows how to steer it like a skilful captain, and when attacking a hostile vessel or fleeing before it, he strews about him the terms he loves to hear, losing himself in descriptions of the ship’s manoeuvres with as much pleasure as Walter Scott takes in describing some ancient costume or a gloomy Gothic hall. Many figures have been created by the brush of the great Cooper, and limned with considerable originality and interest: the mere mention of John Paul, the Red Rover and Harvey Birch is sufficient for one to lose himself in contemplation of the infinite… But not a single figure of all the multitude of his marvellous creations moves the reader to such wonder and sympathy as does the colossal image of that man—so great in his natural simplicity—whom Cooper has made the hero of four of his novels: The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie. Even his creator is so taken with, so captivated by the wonderful image which has sprung from his fantasy, and loves so ardently this finest creature of his genius that, after presenting him in three novels as a character indispensable to the continuity of the action, Cooper conceived the idea of a new novel with him as hero. And from all this there emerged a wonderful tetralogy, a vast and splendid poem in four parts. Cooper spent a long time preparing himself for this novel, as for a mighty exploit; many years elapsed from the first gleam of an idea up to the moment of actually writing The Pathfinder—so deeply aware was Cooper of the importance of the work he had conceived. Consequently, of all famous novels one can scarcely point to a single one which is distinguished by so profound an idea, so daring a conception, such richness of life and such nature genius! Many scenes fromThe Pathfinder would enhance the beauty of any of Shakespeare’s dramas. It is based on the idea of one of the greatest and most enigmatic acts of the human spirit: the act of self-abnegation, and in this respect the novel represents the apotheosis of self-abnegation. But enough of this. The Pathfinder is the kind of work about which one should either say everything, or say nothing at all. We look forward, in the near future, to discussing The Pathfinder in a separate essay. Nor, indeed, shall our words lack a subject: life and its undiscovered mysteries, which the novel invests with poetic form, will provide us with the finest of themes, and the epigraph to the novel: ‘Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head, and Learning wiser grow without his books,’ will set the tone for our essay. The Pathfinder appeared only last year, and was translated and printed that same year in Notes of the Fatherland. Now it is published as a separate volume. As is well known, even Walter Scott was not particularly fortunate as regards the Russian versions of his novels. But Cooper has had scarcely any luck at all in this respect. The only respectable translations are those of The Pilot and The Red Rover. The others were done just anyhow:

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The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie extremely badly; The Bravo and The Wept of Wish-tonWish nonsensically. The translation of The Pathfinder amply recompenses Cooper for the tribulations he has suffered in the Russian language. This is, first of all, a translation from the original, and secondly it is true to the poetic spirit of its original, which it renders with artistic sensitivity. (c) Extract from ‘The Division of Poetry into Kinds and Genres’, Notes of the Fatherland, xv (1841), 13–64. In most of the novels of Walter Scott and Cooper there is one important defect, although no-one draws attention to it or complains about it (at least not in Russian periodicals): namely the decisive preponderance of the epic moment and the absence of the inner, subjective principle. Due to such a defect both these great creative writers seem, as far astheir works are concerned, to be somehow cold and lacking in personality, like men for whom everything is fine as it is, whose heart seems not to quicken its beat at the sight of either good or evil, and who seem not even to suspect the existence of the inner man. Of course, it is only in our era that this can be regarded as a defect; nevertheless, it certainly is a defect, for contemporaneity is a great quality in an artist. However, both these novelists have upon occasion paid tribute, involuntarily, as it were, to the spirit of modern art, and we shall draw upon the testimony of their own creations in order to show that the best and most exalted of them are those which are, to a greater or lesser extent, imbued with the dramatic element…. [Belinsky proceeds to discuss Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and St. Ronan’s Well (1823).] But incomparably superior to all these as an example of the dramatic novel is Cooper’s The Pathfinder. A man of profound character and mighty spirit, who has spent the best years of his life in the impenetrable virgin forests of America with a hunting rifle slung across his shoulder, who has rejected of his own free will the comforts and lures of civilized life for the broad expanse of majestic nature, for lofty discourse with God in the solemn silence of his great creation; a man who has just reached the very pinnacle of his physical and spiritual strength at a time of life when others are already past their prime, and who, at forty years of age, has preserved his freshness and ardour, and the pristine purity of a heart as gentle as a babe’s; a man grown to manhood beneath the open sky, in eternal conflict with danger, perpetually at war with predatory beasts and evil Mingos; a man with iron muscles and sinews of steel within a lean body, with the heart of a dove within the breast of a lion—this man meets upon the highway of life a splendid, grandiose manifestation of the female world, and quietly, imperceptibly love takes possession of his whole being…. His friend, the sergeant, the father of the beautiful girl, had long since promised him the hand of his daughter. Also accompanying Mabel is the young and handsome Jasper. The Pathfinder loves him with the tenderness of a father, with the devotion of a friend; loves him for his open heart, his noble and manly character, his bold and cheerful disposition, his diligence and dexterity. He never misses an opportunity of praising Jasper and extolling his merits to Mabel. And then comes the moment of

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explanation between him and Mabel, and all his dreams are shattered by harsh reality. The one who alone sets his heart beating, whom alone he could love with all thestrength and depth of his character, with whom he had merged his most precious dreams of happiness and bliss for the rest of his hitherto rough and lonely life—this being respects him deeply and reverently, but cannot be his wife. Convulsively he clutches his neck in an iron grip and, smiling through the martyred expression of his face, he repeats: ‘Yes, it’s the sarjeant’s fault, the sarjeant was wrong!’ Oh, how deeply he suffers and what a noble, human character his suffering bears; there is nothing animal, nothing savage about it. His coarse eyes fill with tears, with a smile he clasps Mabel’s hand and, without relinquishing the love he feels, he tears himself away henceforth and for ever from the object of that love, valiantly to bear his heavy cross! Terrible is the moment when first he recognizes in Jasper his rival, but he withstands even this ordeal. He entrusts her to his safe-keeping, blesses them both and wishes them the joy and happiness which he himself is never more to know. He asks Jasper to treasure his companion for life, not to offend her womanly heart by his coarse, masculine nature, and disappears for ever from their sight…. This is not intended as a critical discussion of this superb novel, and, lest we become caught up in details, we are contenting ourselves, with indicating the general features. Those who have read and understood the novel will recall a whole series of scenes of marvellous artistry, in which the Pathfinder’s conflicting emotions and turbulent heart are depicted with staggering fidelity. The merits of such scenes cannot be shown otherwise than by tracing each detail in consecutive order, and in some cases even writing the scene out in full. We repeat: those who have read and comprehended the novel will understand us, and we shall say no more than that this whole novel is the apotheosis of self-abnegation (of resignation), a great mystery of suffering, a revelation of the deepest and noblest secrets of the human heart. Here Cooper shows himself to be, like Shakespeare, a profound interpreter of the human heart, a great portrayer of the world of the soul. Clearly and precisely he has uttered the inexpressible, has reconciled and fused into one the external and the internal, and his The Pathfinder is Shakespearian drama in the form of a novel—the only creation in this genre, entirely without equal, a triumph of modern art in the sphere of epic poetry. And for all this the novel is indebted—aside from the great creative genius of its author—to the profound dramatic moment, which gleams through every line of the narrative like a ray of sunlight in cut crystal….

33. Honoré de Balzac, review, Paris Review 25 July 1840

Translated by K.P.Wormeley, The Personal Opinions of Honoré de Balzac (Boston, 1899), pp. 114–20. Balzac’s appreciation is the tribute of a writer who learned much from Cooper. See Introduction, pp. 40, 42. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), a pioneer Realist and Promethean literary figure, wrote the immense novel cycle, La Comédie Humaine, which provides a comprehensive picture of French civilization between the Revolution and the July Monarchy. Among Balzac’s most famous novels are Eugénie Grandet (1834), Le Père Goriot (1835) and La Cousine Bette (1847). After two weak works Cooper has just recovered himself by The Pathfinder. It is a noble book; worthy of The Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers, and The Prairie, to which it serves as a completion. Cooper is in our epoch the only author worthy of being put beside Walter Scott: he does not equal him, but he has his genius. He owes the high place he holds in modern literature to two faculties: that of painting the sea and seamen; that of idealizing the magnificent landscapes of America. I cannot understand how the author of The Pilot and The Red Rover can be the same man who wrote the other novels—excepting The Spy. These seven works are his true and only titles to fame. I do not say this lightly, for I have read and re-read the works of the American novelist, or rather let me say the American historian. I feel for his two faculties the admiration Walter Scott felt for them, which is still further deserved by the grandeur, the originality of Leather-Stocking, that fine personality which binds into one The Pioneers, The Mohicans, The Pathfinder and The Prairie, Leather-Stocking is a statue, a magnificent moral hermaphrodite, born of the savage state and of civilization, who will live as long as literatures last. I do not know that the extraordinarywork of Walter Scott furnishes a creation as grandiose as that of this hero of the savannas and the forests. Gurth in Ivanhoe approaches Leather-Stocking. We feel that if the great Scotchman had seen America he might have created Leather-Stocking. It is, especially, by that man, half Indian, half civilized, that Cooper has risen to the level of Walter Scott. The subject of The Pathfinder is excessively simple…. I like these simple subjects; th show great strength of conception and are always full of riches. The first part of the book

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paints the Oswego, one of the rivers that fall into Lake Ontario, and the shores along which lurk the savages who are seeking to seize the travellers. Here Cooper becomes once more the great Cooper. The description of the forest, the waters of the river, and the falls, the wily schemes of the savages foiled by the Great Snake, Jasper, and LeatherStocking himself, supply a succession of marvellous tableaux, which in this work as in those that preceded it are quite inimitable. Never did typographed language approach so closely to painting. This is the school that literary landscape-painters ought to study; all the secrets of the art are here. This magic prose not only shows to the mind the river, its banks, the forests and their trees, but it succeeds in giving us a sense of both the slightest circumstances and the combined whole. The same genius which heretofore launched you on the ocean and impassioned you with its vast extent, now reveals to you the primeval forest and makes you quiver in detecting Indians behind the trees, in the water, under the rocks. When the spirit of solitude has spoken to you, when the cool stillness of eternal shade has soothed you, when you hover, as it were, above that rich vegetation, your heart is all emotion. From page to page dangers rise naturally, without any effort to bring them on the scene. You think that you yourself are bending beneath those giant trees to follow the trail of a moccasin. The dangers are so allied to the lay of the land that you examine attentively the rocks, the trees, the rapids, the bark canoes, the bushes; you incarnate yourself in the country; it passes into you, or you into it, and you know not how this metamorphosis, the work of genius, has been accomplished; but you feel it impossible to separate the soil, the vegetation, the waters, their expanse, their configuration, from the interests that agitate you. The personages become what they really are, a small matter in this grand scene which your eye measures. The encounters with Indians, the wiles and fights of the savages have no monotony; they are not like any others already used by Cooper. The picture of the fort, the period of rest to the personages, the scene of the target, are masterpieces. We owe a debt of gratitude to the author forhis choice of humble personages. Excepting the young girl, who is not true, and whose characteristics are painfully invented and useless, these figures are nature, to use the word of studios. It is unfortunate, however, that the English seaman and Lieutenant Muir, the two pivots of the naive, simple drama, should be failures. A little good advice, a little more study and this composition would have had no defect. The navigation of the lake, a delicious miniature, is equal to the finest of Cooper’s maritime scenes. The expedition to the Thousand Islands, and the fights of the Iroquois supported by a French officer, have an interest equal to that which made The Mohicans a masterpiece in this line. Leather-Stocking, under one name or another, dominates all else, here as elsewhere, and more than elsewhere. That figure, so profoundly melancholy, is here in part explained. Enough on the interest and the details of this fine work; it may be more useful to seek out its faults. That which renders Cooper inferior to Walter Scott is his profound and radical impotence for the comic, and his perpetual intention to divert you, in which he never succeeds. I feel, in reading Cooper, a singular sensation, as if while listening to beautiful music there was near me some horrible village fiddler scraping his violin and harrowing me by playing the same air. To produce what he thinks to be comic he puts into the mouth of one of his personages a silly joke, invented a priori, some notion, a mental vice, a deformity of mind, which is shown in the first chapters and reappears, page

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after page, to the last. This joke and this personage form the village fiddler I speak of. To this system we owe David in The Mohicans, the English sailor and Lieutenant Muir in The Pathfinder; in short, all the so-called comic figures in Cooper’s works. The originator of this malady was Walter Scott. The visit of King Charles, of which Lady Bellenden speaks seven or eight times in The Puritans, and other like features of which Walter Scott, as a man of genius, was chary, have been the ruin of Cooper. The great Scotchman never abused this means, which is petty, and reveals an aridity, a barrenness of mind. Genius consists in making gush from a situation the words by which a character reveals itself, and not in bedizening a personage with a speech adapted to the occasion. It is perfectly permissible to pose a man as gay, or gloomy, or ironical; but his gayety, his gloom, his irony must be manifested by traits of character. After painting your personage, make him talk; but to make him always say the same thing is impotent. It is in the invention of circumstances and in that of characteristic traits that the genius of the modern trouvèrereveals itself. If you do not feel within you the power of creating thus, remain yourself; seek, work out the resources that are really within you. In Redgauntlet there is an old smuggler who repeatedly remarks: ‘And therefore, consequently’, but Walter Scott has made that expression a source of inextinguishable humour which never wearies us. I was absolutely saddened when, in this noble work of Cooper’s, I found the same jest in the sailor and the four women of Lieutenant Muir. Sublime when he initiates you into the beauties of American nature, Cooper weakens in his preparation of the drama, and he only atones for this weakness by the beauty of his details. Never would Walter Scott have committed the blunder of raising suspicions on the character of Jasper before the middle of the book. We are made to see the necessity of the means and the means itself. Lieutenant Muir ought to have appeared much sooner, and the author would have created more interest by adroitly suggesting his treachery and his relations with Arrow-Head. I have a serious reproach to make to this author. Certainly, Cooper does not owe his fame to his fellow-citizens, neither does he owe it to England; he owes it in a great measure to the passionate admiration of France, to our fine and noble country, more considerate of foreign men of genius than she is of her own poets. Cooper has been understood and, above all, appreciated in France. I am therefore surprised to see him ridicule the French officers who were in Canada in 1750. Those officers were gentlemen, and history tells us that their conduct was noble. Is it for an American, whose position demands of him lofty ideas, to give a gratuitously odious character to one of those officers when the sole succour that America received during her War of Independence came from France? My observation is, I think, the more just because in reading over all Cooper’s works I find it impossible to discover even a trace of good-will to France. The difference that exists between Walter Scott and Cooper is derived essentially from the nature of the subjects towards which their genius led them. From Cooper’s scenes nothing philosophical or impressive to the intellect issues when, the work once read, the soul looks back to take in a sense of the whole. Yet both are great historians; both have cold hearts; neither will admit passion, that divine emanation, superior to the virtue that man has constructed for the preservation of society; they have suppressed it, they have offered it as a holocaust to the blue-stockings of their country; but the one initiates you

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into great human evolutions, the other into the mighty heart of Nature herself. One has brought literature to grasp the earth and ocean, the other makesit grapple body to body with humanity. Read Cooper, and this will strike you, especially in the Pathfinder. You will not find a portrait which makes you think, which brings you back into yourself by some subtle or ingenious reflection, which explains to you facts, persons, or actions. He seems, on the contrary, to wish to plunge you into solitude and leave you to dream there. Whereas Scott gives you, wherever you are, a brilliant company of human beings. Cooper’s work isolates; Scott weds you to his drama as he paints with broad strokes the features of his country at all epochs. The grandeur of Cooper is a reflection of the Nature he depicts; that of Walter Scott is more peculiarly his own. The Scotchman procreates his work; the American is the son of his. Walter Scott has a hundred aspects; Cooper is a painter of sea and landscape, admirably aided by two academies—the Savage and the Sailor. His noble creation of Leather-Stocking is a work apart. Not understanding English I cannot judge of the style of these two great geniuses, happily for us so different, but I should suppose the Scotchman to be superior to the American in the expression of his thought and in the mechanism of his style. Cooper is illogical; he proceeds by sentences which, taken one by one, are confused, the succeeding phrase not allied to the preceding, though the whole presents an imposing substance. To understand this criticism read the first two pages of the Pathfinder and examine each proposition. You will find a muddle of ideas which would bring pensums upon any rhetoric pupil in France. But the moment the majesty of his Nature lays hold of you, you forget the clumsy lurching of the vessel, you think only of the ocean or the lake. To sum up once more: one is the historian of Nature, the other of humanity; one attains to the glorious ideal by imagery, the other by action, though without neglecting poesy, the high-priestess of art.

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34. Evert Duyckinck, review, Arcturus i (January 1841), 90–2

Duyckinck (1816–78) was a well-known literary figure in New York during the 1840s and 1850s. Possessor of an immense library, he was the acknowledged leader of the ‘Young America’ literary movement, editor of the Literary World, and compiler of the influential Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855). He is chiefly remembered today for his influence upon Herman Melville. Duyckinck’s review of Mercedes of Castile is an intelligent, lively critique of the vogue for historical romances. SeeIntroduction, p. 24.

The Romance of History is an exhausted vein of writing from which the ore has long disappeared. In the hands of its master, Sir Walter Scott, the historical novel was a work of art equally with the histories of Shakespeare. Sir Walter put life into the marrowless bones and lit up once more the light in the eyes of old skeleton traditions. Like the discoverer of one of the great western caves, he was the first to make known the untried wonders of fairy halls, the beauty of hidden grottoes, the secret sport of time encrusting virgin pillars of white with crystals of frozen water, and those freakish labors in which nature works, in her study, resemblances to the beasts, birds, the architecture, the very men of the outer world. His imitators resembled that herd of guides and vulgar travellers who rush in at the heels of the discoverer, mar the beauty of the work by chisels and hammers, blacken the pure walls with tallow torches, and end by writing their names in the smoke. Or, they may more charitably be compared to a troop of servants swarming inupon the remains of a feast where the host had but just dined. After Scott’s success, the historical novel became a fashion, and like all the fashions of this world, it soon passes away. The production of a work of this kind was soon made as mechanical as the outpouring of moral commonplaces in an essay after the days of the Spectator. Romances were written to order: the annals of all nations were ransacked to furnish a plot and story; no country was spared; not even our own forest land, which must give up its buried Indians: no events were too sacred; the most venerable themes were subjected to the grave ridicule of being paraded in a motley carnival dress of cast-off finery. History and fiction were both degraded. The novel was one of those things to be once done, and ever after left alone. The best evidence of its poverty, at present, is the ease with which such workers are prepared. To a man of original mind, who sees the real wants of the subject, it is the most difficult kind of writing; to an imitator the very easiest. But it is not the form of

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composition a first-rate man should select for the exercise of his pen. Truth is now better than fiction. The present is greater than the past: a living man with hopes, and aims, and faculties to attain them, or fall short of them, is a nobler object, though in rags, than Pharaoh in all his glory. There are few readers who would not prefer an article by Macaulay, in the Edinburgh Review, where real personages are introduced in their true shape as they lived, to the mongrel fact and fiction of the historical romance. A profound critical spirit is abroad, a spirit of earnestness, sympathy, and labor-loving investigation, which needs no aid of fiction to commend its literary products to the world. If the world were dependent upon the novelist for a knowledge of the facts of history, long preliminary disquisitions and connecting chapters would be welcome, but history is better learned from other sources. Besides, the facts must be altered or suppressed to suit the demands of the story. What is good, the proper humanity of the novel, is interrupted by the historical machinery: to get at a few traits of nature we must read through two volumes, narrating the policy of courts and the genealogy of a race of sovereigns. If we escape this pedantry, the chances are that we fall upon some melodramatical historical pageant, described through a series of chapters, and out of place anywhere, except on the boards of a third-rate theatre for the benefit of a third-rate audience. The chief objection to the historical novel is its want of directness. A tale of true love can be told without a long dissertation on the affairs of nations, and the revival of various lords, ladies, and serving-men, to fill up the stage as supernumeraries. Historical personages may be made the subjectsof fictitious narrative, and historical events the means of bringing out character and aiding a poetical distribution of justice in the plot. The field of history is open to the novelist, as it is to the dramatist; but such aid should be very sparingly used. The mere elucidation of historical questions ought never to be united with a work of fiction. History and the novel should remain distinct. With these impressions of the defects of the historical romance, we regret that Cooper, in his late works,1 should have chosen a subject which can receive so little aid from fancy, and one so likely to obscure the powers of the novelist, as the discovery of America. Washington Irving’s perfect, pure narrative2 will always remain the only true romantic history of that event to the English reader. It is not our purpose to review, in detail, the work of Mr. Cooper, but furnish the reader with a few general remarks, applicable to the class of writings in which Mercedes of Castile is found. To many, the form of the work, we think, will be an insurmountable objection to its perusal: in other respects it will be found neither better nor worse than the other productions of the author. The literary merits and defects of Mr. Cooper have been long settled; between himself and his enemies, his good and bad points have been set before the public so often that we seem to know them by instinct, and can, at a glance, when a new Precaution novel appears, refer to the good parts, the indifferent, and the bad. The most constant faculty of Mr. Cooper is his judgment; always acute and intelligent, but over-refined, and exercised upon all occasions, sometimes on insufficient premises it has been taken by some for suspicion. He is sensitive without the accompaniment of the poetical temperament, so he is more ready to suspect than forgive. He has imagination enough to conceive a plot, the circumstances of which are sufficiently like life, and people it with true mariners and Indians. In his female characters, which may be taken as the nicest test of a novelist’s

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abilities, he is deficient. They are nothing better than the walking mannakin which Mr. Willis3 introduced into his comedy at the Park. The style of the novels is commonly clumsy and confused, from the very circumstance that so much pains is taken to be explicit. He leaves nothing to the reader’s comprehension, but is forever giving a motive. The latter member of a sentence has generally the onerous task to perform of explaining the first. There is a gratuitous abundance of knowledge and advice which is something tedious. The dialogues and narrative are uphill work till the author gets to the height of his subject, when he is bold, vigorous, and full of life. In his descriptions of nature he is unsurpassed. He selects the chief circumstances, and sets them forth on the canvas to speak for themselves. He has a vast strength and earnestness at times, which, in spite of all faults, make him the very first of American writers.

1

Mercedes of Castile (1840) is an historical romance concerning Columbus’s discovery of America. History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). 3 Nathaniel Parker Willis, well-known New York literary figure was foreign correspondent for the New-York Mirror, an acquaintance of Cooper, and author of the popular Pencillings by the Way (1836). 2

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THE DEERSLAYER 1841

218

35. Unsigned review, New-York Mirror xix (September 1841), 295

Mr. Cooper is an exception to the general rule, that an author’s last works are generally inferiour to his first. The book before us is certainly the best which has issued from his pen in many years. There is so much real merit in Mr. Cooper that it gives us great pleasure to praise him whenever he puts it in our power to do so, which, we regret to say, has not always been the case. He is the most original thinker of any of our American novelists; the manliest, most vigourous and independent spirit of them all, unrivalled in descriptive powers, and unapproached in the heartiness of his patriotic feelings. If, with all these eminent qualities, he has defects and weaknesses, which, with the tenacity of his character, he too pertinaciously adheres to, it is matter of regret, and for no worse feeling. In the present work, we are happy to say, none of those peculiarities are to be met with which some critics, and ourselves among the number, have found so offensive. Its principal personage, as the public are already aware, is our old friend Leatherstocking, who is drawn in the vigour of early manhood, thus completing the history of his life and death. Mr. Cooper could not have chosen a more popular hero, and he has felt that no apology was necessary for bringing so general a favourite on the stage again, though for the fifth time. The scene is laid on the borders of that beautiful lake near which the author himself resides. His descriptions of that fine sheet of water and the hills that encircle it are in his best style, that is, remarkably clear and minute, and exquisitely true to nature. We can almost fancy ourselves looking down on the unruffled surface of Otsego, and feel the night-breeze rising, damp and heavy with the odours of the forest. Mr. Cooper cannot delineate fashionable life, nor catch the tone of modern society,but here he has attempted nothing of the kind; ‘his foot is on his native heath,’ and he seems to breath the freer for it; at least his style is certainly more easy and flowing than it was wont to be. The sketches of Indian character strike us as peculiarly masterly, and the surprises, scuffles, ‘skrimmages’, and other incidents of border warfare, are of course capital. If there is any fault in the book, and one at least a reviewer must find, or the public will deem him unfit for his task, it is in the love of Judith for the Deerslayer, and the apparent coldness with which he repulses it. It seems too bad that so brilliant a beauty, with so many generous impulses and good qualities too to enhance her outward advantages, should throw herself at the head of a rough hunter only to be rejected; and, moreover, the Deerslayer, trained in Indian habits of observation, could hardly have remained so long ignorant of what was going on in his pretty neighbour’s heart as to render so many pages of broad hints and circumlocutions necessary on her part. But, on the whole, the author is perhaps right, for a wife like Judith

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would have been a sad incumbrance to Natty; and, besides, her unhappy fate is such as the warmest feelings, when uncontrolled by principle, are too apt to lead to. Indeed, throughout the work there is more knowledge of human nature and more successful delineation of character than Mr. Cooper has generally had credit for. There is little of that heavy dialogue which encumbers most of his former works, and indeed everywhere we see signs of a better taste and kindlier feeling. We are glad to be able to say thus much of one whom we have always delighted to honour; who, whatever may be his errours of judgment, has shown a genuine American feeling which is unfortunately too seldom met with in American writers. Let him go on and write a few more such works as the Deerslayer, illustrating American history, scenery and manners, and identifying himself with his subject, and he cannot fail to reach a higher reputation than he has yet enjoyed. His own country will, of course, be the last to appreciate him, but, after his renown has been endorsed by England, France and Germany, it will begin to pass current here; and, it being proved already that he is a man of genius, it will go near to be thought so shortly.

WYANDOTTÉ 1843

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36. Edgar Allan Poe, review, Graham’s Magazine xxiv (November 1843), 261–4

Poe had noticed Sketches of Switzerland for the Southern Literary Messenger and Mercedes of Castile for Graham’s, but his general opinion of Cooper emerges in his review of Wyandotté. See Introduction, pp. 24, 32–3. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), prominent American critic, poet and shortstory writer, is too frequently remembered as a gothic writer whose life has been turned into a gothic legend. As a literary critic and editor of American literary magazines, Poe insisted rigorously upon the necessity of detailed craftsmanship in writing. Poe’s most famous writings are Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845). Wyandotté, or The Hutted Knoll, is, in its general features, precisely similar to the novels enumerated in the title. It is a forest subject; and, when we say this, we give assurance that the story is a good one; for Mr. Cooper has never been known to fail, either in the forest or upon the sea. The interest, as usual, has no reference to plot, of which, indeed, our novelist seems altogether regardless, or incapable, but depends, first upon the nature of the theme; secondly, upon a Robinson-Crusoe-like detail in its management; and thirdly, upon the frequently repeated portraiture of the half-civilized Indian. In saying that the interest depends, first, upon the nature of the theme, we mean to suggest that thistheme—life in the Wilderness—is one of intrinsic and universal interest, appealing to the heart of man in all phases; a theme, like that of life upon the ocean, so unfailingly omniprevalent in its power of arresting and absorbing attention, that while success or popularity is, with such a subject, expected as a matter of course, a failure might be properly regarded as conclusive evidence of imbecility on the part of the author. The two theses in question have been handled usque ad nauseam—and this through the instinctive perception of the universal interest which appertains to them. A writer, distrustful of his powers, can scarcely do better than discuss either one or the other. A man of genius will rarely, and should never, undertake either; first, because both are excessively hackneyed; and, secondly, because the reader never fails, in forming his opinion of a book, to make discount, either wittingly or unwittingly, for that intrinsic interest which is inseparable from the subject and independent of the manner in which it is treated. Very few and very dull indeed are those who do not instantaneously perceive the distinction; and thus there are two great classes of fictions, —a popular and widely circulated class, read with

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pleasure but without admiration—in which the author is lost or forgotten; or remembered, if at all, with something very nearly akin to contempt; and then, a class not so popular, nor so widely diffused, in which, at every paragraph, arises a distinctive and highly pleasurable interest, springing from our perception and appreciation of the skill employed, or the genius evinced in the composition. After perusal of the one class, we think solely of the book —after reading the other, chiefly of the author. The former class leads to popularity—the latter to fame. In the former case, the books sometimes live, while the authors usually die; in the latter, even when the works perish, the man survives. Among American writers of the less generally circulated, but more worthy and more artistical fictions, we may mention Mr. Brockden Brown, Mr. John Neal, Mr. Simms, Mr. Hawthorne; at the head of the more popular division we may place Mr. Cooper. The Hutted Knoll, without pretending to detail facts, gives a narrative of fictitious eve similar, in nearly all respects, to occurrences which actually happened during the opening scenes of the Revolution, and at other epochs of our history. It pictures the dangers, difficulties, and distresses of a large family, living, completely insulated, in the forest. The tale commences with a description of the ‘region which lies in the angle formed by the junction of the Mohawk with the Hudson, extending as far south as the line of Pennsylvania, and west to the vergeof that vast rolling plain which composes Western New York’ —a region of which the novelist has already frequently written, and the whole of which, with a trivial exception, was a wilderness before the Revolution. Within this district, and on a creek running into the Unadilla, a certain Captain Willoughby purchases an estate, or ‘patent’ and there retires, with his family and dependents, to pass the close of his life in agricultural pursuits. He has been an officer in the British army, but, after serving many years, has sold his commission, and purchased one for his only son, Robert, who alone does not accompany the party into the forest. This party consists of the captain himself; his wife; his daughter, Beulah; an adopted daughter, Maud Meredith; an invalid sergeant, Joyce, who had served under the captain; a Presbyterian preacher, Mr. Woods; a Scotch mason, Jamie Allen; an Irish laborer, Michael O’Hearn: a Connecticut man, Joel Strides; four negroes, Old Plin and Young Plin, Big Smash and little Smash; eight axemen; a house-carpenter; a millwright, &c., &c. Besides these, a Tuscarora Indian called Nick, or Wyandotté, accompanies the expedition. This Indian, who figures largely in the story, and gives it its title, may be considered as the principal character—the one chiefly elaborated. He is an outcast from his tribe, has been known to Captain Willoughby for thirty years, and is a compound of all the good and bad qualities which make up the character of the half-civilized Indian. He does not remain with the settlers; but appears and re-appears at intervals upon the scene. Nearly the whole of the first volume is occupied with a detailed account of the estate purchased, (which is termed ‘The Hutted Knoll’ from a natural mound upon which the principal house is built) and of the progressive arrangements and improvements. Toward the close of the volume the Revolution commences; and the party at the ‘Knoll’ are besieged by a band of savages and ‘rebels,’ with whom an understanding exists, on the part of Joel Strides, the Yankee. This traitor, instigated by the hope of possessing Captain Willoughby’s estate, should it be confiscated, brings about a series of defections from the party of the settlers, and finally, deserting himself, reduces the whole number to six or

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seven, capable of bearing arms. Captain Willoughby resolves, however, to defend his post. His son, at this juncture, pays him a clandestine visit, and, endeavoring to reconnoitre the position of the Indians, is made captive. The captain, in an attempt at rescue, is murdered by Wyandotté, whose vindictive passions had been aroused by illtimed allusions, on the part of Willoughby, to floggings previously inflicted, by his orders,upon the Indian. Wyandotté, however, having satisfied his personal vengeance, is still the ally of the settlers. He guides Maud, who is beloved by Robert, to the hut in which the latter is confined, and effects his escape. Aroused by this escape, the Indians precipitate their attack upon the Knoll, which, through the previous treachery of Strides in ill-hanging a gate, is immediately carried. Mrs. Willoughby, Beulah, and others of the party, are killed. Maud is secreted and thus saved by Wyandotté. At the last moment, when all is apparently lost, a reinforcement appears, under command of Evert Beekman, the husband of Beulah; and the completion of the massacre is prevented. Woods, the preacher, had left the Knoll, and made his way through the enemy, to inform Beekman of the dilemma of his friends. Maud and Robert Willoughby are, of course, happily married. The concluding scene of the novel shows us Wyandotté repenting the murder of Willoughby, and converted to Christianity through the agency of Woods. It will be at once seen that there is nothing original in this story. On the contrary, it is even excessively commonplace. The lover, for example, rescued from captivity by the mistress; the Knoll carried through the treachery of an inmate; and the salvation of the besieged, at the very last moment, by a reinforcement arriving, in consequence of a message borne to a friend by one of the besieged, without the cognizance of the others; these, we say, are incidents which have been the common property of every novelist since the invention of letters. And as for plot, there has been no attempt at anything of the kind. The tale is a mere succession of events, scarcely any one of which has any necessary dependence upon any one other. Plot, however, is at best, an artificial effect, requiring, like music, not only a natural bias, but long cultivation of taste for its full appreciation; some of the finest narratives in the world—Gil-Blas and Robinson Crusoe, for example— have been written without its employment; and The Hutted Knoll, like all the sea and forest novels of Cooper, has been made deeply interesting, although depending upon this peculiar source of interest not at all. Thus the absence of plot can never be critically regarded as a defect; although its judicious use, in all cases aiding and in no case injuring other effects, must be regarded as of a very high order of merit. There are one or two points, however, in the mere conduct of the story now before us, which may, perhaps, be considered as defective. For instance, there is too much obviousness in all that appertains to the hanging of the large gate. In more than a dozen instances Mrs. Willoughby is made to allude to the delay in the hanging; so that thereader is too positively and pointedly forced to perceive that this delay is to result in the capture of the Knoll. As we are never in doubt of the fact, we feel diminished interest when it actually happens. A single vague allusion, well managed, would have been in the true artistical spirit. Again we see too plainly, from the first, that Beekman is to marry Beulah, and that Robert Willoughby is to marry Maud. The killing of Beulah, of Mrs. Willoughby, and Jamie Allen, produces, too, a painful impression, which does not properly appertain to the right

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fiction. Their deaths affect us as revolting and supererogatory; since the purposes of the story are not thereby furthered in any regard. To Willoughby’s murder, however distressing, the reader makes no similar objection; merely because in his decease is fulfilled a species of poetical justice. We may observe here, nevertheless, that his repeated references to his flogging the Indian seem unnatural, because we have otherwise no reason to think him a fool, or a madman, and these references, under the circumstances, are absolutely insensate. We object, also, to the manner in which the general interest is dragged out, or suspended. The besieging party are kept before the Knoll so long, while so little is done, and so many opportunities of action are lost, that the reader takes it for granted that nothing of consequence will occur—that the besieged will be finally delivered. He gets so accustomed to the presence of danger that its excitement, at length, departs. The action is not sufficiently rapid. There is too much procrastination. There is too much mere talk for talk’s sake. The interminable discussions between Woods and Captain Willoughby are, perhaps, the worst feature of the book, for they have not even the merit of referring to the matters on hand. In general, there is quite too much colloquy for the purpose of manifesting character, and too little for the explanation of motive. The characters of the drama would have been better made out by action; while the motives to action, the reasons for the different courses of conduct adopted by the dramatis personae, might have been made to proceed more satisfactorily from their own mouths, in casual conversations, than from that of the author in person. To conclude our remarks upon the head of ill-conduct in the story, we may mention occasional incidents of the merest melodramatic absurdity; as, for example, at page 156, of the second volume, where ‘Willoughby had an arm round the waist of Maud, and bore her forward with a rapidity to which her own strength was entirely unequal.’ We may be permitted to doubt whether a young lady of sound health and limbs, exists, within the limits of Christendom,who could not run faster, on her own proper feet, for any considerable distance, than she could be carried upon one arm of either the Cretan Milo or of the Hercules Farnese. On the other hand, it would be easy to designate many particulars which are admirably handled, the love of Maud Meredith for Robert Willoughby is painted with exquisite skill and truth. The incident of the tress of hair and box is naturally and effectively conceived. A fine collateral interest is thrown over the whole narrative by the connexion of the theme with that of the Revolution; and, especially, there is an excellent dramatic point, at page 124 of the second volume, where Wyandotté, remembering the stripes inflicted upon him by Captain Willoughby, is about to betray him to his foes, when his purpose is arrested by a casual glimpse, through the forest, of the hut which contains Mrs. Willoughby, who had preserved the life of the Indian, by inoculation for the small-pox. In the depicting of character, Mr. Cooper has been unusually successful in ‘Wyandotté’. One or two of his personages, to be sure, must be regarded as little worth. Robert Willoughby, like most novel heroes, is a nobody; that is to say, there is nothing about him which may be looked upon as distinctive. Perhaps he is rather silly than otherwise; as, for instance, when he confuses all his father’s arrangements for his concealment, and bursts into the room before Strides—afterwards insisting upon accompanying that person to the Indian encampment, without any possible or impossible object. Woods, the parson, is a sad bore, upon the Dominie Sampson plan, and is,

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moreover, caricatured. Of Captain Willoughby we have already spoken—he is too often on stilts. Evert Beekman and Beulah are merely episodical. Joyce is nothing in the world but Corporal Trim—or, rather, Corporal Trim and water. Jamie Allen, with his prate about Catholicism, is unsufferable. But Mrs. Willoughby, the humble, shrinking, womanly wife, whose whole existence centres in her affections, is worthy of Mr. Cooper. Maud Meredith is still better. In fact, we know no female portraiture, even in Scott, which surpasses her; and yet the world has been given to understand, by the enemies of the novelist, that he is incapable of depicting a woman. Joel Strides will be recognised by all who are conversant with his general prototypes of Connecticut. Michael O’Hearn, the County Leitrim man, is an Irishman all over, and his portraiture abounds in humor; as, for example, at page 31, of the first volume, where he has a difficulty with a skiff, not being able to account for its revolving upon its own axis, instead of moving forward! or, at page 132, where, duringdivine service, to exclude at least a portion of the heretical doctrine, he stops one of his ears with his thumb; or, at page 195, where a passage occurs so much to our purpose that we will be pardoned for quoting it in full. Captain Willoughby is drawing his son up through a window, from his enemies below. The assistants, placed at a distance from this window to avoid observation from without, are ignorant of what burthen is at the end of the rope: The men did as ordered, raising their load from the ground a foot or two at a time. In this manner the burthen approached, yard after yard, until it was evidently drawing near the window. ‘It’s the captain hoisting up the big baste of a hog, for provisioning the hoose again a saige,’ whispered Mike to the negroes, who grinned as they tugged; ‘and, when the craitur squails, see to it, that ye do not squail yourselves.’ At that moment the head and shoulders of a man appeared at the window. Mike let go the rope, seized a chair, and was about to knock the intruder upon the head; but the captain arrested the blow. ‘It’s one o’ the vagabone Injins that has undermined the hog and come up in its stead,’ roared Mike. ‘It’s my son,’ said the captain; ‘see that you are silent and secret.’ The negroes are, without exception, admirably drawn. The Indian, Wyandotté, howev is the great feature of the book, and is, in every respect, equal to the previous Indian creations of the author of The Pioneer. Indeed, we think this ‘forest gentleman’ superior to the other noted heroes of his kind—the heroes which have been immortalized by our novelist. His keen sense of the distinction, in his own character, between the chief Wyandotté, and the drunken vagabond, Sassy Nick; his chivalrous delicacy toward Maud, in never disclosing to her that knowledge of her real feelings toward Robert Willoughby, which his own Indian intuition had discovered; his enduring animosity toward Captain Willoughby, softened, and for thirty years delayed, through his gratitude to the wife; and then, the vengeance consummated, his pity for that wife conflicting with his exultation at the deed —these, we say, are all traits of a lofty excellence indeed. Perhaps the most effective passage in the book, and that which, most distinctively, brings out the character of the

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Tuscarora, is to be found at pages 50, 51, 52 and 53 of the second volume, where, for some trivial misdemeanor, the captain threatens to make use of the whip. The manner in which the Indian harps upon the threat, returning to it again and again, in every variety of phrase, forms one of the finest pieces of mere character-painting with which we have any acquaintance. The most obvious and most unaccountable faults of The Hutted Knoll, are those which appertain to the style—to the mere grammatical construction; —for, in other and more important particulars of style, Mr. Cooper, of late days, has made a very manifest improvement. His sentences, however, are arranged with an awkwardness so remarkable as to be matter of absolute astonishment, when we consider the education of the author, and his long and continual practice with the pen. In minute descriptions of localities, any verbal inaccuracy, or confusion, becomes a source of vexation and misunderstanding, detracting very much from the pleasure of perusal; and in these inaccuracies Wyandotté abounds. Although, for instance, we carefully read and re-read that portion of the narrative which details the situation of the Knoll, and the construction of the buildings and walls about it, we were forced to proceed with the story without any exact or definite impressions upon the subject. Similar difficulties, from similar causes, occur passim throughout the book. For example, at page 31, vol. I.: ‘The Indian gazed at the house, with that fierce intentness which sometimes glared, in a manner that had got to be, in its ordinary aspects, dull and besotted.’ This it is utterly impossible to comprehend. We presume, however, the intention is to say that although the Indian’s ordinary manner (of gazing) had ‘got to be’ dull and besotted, he occasionally gazed with an intentness that glared, and that he did so in the instance in question. The ‘got to be’ is atrocious—the whole sentence no less so. Here at page 9, vol. I., is something excessively vague: ‘Of the latter character is the face of most of that region which lies in the angle formed by the junction of the Mohawk with the Hudson,’ &c., &c. The Mohawk, joining the Hudson, forms two angles, of course, —an acute and an obtuse one; and, without further explanation, it is difficult to say which it intended. At page 55, vol. I., we read:— ‘The captain, owing to his English education, had avoided straight lines, and formal paths; giving to the little spot the improvement on nature which is a consequence of embellishing her works without destroying them. On each side of this lawn was an orchard, thrifty and young, and which were already beginning to show signs of putting forth their blossoms.’ Here we are tautologically informed that improvement is a consequence of embellishment, and supererogatorily told that the rule holds good only where the embellishment is not accompanied by destruction. Upon the ‘each orchard were’ it is needless to comment. At page 30, vol. I., is something similar, where Strides is represented as ‘never doing anything that required a particle more than the exertion and strength that were absolutely necessary to affect his object.’ Did Mr. C. ever hear of any labor that required more exertion than was necessary? He means to say that Strides exerted himself no further than was necessary—that’s all.

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At page 59, vol. I., we find this sentence— ‘He was advancing by the only road that was ever travelled by the stranger as he approached the Hut; or, he came up the valley.’ This is merely a vagueness of speech. ‘Or’ is intended to imply ‘that is to say.’ The whole would be clearer thus— ‘He was advancing by the valley—the only road travelled by a stranger approaching the Hut.’ We have here sixteen words, instead of Mr. Cooper’s twenty-five. At page 8, vol. II., is an unpardonable awkwardness, although an awkwardness strictly grammatical. ‘I was a favorite, I believe, with, certainly was much petted by, both.’ Upon this we need make no further observation. It speaks for itself. We are aware, however, that there is a certain air of unfairness, in thus quoting detached passages, for animadversion of this kind; for, however strictly at random our quotations may really be, we have, of course, no means of proving the fact to our readers; and there are no authors, from whose works individual inaccurate sentences may not be culled. But we mean to say that Mr. Cooper, no doubt through haste or neglect, is remarkably and especially inaccurate, as a general rule; and, by way of demonstrating this assertion, we will dismiss our extracts at random, and discuss some entire page of his composition. More than this: we will endeavor to select that particular page upon which it might naturally be supposed he would bestow the most careful attention. The reader will say at once— ‘Let this be his first page—the first page of his Preface.’ This page, then, shall be taken of course. The history of the border is filled with legends of the sufferings of isolated families, during the troubled scenes of colonial warfare. Those which we now offer to the reader, are distinctive in many of their leading facts, if not rigidly true in the details. The first alone is necessary to the legitimate objects of fiction. ‘Abounds with legends,’ would be better than ‘is filled with legends;’ for it is clear that the history were filled with legends, it would be all legend and no history. The word ‘of,’ too, occurs, in the first sentence, with an unpleasant frequency. The ‘those’ commencing the second sentence, grammatically refers to the noun ‘scenes’, immediately preceding, but is intended for ‘legends’. The adjective ‘distinctive’ is vaguely and altogether improperly employed. Mr. C. we believe means to say, merely, that although the details of his legends may not be strictly true, facts similar to his leading ones have actually occurred. By use of the word ‘distinctive’, however, he has contrived to convey a meaning nearly converse. In saying that his legend is ‘distinctive’ in many of the leading facts, he has said what he, clearly, did not wish to say—viz.: that his legend contained facts which distinguished it from all other legends—in other words, facts never before discussed in other legends, and belonging peculiarly to his own. That Mr. C. did mean what we suppose, is rendered evident by the third sentence— ‘The first alone is necessary to the legitimate objects of fiction.’ This third sentence itself, however, is very badly constructed. ‘The first’ can refer, grammatically, only to ‘facts’; but no such reference is intended. If we ask the question— what is meant by ‘the first?’ —what ‘alone is necessary to the legitimate objects of fiction?’ —the natural reply is ‘that facts similar to the leading

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ones have actually happened.’ The circumstance is alone to be cared for—this consideration ‘alone is necessary to the legitimate objects of fiction.’ ‘One of the misfortunes of a nation is to hear nothing besides its own praises.’ This is the fourth sentence, and is by no means lucid. The design is to say that individuals composing a nation, and living altogether within the national bounds, hear from each other only praises of the nation, and that this is a misfortune to the individuals, since it misleads them in regard to the actual condition of the nation. Here it will be seen that, to convey the intended idea, we have been forced to make distinction between the nation and its individual members; for it is evident that a nation is considered as such only in reference to other nations; and thus as a nation, it hears very much ‘besides its own praises’; that is to say, it hears the detractions of other rival nations. In endeavoring to compel his meaning within the compass of a brief sentence, Mr. Cooper has completely sacrificed its intelligibility. The fifth sentence runs thus:— ‘Although the American Revolution was probably as just an effort as was ever made by a people to resist the first inroads of oppression, the cause had its evil aspects, as well as all other human struggles.’ The American Revolution is here improperly called an ‘effort’. The effort was the cause, of which the Revolution was the result. A rebellion is an ‘effort’ to effect a revolution. An ‘inroad of oppression’ involves an untrue metaphor; for ‘inroad’ appertains to aggression, to attack, toactive assault. ‘The cause had its evil aspects as well as all other human struggles,’ implies that the cause had not only its evil aspects, but had, also, all other human struggles. If the words must be retained at all, they should be thus arranged— ‘The cause like [or as well as] all other human struggles, had its evil aspects;’ or better thus— ‘The cause had its evil aspect, as have all human struggles.’ ‘Other’ is superfluous. The sixth sentence is thus written:— ‘We have been so much accustomed to hear everything extolled, of late years, that could be dragged into the remotest connexion with that great event, and the principles which led to it, that there is danger of overlooking truth in a pseudo patriotism.’ The ‘of late years,’ here, should follow the ‘accustomed’, or precede the ‘We have been’; and the Greek ‘pseudo’ is objectionable, since its exact equivalent is to be found in the English ‘false’. ‘Spurious’ would have been better, perhaps, than either. Inadvertences such as these sadly disfigure the style of The Hutted Knoll; and every true friend of its author must regret his inattention to the minor morals of the Muse. But these ‘minor morals,’ it may be said, are trifles at best. Perhaps so. At all events, we should never have thought of dwelling so pertinaciously upon the unessential demerits of Wyandotté, could we have discovered any more momentous upon which to comment.

37. William Gilmore Simms on Cooper 1842

Extracts from Simms’s essay, ‘The Writings of Cooper’, first published in Magnolia, n.s. i (1842), 129–39 and later incorporated into Views and Reviews in American Literature (1845). Reprinted from Views and Reviews in American Literature, ed. C.Hugh Holman (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 258–92. A writer of historical romances concerning South Carolina, Simms (1806– 70) was a talented disciple of Scott and Cooper. We are among those who regard Mr. Cooper as a wronged and persecuted man. We conceive that his countrymen have done him gross injustice—that they have not only shown themselves ungenerous but ungrateful, and that, in lending a greedy ear to the numerous malicious aspersions which have assailed his person and his reputation, they have only given confirmation and strength to the proverbial reproach, of irreverence and ingratitude, to which countries, distinguished by popular governments, have usually been thought obnoxious. We do not mean to regard him as wholly faultless—on the contrary, we look upon Mr. Cooper as a very imprudent person; one whose determined will, impetuous temperament, and great self-esteem, continually hurry forward into acts and expressions of error and impatience. We propose to compare sides in this question:—to put the case fairly between himself and countrymen, and show where the balance of justice lies…. The conception of the Spy, as a character, was a very noble one. A patriot in the humbl condition of life, —almost wholly motiveless unless for his country—enduring the persecutions of friends, the hate of enemies—the doomed by both parties to the gallows— enduring all in secret, without a murmur, —without a word, when a word might have saved him, —all for his country; and all, under the palsying conviction, not only that his country never could reward him, but that, in all probability, the secret of his patriotism must perish with him, andnothing survive but that obloquy under which he was still content to live and labour. It does not lessen the value of such a novel, nor the ideal truth of such a conception, that such a character is not often to be found. It is sufficiently true if it wins our sympathies and commands our respect. This is always the purpose of the ideal, which, if it can effect such results, becomes at once a model and a reality. The character of the ‘Spy’

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was not the only good one of the book. Lawton and Sitgreaves were both good conceptions, though rather exaggerated ones. Lawton was a somewhat too burly Virginian; and his appetite was too strong an ingredient in his chivalry. But, as his origin was British, this may have been due to the truthfulness of portraiture. The defect of the story was rather in its action than its characters. This is the usual and grand defect in all Mr. Cooper’s stories. In truth, there is very little story. He seems to exercise none of his genius in the invention of his fable. There is none of that careful grouping of means to ends, and all, to the one end of the dénouëment, which so remarkably distinguished the genius of Scott, and made all the parts of his story fit as compactly as the work of the joiner, —but he seems to hurry forward in the delineation of scene after scene, as if wholly indifferent to the catastrophe. The consequence is that his catastrophe is usually forced and unsatisfactory. He is, for this reason, compelled frequently, at the close, to begin the work of invention; —to bring out some latent matter, —to make unlocked for discoveries, and prove his hero, be he hunter or pirate, to have been the son of somebody of unexpected importance; —a discovery which, it is fancied, will secure him a greater degree of the reader’s favour, than he could have before commanded. Mr. Cooper seems to rely wholly on the spirit and success of certain scenes. It is, perhaps, the great fault of Mr. Cooper, that, conceiving some few scenes, or even a single one, with great beauty and boldness, he discards from his mind all serious concern for the rest—for all those by which they are introduced and finished. These scenes, in consequence, rise up abruptly—and so far imposingly—like an isolated mountain wall from the dead level of a plain. We are astonished when we see them, —we wonder and admire, —but our feet have grown weary in the search for them, —we have had a long journey, —and the querulous will be apt to ask, as now they do— ‘fine sight, indeed, very lofty and imposing, but, was it worth while to come so far in search of it?’ An equal care in the invention of the fable, at the beginning, would obviate this question. Our colonial relation to Great Britain had filled us with a feeling ofintellectual dependence, of which our success in shaking off her political dominion had in no respect relieved us. We had not then, and, indeed, have not entirely to this day, arrived at any just idea of the inevitable connexion between an ability to maintain ourselves in arts as well as in arms—the ability in both cases arising only from our intellectual resources, and a manly reliance upon the just origin of national strength, —Self-dependence! To Mr. Cooper the merit is due, of having first awakened us to this self-reference, —to this consciousness of mental resources, of which our provincialism dealt, not only in constant doubts, but in constant denials. The first step is half the march, as in ordinary cases, the first blow is half the battle. With what rapidity after that did the American press operate. How many new writers rose up suddenly, the moment that their neighbours had made the discovery that there were such writers—that such writers should be. Every form of fiction, the legend, tale, novel and romance—the poem, narrative and dramatic—were poured out with a prolific abundance, which proved the possession, not only of large resources of thought, but of fancy, and of an imagination equal to every department of creative fiction. It will not matter to show that a great deal of this was crude, faulty, undigested —contracted and narrow in design, and spasmodic in execution. The demand of the country called for no more. The wonder was that, so suddenly, and at such short

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notice, such resources could be found as had not before been imagined. The sudden rise and progress of German literature seems to have been equally surprising and sudden— equally the result of a national impulse, newly moved in a novel and unexpected direction. The wonderful birth and progress of American letters in the last twenty years— and in every department of thought, art and science, so far from discouraging, because of its imperfections, holds forth the most signal encouragement to industry and hope— showing most clearly, that the deficiency was not in the resource but in the demand, not in the inferior quality, or limited quantity, but in the utter indifference of our people to the possession of the material. Having struck the vein, and convinced the people not only that there was gold in the land, but that the gold of the land was good, Mr. Cooper proceeded with proper industry to supply the demand which his own genius had occasioned in the markets, as well of Europe as his own country, for his productions. The Spy was followed by Lionel Lincoln, the Pioneers, the Last of the Mohicans, the Pilot, Red Rover, Prairie, Water Witch, &c. We speak from memory—we are not so sure that we name these writings in their proper order, nor is this important to us in the plan of this paper, which does not contemplate their examination in detail. All these works were more or less interesting. In most of them, the improvement in style, continuity of narrative, propriety of incident, &c., was obvious. In all of them were obvious, in greater or less degree, the characteristics of the author. The plots were generally simple, not always coherent, and proving either an incapacity for, or an indifference to the exercise of much invention. The reader was led through long and dead levels of dialogue—sensible enough, —sometimes smart, sarcastic or playful, — occasionally marked by depth or originality of thought, and occasionally exhibiting resources of study and reflection in the departments of law and morals, which are not common to the ordinary novel writer. But these things kept us from the story, —to which they were sometimes foreign, and always in some degree, unnecessary. His characters were not often felicitous, and, as in the case of most writers, Mr. Cooper had hobbies on which he rode too often, to the great disquiet of his friends and companions. He rang the changes on words, as Scott once suffered himself to do, in the ‘Prodigious’ of Dominie Sampson, until readers sickened of the stupidity; and occasionally, as in the case of David Gamut, mistaking his own powers of the humorous, he afflicted us with the dispensation of a bore, which qualified seriously the really meritorious in his performance. But, to compensate us for these trials of our tastes and tempers, he gave us the most exquisite scenes of minute artifice, as in his Indian stories, —in which the events were elaborated with a nicety and patience, reminding us of the spider at his web, that curious and complicated spinner, which may well be employed to illustrate by his own labours and ingenuity the subtle frame-work of Indian cunning—the labyrinth of his artifice, —his wily traps and pitfalls, and indomitable perseverance. In these details of Indian art and resource, Mr. Cooper was inimitable. In his pursuits, flights, captures, —in his encounters, —cunning opposed to cunning, —man to man—the trapper and the hunter, against the red man whose life he envies and emulates, —Mr. Cooper has no superior as he has had no master. His conception of the frontier white man, if less true than picturesque, is also not less happy as an artistical conception of great originality and effect. In him, the author embodied his ideal of the philosopher of the foremast—

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Hawkeye is a sailor in a hunting shirt—and in this respect he committed no error in propriety. The sailor and the forester both derive their philosophies and character from the same sources, —though the one disdains the land, and the other trembles at the sight of the sea.They both think and feel, with a highly individual nature, that has been taught, by constant contemplation, in scenes of solitude. The vast unbroken ranges of forest, to its one lonely occupant, press upon the mind with the same sort of solemnity which one feels condemned to a life of partial isolation upon the ocean. Both are permitted that degree of commerce with their fellow beings, which suffice to maintain in strength the sweet and sacred sources of their humanity. It is through these that they are commended to our sympathies, and it is through the same medium that they acquire that habit of moral musing and meditation which expresses itself finely in the most delightful of all human philosophies. The very isolation to which, in the most successful of his stories, Mr. Cooper subjects his favourite personages, is, alone, a proof of his strength and genius. While the ordinary writer, the man of mere talent, is compelled to look around him among masses for his material, he contents himself with one man, and flings him upon the wilderness. The picture then, which follows, must be one of intense individuality. Out of this one man’s nature, his moods and fortunes, he spins his story. The agencies and dependences are few. With the self-reliance which is only found in true genius, he goes forward into the wilderness, whether of land or ocean; and the vicissitudes of either region, acting upon the natural resources of one man’s mind, furnish the whole material of his work-shop. This mode of performance is highly dramatic, and thus it is that his scout, his trapper, his hunter, his pilot, all live to our eyes and thoughts, the perfect ideals of moral individuality. For this we admire them—love them we do not—they are objects not made to love— they do not appeal to our affections so much as to our minds. We admire their progress through sea and forest—their strange ingenuity, the skill with which they provide against human and savage enemies, against cold and hunger, with the same sort of admiration which we feel at watching any novel progress in arts or arms—a noble ship darting like a bird over the deep, unshivering, though the storm threatens to shiver everything else around it—a splendid piece of machinery which works to the most consummate ends by a modus operandi, which we yet fail to detect—any curious and complex invention which dazzles our eyes, confounds our judgment, and mocks the search which would discover its secret principles. Take, for example, the character of the ‘Pilot,’ in the rapid and exciting story of that name. Here is a remarkable instance of the sort of interest which Mr. Cooper’s writings are chiefly calculated to inspire. Marble could not be more inflexible than this cold, immovable, pulseless personage. He says nothing, shows nothing,promises nothing. Yet we are interested in his very first appearance. Why and how? Naturally enough by the anxiety with which he is sought and looked for; —by the fact that he promises nothing, yet goes to work, without a word, in a manner that promises every thing. We feel, at a glance, that if any mortal man can save the ship, he is the man. Why is this? Simply because he goes to work, without a word, as if it was in him to do so; —as if a calm consciousness of power was his possession; as if he knew just where to lay his hands, and in what direction to expend his strength. He shows the capacity for work, and this constitutes the sort of manhood upon which all men rely in moments of doubt or danger. Yet he gives you no process of reasoning—he has no word

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save that which commands obedience, —he neither storms, implores, nor threatens—he has no books, —he deals in no declamation. He is the ideal of an abstract but innate power, which we acknowledge and perhaps fear, but cannot fathom. All is hidden within himself, and, except when at work, he is nothing—he might as well be stone. Yet, around him, —such a man—a wonderful interest gathers like a halo— bright and inscrutable, — which fills us with equal curiosity and reverence. With him, a man of whom we know nothing, —whom we see now for the first time, —whom we may never see again, — whom we cannot love—whom we should never seek; and with his ship, — timbers, tackle, ropes, spars and cordage, —a frail fabric, such as goes to and fro along our shores, in our daily sight, without awakening a single thought or feeling; —with ship and man we grow fascinated beyond all measure of ordinary attraction. In his hands the ship becomes a being, instinct with life, beauty, sentiment—in danger, and to be saved; —and our interest in her fate, grows from our anxiety to behold the issue, in which human skill, courage and ingenuity, are to contend with storm and sea, rocks and tempest—as it were, man against omnipotence. Our interest springs from our curiosity rather than from our affections. We do not care a straw for the inmates of the vessel. They are very ordinary persons, that one man excepted—and he will not suffer us to love him. But manhood, true manhood, is a sight, always, of wondrous beauty and magnificence. The courage that looks steadily on the danger, however terrible; the composure that never swerves from its centre under the pressure of unexpected misfortune; — the knowledge that can properly apply its strength, and the adroitness and energy, which, feeling the force of a manly will, flies to their task, in instant and hearty obedience; —these form a picture of singular beauty, and must always rivet the admiration of the spectator. Weregard Mr. Cooper’s ‘Pilot’ —breasting the storm, tried by, and finally baffling all its powers, as the Prometheus in action—inflexible, ready to endure, —isolated, but still human in a fond loyalty to all the great hopes and interests of humanity. Hawkeye, the land sailor of Mr. Cooper, is, with certain suitable modifications, the same personage. We see and admire, in him, the qualities of hardihood and endurance, coolness, readiness of resource, keen, clear sighted observation, just reflection, and a sincere, direct, honest heart. He is more human than the other, since, naturally of gentler temperament, the life-conflict has not left upon his mind so many traces of its volcanic fires. He has had more patience, been more easily persuaded; has endured with less struggle if not more fortitude, and, in his greater pliancy, has escaped the greater force of the tempest. But he is, in all substantial respects, the same personage, and inspires us with like feelings. In the hour of danger, —at midnight, —in the green camp of the hunter, — trembling women, timid men, and weeping children, grouped together in doubt, —all eyes turn to him, as, on the sea, in storm, all eyes address themselves to the ‘Pilot’. If any one can save them he is the man. Meanwhile, the shouts of savages are heard on every side, —the fearful whoop of slaughter; —as, on the sea, the wind howls through the ship’s cordage, and the storm shrieks a requiem, in anticipation of ultimate triumph, around the shivering inmates. It is only upon true manhood that man can rely, and these are genuine men —not blocks, not feathers—neither dull, nor light of brain, —neither the stubbornly stupid, nor the frothily shallow. Now, as nothing in nature is more noble than a noble-minded, whole-souled man, — however ignorant, however poor, however

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deficient in imposing costume or imposing person, —so nothing, in nature, is better calculated to win the homage and command the obedience of men, than the presence of such a person in their moments of doubt and danger. It is inevitable, most usually, that such a man will save them, if they are to be saved by human agency. To Mr. Cooper we owe several specimens of this sort of moral manhood. It does not qualify our obligation to him, that they have their little defects, —that he has sometimes failed to hit the true line that divides the simplicity of nature, from the puerility of ignorance or childhood. His pictures are as perfect, of their kind, as the artist of fiction has ever given us. We say this after due reflection. The Sea and American Forest Tales of Mr. Cooper, were at length superseded, when this gentleman visited Europe, by others of a very different class. Travelling on the continent, with objects of interest andnovelty continually before his eyes, it was very natural that he should desire to try his hand at objects of foreign mould and material. The institutions of Europe, where they differed from our own, were also subjects provoking curiosity and calling for examination. These might be discussed in story; —the old traditions and institutions of a country naturally go together, either in connexion or contrast; —and the genius of our countryman conceived the novel idea of so framing his narrative, as to make it illustrate the radical differences, in operation and effect, of the policy of the new world, in opposition to that of the old. There was yet another reason for this change of scene and material. Mr. Cooper entertained a notion, expressed in some one or more of his prefaces, that the literary material of his own country was too limited and too deficient in variety, to admit of frequent employment. He thought it too easily exhausted, and though he did not say so, it was very evident, at that time, that he thought he himself had already exhausted it. We need scarcely say that we think all this a very great error. In Mr. Cooper’s hands, no doubt, there would be a want of variety; not because of any deficiency in the material, but, simply, because the mind of Mr. Cooper is limited in its grasp. It is too individual in its aims and agencies, —does not often vary, but rather multiplies the same forms, characters, images and objects, through different media —now enlarging and now depressing them—now throwing them into greater shadow, and now bringing them out into stronger light—seldom entirely discarding them for others, and we should think not easily capable of doing so. His characters are uniformly the same, his incidents are seldom varied; —the whole change which he effects in his story, consists in new combinations of the same circumstances, heightened, now and then, by auxiliary events, which are seldom of much additional importance. In Indian life and sailor life, he was almost uniformly successful—for the simple reason, that such stories called simply for the display of individual character. They enabled him to devote his genius, as would be always the desire of his mind, to a single object. He took a single captive, after the manner of Sterne, and drew from him, whether in success or suffering, the whole interest of his story. Whenever it became necessary to deal with groups, as in Lionel Lincoln, he failed. To manage the progress of one leading personage, and to concentrate in his portraiture his whole powers, has been the invariable secret of Mr. Cooper’s success. We very soon lose all interest in his subordinates. Take away from his stories one or two of the personages, and the rest are the merest puppets. The Spy contained thebest specimens of his grouping, but a large portion of it depended entirely on Harvey Birch,

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and, to so great a degree was this disparity carried, in the use of his dramatis persons, that, in some of the scenes between the Spy and Henry Wharton, the latter almost sinks into contempt, in consequence of his strange feebleness or deficiencies of character. Mr. Cooper possesses some of the mental and physical characteristics of Lord Byron, in similar degree. He is equally a person of strong will, great impetuosity of character, and intense self-esteem. Such persons inevitably concentrate themselves upon a few objects of interest; and to these they devote themselves with a gush of enthusiasm, which, to minds of less one-sidedness, is either amusing or astonishing. So in their social characteristics, —so in their loves and hates, —the one object of regard, for the time being, driving out of sight every other. This is caused by a peculiar organization. It is the preponderance of blood, which, not preventing or baffling the mind, yet impels its exercise in one direction, and confers upon it a marvellous strength in doing so. Such writers—and Milton partook of this —and hence his tragedy of Paradise Lost became a poem—and hence his dramas are all monologues—such writers throw their whole souls into one or more characters, and make all the rest subordinate. Such was particularly the case with Lord Byron. His Harold and Giaour, and Lara, and Manfred, and Selim, are all, in greater or less degree, modifications of the same character. His Sardanapalus and Juan, are the same persons also, though in a rather better humour, possibly, from the better digestion of the author at the time of writing. It would not be difficult to trace Mr. Cooper’s one ideal through all his novels. Even in the Bravo, one of his European works, we find the Pilot and Natty Bumppo, where we should least look for them, in the person of Jacopo, the assassin of Venice. His Mr. Editor Dodge, making some small allowances for the usual exaggerations of satire, was a very just portrait. There are many such scattered broad-cast over our country —living on its vices—its gross appetites, its base passions, and numerous irregularities; and pandering to tastes and desires, which are equally shocking to manhood and morality. The prying presumption of this person; his utter want of principle; his arrogance at one moment, and sycophancy at another; his blind allegiance to majorities; and the ignorance which keeps equal pace with, and affords at all times the happiest commentary on, his pretension, —all these characteristics were well hit off, and happily illustrated, in the example selected by Mr. Cooper. This character, as acharacter, has been loudly denied vraisemblance by all those who must have felt its truth. It is an exaggeration, certainly, but in all substantial respects it is true. The exaggerations were only such as were necessary to raise the relief, and bring out the person into that pillory sort of prominence which was desirable for the purposes of satire. The patriotism of Mr. Cooper has always been a striking trait in his character and writings. It is conspicuous in all his performances. How fondly he dwells, even in his foreign books, while discussing their institutions, on the superiority of our own. How ready he is to do battle in their behalf. This very readiness was one of the first occasions of offence which he gave to those cold-blooded Americans, who were content to truckle abroad for their porridge, silent when their nation was openly scorned, and snatching their miserable pittance of bread and society from the very hands that were lifted in reprobation of their country. As we have already said, the Americanism of Mr. Cooper would move us to forgive him all his faults, were they twice as many. That he should

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come home to censure ours, was equally the proof, though an unwise one, of his honest and fearless patriotism.

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38. Thackeray on Cooper (1846, 1847)

Thackeray (1811–63) enjoyed the Leatherstocking novels and doubtless shared the popular view that Cooper badly mistook both the nature of his own genius and the nature of fiction when, as in The Redskins, he used fiction as a vehicle for direct social and political commentary. To Thackeray’s shrewd satiric eye, Cooper’s passionate Americanism must have been an irresistible target. See Introduction, pp. 38–9. (a) Extract from a review of The Redskins in the London Morning Chronicle for 27 August 1846, 6. The social position of Brother Jonathan does not appear to be just as comfortable as his best friends could wish. His fusion, not only with the denizens of the Old World, but with his fellow-citizens in the New, is but in progress, and much boiling and bubbling, and rubbing and roughing, must take place before it is complete. Abroad, we all know how uncomfortable an American is. His writings abound with complaints of slights and of illusage received at the hands of an antiquated, ignorant, and purse-proud aristocracy. Returned home, spoiled with the contaminating influence of European prejudices— prejudices in favour of the rights of property, the claims of respectability, and the natural influences resulting from both—he has to suffer still deeper indignities from a tyrant democracy. Mr. Fenimore Cooper has afforded us an able exposition of both these unhappy positions in the works which he has put before the public. A few years ago, after visiting this country, he published a memoir of his travels, in which he showed how gracefully he could receive attentions and enjoy the hospitality of English noblemen and gentlemen— attentions offered as a tribute due to talents which had been already generally acknowledged by the public at large. Here was the deference paid by the aristocracy of title and wealth to the aristocracy of genius. It was, at least, in this spirit that the fêting and feasting of Cooper took place, for although we may just have some misgivings as to this gentleman’s claim either to aristocracy or genius in a catholic peerage of either—still,

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as he was undoubtedly the one bright name in the literature of the land whence he came, he may be accepted as its representative of the aristocracy of genius. How gracefully the aristocracy of genius accepted the attentions of the genius of aristocracy, and how graciously he requited them, is known to all who read Mr. Fenimore Cooper’s three volumes, entitled England, published some nine years ago. How he received every little act of hospitality as a simple right—how he construed every mark of politeness into an effort of servile homage—how he denounced every little symptom of neglect or indifference as a positive lèse majesté—how he grinned, and gratulated himself and his readers when an earl knocked at his door, or a lady of title offered him Dutch herrings after dinner— and how he growled because an old nobleman was suffered to hobble up-stairs before him, and because, on another occasion, through his own stupidity, he happened to walk down last to dinner; in short, how ill his uncivilized nature assimilated with the general tenor of civilized life, and how little he understood the real spirit of equality and independence which regulates the association of gentlemen in the worn-out old world, are matters all fully set forth in the pages of the three notable little volumes referred to. Mr. Cooper quitted England a thorough-going equality-man, and a hater and despiser of everything connected with the land in which he had experienced so much misapplied hospitality. All this at least in his own conceit; for, alas for poor weak human nature! how little are we aware of the encroachment of evil influences upon us. Can we touch pitch and not be defiled? And was it possible that a man of the fine proud spirit of Mr. Cooper could see so much of the effect of pride and ostentation without imbibing some little taste for it? Besides, there were family circumstances to favour such a weakness. Mr. Cooper may holdin supreme contempt the prescriptive honours of such English houses as Howard and Percy, but he must hold in proud distinction ‘the old house’ of Littlepage, which he tells us was founded in 1785. We may observe, before proceeding further, that we assume the author himself to be identified with the person of his hero, Littlepage, who speaks throughout in the first person; and so assuming, we must say that a finer specimen of a Brummagem aristocrat never came under our notice. How grand is his burst of patriarchal enthusiasm as he contemplates the land of his forefathers, land which has been in the family of the Littlepages for nearly three-score years! What strange vicissitudes occur in the history of our race! A premium upon landowners in democratic America, just at the very time the country-gentleman party have been turned to the right about in aristocratic England! We will not allow ourselves to be tempted to dwell upon this theme suggestive of so many speculations for the future. Doubtless there are the elements of social change at work in the vast continent of America, which will pass through many phases before her domestic economy can be said to be consolidated. These changes will not be accomplished without much of trouble and struggling—the struggle of two abstract principles, both very strongly rooted in the American mind, namely, the principles of equality on the one hand, and of right of property on the other, both principles being controlled, as virtually they now are, by a third principle—the right of the majority to control, coerce, and bind the minority by a simple resolution. Soured with the contemplation of these wrongs, Mr. Littlepage and his uncle (or rather Mr. Fenimore Cooper) turn about in search of all sorts of abuses, and denounce pretty

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freely nearly every political institution and executive function of the land of which they are so proud. Basil Hall, Trollope, Dickens, and other European libellers never spoke more strongly or more unceremoniously on these points. We think there may be a good deal of truth in those observations, and, coming so mildly from whence they do, will doubtless be received in a kindly spirit. With regard to the book generally, we must observe that, although printed in the usual fashionable novel form, it is the least lively affair of the kind we have ever met with. Indeed, we do not see how it could be otherwise, the incidents being few and commonplace, and the dialogue all turning upon political and social questions. (b) ‘The Stars and Stripes’, one of a series of burlesques on popular contemporary novelists which Thackeray wrote for Punch. This one appeared on 9 October 1847. Reproduced from The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (London, 1911), Vol. VIII, 93–102.

THE STARS AND STRIPES BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘THE LAST OF THE MULLIGANS’, ‘PILOT’, ETC.

I The King of France was walking on the terrace of Versailles; the fairest, not only of Queens, but of women, hung fondly on the Royal arm; while the children of France were indulging in their infantile hilarity in the alleys of the magnificent garden of Le Nôtre (from which Niblo’s garden has been copied, in our own Empire city of New York), and playing at leap-frog with their uncle, the Count of Provence; gaudy courtiers, emblazoned with orders, glittered in the groves, and murmured frivolous talk in the ears of high-bred beauty. ‘Marie, my beloved,’ said the ruler of France, taking out his watch, ‘’tis time that the Minister of America should be here.’ ‘Your Majesty should know the time,’ replied Marie Antoinette, archly, and in an Austrian accent; ‘is not my Royal Louis the first watchmaker in his empire?’ The King cast a pleased glance at his repeater, and kissed with courtly grace the fair hand of her who had made him the compliment. ‘My Lord Bishop of Autun,’ said he to Monsieur de Talleyrand Périgord, who followed the Royal pair, in his quality of Archchamberlain of the Empire, ‘I pray you look through the gardens, and tell his Excellency Doctor Franklin that the King waits.’ The Bishop ran off, with more than youthful agility, to seek the United States Minister. ‘These Republicans,’ he added, confidentially, and with something of a supercilious look, ‘are but rude courtiers, methinks.’ ‘Nay,’ interposed the lovely Antoinette, ‘rude courtiers, Sire, they may be; but the world boasts not of more accomplished gentlemen. Ihave seen no grandee of Versailles

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that has the noble bearing of this American Envoy and his suite. They have the refinement of the Old World, with all the simple elegance of the New. Though they have perfect dignity of manner, they have engaging modesty which I have never seen equalled by the best of the proud English nobles with whom they wage war. I am told they speak their very language with a grace which the haughty Islanders who oppress them never attained. They are independent, yet never insolent; elegant, yet always respectful; and brave, but not in the least boastful.’ ‘What! savages and all, Marie?’ exclaimed Louis, laughing, and chucking the lovely Queen playfully under the Royal chin. ‘But here comes Doctor Franklin, and your friend the Cacique with him.’ In fact, as the monarch spoke, the Minister of the United States made his appearance, followed by a gigantic warrior in the garb of his native woods. Knowing his place as Minister of a sovereign State (yielding even then in dignity to none, as it surpasses all now in dignity, in valour, in honesty, in strength, and civilisation), the Doctor nodded to the Queen of France, but kept his hat on as he faced the French monarch, and did not cease whittling the cane he carried in his hand. ‘I was waiting for you, sir,’ the King said, peevishly, in spite of the alarmed pressure which the Queen gave his Royal arm. ‘The business of the Republic, Sire, must take precedence even of your Majesty’s wishes,’ replied Doctor Franklin. ‘When I was a poor printer’s boy and ran errands, no lad could be more punctual than poor Ben Franklin; but all other things must yield to the service of the United States of North America. I have done. What would you, Sire?’ and the intrepid republican eyed the monarch with a serene and easy dignity, which made the descendant of St. Louis feel ill at ease. ‘I wished to—to say farewell to Tatua before his departure,’ said Louis XVI., looking rather awkward. ‘Approach, Tatua.’ And the gigantic Indian strode up, and stood undaunted before the first magistrate of the French nation: again the feeble monarch quailed before the terrible simplicity of the glance of the denizen of the primæval forests. The redoubted chief of the Nose-ring Indians was decorated in his war-paint, and in his top-knot was a peacock’s feather, which had been given him out of the head-dress of the beautiful Princess of Lamballe. His nose, from which hung the ornament from which his ferocious tribe took its designation, was painted a light-blue, a circle of green and orange was drawn round each eye, while serpentine stripes of black,white, and vermilion alternately were smeared on his forehead, and descended over his cheek-bones to his chin. His manly chest was similarly tattooed and painted, and round his brawny neck and arms hung innumerable bracelets and necklaces of human teeth, extracted (one only from each skull) from the jaws of those who had fallen by the terrible tomahawk at his girdle. His moccasins, and his blanket, which was draped on his arm and fell in picturesque folds to his feet, were fringed with tufts of hair—the black, the grey, the auburn, the golden ringlet of beauty, the red lock from the forehead of the Scottish or the Northern soldier, the snowy tress of extreme old age, the flaxen down of infancy—all were there, dreadful reminiscences of the Chief’s triumphs in war. The warrior leaned on his enormous rifle, and faced the King.

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‘And it was with that carabine that you shot Wolfe in ’57?’ said Louis, eyeing the warrior and his weapon. ‘’Tis a clumsy lock, and methinks I could mend it,’ he added mentally. ‘The Chief of the French pale-faces speaks truth,’ Tatua said. ‘Tatua was a boy when he went first on the war-path with Montcalm.’ ‘And shot a Wolfe at the first fire!’ said the King. ‘The English are braves, though their faces are white,’ replied the Indian. ‘Tatua shot the raging Wolfe of the English; but the other wolves caused the foxes to go to earth.’ A smile played round Doctor Franklin’s lips, as he whittled his cane with more vigour than ever. ‘I believe, your Excellency, Tatua has done good service elsewhere than at Quebec,’ the King said, appealing to the American Envoy: ‘at Bunker’s Hill, at Brandywine, at York Island? Now that Lafayette and my brave Frenchmen are among you, your Excellency need have no fear but that the war will finish quickly—yes, yes, it will finish quickly. They will teach you discipline, and the way to conquer.’ ‘King Louis of France,’ said the Envoy, clapping his hat down over his head and putting his arms akimbo, ‘we have learned that from the British to whom we are superior in everything: and I’d have your Majesty to know that in the art of whipping the world we have no need of any French lessons. If your reglars jine General Washington, ’tis to larn from him how Britishers are licked; for I’m blest if yu know the way yet.’ Tatua said ‘Ugh,’ and gave a rattle with the butt of his carabine, which made the timid monarch start; the eyes of the lovely Antoinette flashed fire, but it played round the head of the dauntless American Envoy harmless as the lightning which he knew how to conjure away. The King fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a Cross of the Order of the Bath. ‘Your Excellency wears no honour,’ the monarch said; ‘but Tatua, who is not a subject, only an ally, of the United States, may. Noble Tatua, I appoint you Knight Companion of my noble Order of the Bath. Wear this cross upon your breast in memory of Louis of France;’ and the King held out the decoration to the Chief. Up to that moment the Chief’s countenance had been impassable. No look either of admiration or dislike had appeared upon that grim and war-painted visage. But now, as Louis spoke, Tatua’s face assumed a glance of ineffable scorn, as, bending his head, he took the bauble. ‘I will give it to one of my squaws,’ he said. ‘The papooses in my lodge will play with it. Come, Médicine, Tatua will go and drink fire-water;’ and, shouldering his carabine, he turned his broad back without ceremony upon the monarch and his train, and disappeared down one of the walks of the garden. Franklin found him when his own interview with the French Chief Magistrate was over; being attracted to the spot where the Chief was by the crack of his well-known rifle. He was laughing in his quiet way. He had shot the Colonel of the Swiss Guards through his cockade. Three days afterwards, as the gallant frigate, the ‘Repudiator’, was sailing out of Brest Harbour, the gigantic form of an Indian might be seen standing on the binnacle in

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conversation with Commodore Bowie, the commander of the noble ship. It was Tatua, the Chief of the Nose-rings. II Leatherlegs and Tom Coxswain did not accompany Tatua when he went to the Parisian metropolis on a visit to the father of the French pale-faces. Neither the Legs nor the Sailor cared for the gaiety and the crowd of cities; the stout mariner’s home was in the puttockshrouds of the old ‘Repudiator.’ The stern and simple trapper loved the sound of the waters better than the jargon of the French of the old country. ‘I can follow the talk of a Pawnee,’ he said, ‘or wag my jaw, if so be necessity bids me to speak, by a Sioux’s council-fire; and I can patter Canadian French with the hunters who come for peltries to Nachitoches or Thichimuchimachy; but from the tongue of a Frenchwoman, with white flour on her head, and war-paint on her face, the Lord deliver poor Natty Pumpo.’ ‘Amen and amen!’ said Tom Coxswain. ‘There was a woman in our aft-scuppers when I went a-whalin in the little “Grampus” —and Lordlove you, Pumpo, you poor landswab, she was as pretty a craft as ever dowsed a tarpauling—there was a woman on board the “Grampus,” who before we’d struck our first fish, or biled our first blubber, set the whole crew in a mutiny. I mind me of her now, Natty—her eye was sich a piercer that you could see to steer by it in a Newfoundland fog; her nose stood out like the “Grampus’s” jibboom, and her woice, Lord love you, her woice sings in my ears even now; —it set the Captain a-quarrelin with the Mate, who was hanged in Boston Harbour for harpoonin of his officer in Baffin’s Bay; —it set me and Bob Bunting a-pouring broadsides into each other’s old timbers, whereas me and Bob was worth all the women that ever shipped a hawser. It cost me three years’ pay as I’d stowed away for the old mother, and might have cost me ever so much more, only bad luck to me, she went and married a little tailor out of Nantucket; and I’ve hated women and tailors ever since!’ As he spoke, the hardy tar dashed a drop of brine from his tawny cheek, and once more betook himself to splice the taffrail. Though the brave frigate lay off Havre-de-Grace, she was not idle. The gallant Bowie and his intrepid crew made repeated descents upon the enemy’s seaboard. The coasts of Rutland and merry Leicestershire have still many a legend of fear to tell; and the children of the British fishermen tremble even now when they speak of the terrible ‘Repudiator’. She was the first of the mighty American war-ships that have taught the domineering Briton to respect the valour of the Republic. The novelist ever and anon finds himself forced to adopt the sterner tone of the historian, when describing deeds connected with his country’s triumphs. It is well known that during the two months in which she lay off Havre, the ‘Repudiator’ had brought more prizes into that port than had ever before been seen in the astonished French waters. Her actions with the ‘Dettingen’ and the ‘Elector’ frigates form part of our country’s history; their defence—it may be said without prejudice to national vanity—was worthy of Britons and of the audacious foe they had to encounter; and it must be owned, that but for a happy fortune which presided on that day over the destinies of our country, the chance of the combat might have been in favour of the British vessels. It was not until the

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‘Elector’ blew up, at a quarter-past three P.M., by a lucky shot which fell into her caboose, and communicated with the powder-magazine, that Commodore Bowie was enabled to lay himself on board the ‘Dettingen’, which he carried sword in hand. Even when the American boarders had made their lodgment on the ‘Dettingen’s’ binnacle, it is possible that the battlewould still have gone against us. The British were still seven to one; their carronades, loaded with marline-spikes, swept the gun-deck, of which we had possession, and decimated our little force; when a rifle-ball from the shrouds of the ‘Repudiator’ shot Captain Mumford under the star of the Guelphic Order which he wore, and the Americans, with a shout, rushed up the companion to the quarter-deck, upon the astonished foe. Pike and cutlass did the rest of the bloody work. Rumford, the gigantic first-lieutenant of the ‘Dettingen’, was cut down by Commodore Bowie’s own sword, as they engaged hand to hand; and it was Tom Coxswain who tore down the British flag, after having slain the Englishman at the wheel. Peace be to the souls of the brave! The combat was honourable alike to the victor and the vanquished; and it never can be said that an American warrior depreciated a gallant foe. The bitterness of defeat was enough to the haughty islanders who had to suffer. The people of Herne Bay were lining the shore, near which the combat took place, and cruel must have been the pang to them when they saw the Stars and Stripes rise over the old flag of the Union, and the ‘Dettingen’ fall down the river in tow of the Republican frigate. Another action Bowie contemplated; the boldest and most daring perhaps ever imagined by seaman. It is this which has been so wrongly described by European annalists, and of which the British until now have maintained the most jealous secrecy. Portsmouth Harbour was badly defended. Our intelligence in that town and arsenal gave us precise knowledge of the disposition of the troops, the forts, and the ships there; and it was determined to strike a blow which should shake the British power in its centre. That a frigate of the size of the ‘Repudiator’ should enter the harbour unnoticed, or could escape its guns unscathed, passed the notions of even American temerity. But upon the memorable 26th of June, 1782, the ‘Repudiator’ sailed out of Havre Roads in a thick fog, under cover of which she entered and cast anchor in Bonchurch Bay, in the Isle of Wight. To surprise the Martello Tower and take the feeble garrison thereunder, was the work of Tom Coxswain and a few of his blue-jackets. The surprised garrison laid down their arms before him. It was midnight before the boats of the ship, commanded by Lieutenant Bunker, pulled off from Bonchurch with muffled oars, and in another hour were off the Common Hard of Portsmouth, having passed the challenges of the ‘Thetis’ and the ‘Amphion’ frigates, and the ‘Polyanthus’ brig. There had been on that day great feasting and merriment on board the Flag-ship lying in the harbour. A banquet had been given in honour of the birthday of one of the princes of the Royal line of the Guelphs— the reader knows the propensity of Britons when liquor is in plenty. All on board that Royal ship were more or less overcome. The Flag-ship was plunged in a death-like and drunken sleep. The very officer of the watch was intoxicated: he could not see the ‘Repudiator’s’ boats as they shot swiftly through the waters; nor had he time to challenge her seamen as they swarmed up the huge sides of the ship.

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At the next moment Tom Coxswain stood at the wheel of the ‘Royal George’ —the Briton who had guarded, a corpse at his feet. The hatches were down. The ship was in possession of the ‘Repudiator’s’ crew. They were busy in her rigging, bending her sails to carry her out of the harbour. The well-known heave of the men at the windlass woke up Kempenfelt in his state cabin. We know, or rather do not know, the result; for who can tell by whom the lower-deck ports of the brave ship were opened, and how the haughty prisoners below sunk the ship and its conquerors rather than yield her as a prize to the Republic! Only Tom Coxswain escaped of victors and vanquished. His tale was told to his Captain and to Congress, but Washington forbade its publication; and it was but lately that the faithful seaman told it to me, his grandson, on his hundred-and-fifteenth birthday.

39. James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics 1848

Lowell’s lines on Cooper are reprinted from the Ticknor and Fields edition of 1856, pp. 48–51. See Introduction, pp. 5, 35. James Russell Lowell (1819–91), author of the Bigelow Papers (1848, 1867), was born into a prominent Boston family, became Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, served as editor of Atlantic (1857–62) and the North American Review (1863–72), and thus became an arbiter of American literary taste. ‘Here’s Cooper, who’s written six volumes to show He’s as good as a lord: well, let’s grant that he’s so; If a person prefers that description of praise, Why, a coronet’s certainly cheaper than bays; But he need take no pains to convince us he’s not (As his enemies say) the American Scott. Choose any twelve men, and let C. read aloud That one of his novels of which he’s most proud, And I’d lay any bet that, without ever quitting Their box, they’d be all, to a man, for acquitting. He has drawn you one character, though, that is new, One wildflower he’s plucked that is wet with the dew Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince, He has done naught but copy it ill ever since; His Indians, with proper respect be it said, Are just Natty Bumpo daubed over with red, And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat, Rigged up in duck pants and a sou’-wester hat, (Though, once in a Coffin, a good chance was found To have slipt the old fellow away underground.) All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks, The dernier chemise of a man in a fix,

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(As a captain besieged, when his garrison’s small, Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o’er the wall;) And the women he draws from one model don’t vary, All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie. When a character’s wanted, he goes to the task As a cooper would do in composing a cask; He picks out the staves, of their qualities heedful, Just hoops them together as tight as is needful, And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he Has made at the most something wooden and empty. ‘Don’t suppose I would underrate Cooper’s abilities, If I thought you’d do that, I should feel very ill at ease; The men who have given to one character life And objective existence, are not very rife, You may number them all, both prose-writers and singers, Without overrunning the bounds of your fingers, And Natty won’t go to oblivion quicker Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar. ‘There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis; Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity, He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity. Now he may overcharge his American pictures, But you’ll grant there’s a good deal of truth in his strictures; And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak, Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower. ‘There are truths you Americans need to be told, And it never’ll refute them to swagger and scold; John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in choler At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar; But to scorn such i-dollar-try’s what very few do, And John goes to that church as often as you do. No matter what John says, don’t try to outcrow him, Like most fathers, Bull hates to see Number One Displacing himself in the mind of his son, And detests the same faults in himself he’d neglected When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected; To love one another you’re too like by half, If he is a bull, you’re a pretty stout calf, And tear your own pasture for naught but to show What a nice pair of horns you’re beginning to grow.

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40. Unsigned review, Brownson’s Quarterly Review n.s. iii (July 1849), 397–408

An incisive interpretation of the reasons for American misunderstanding of Cooper’s political position in the 1830s and 1840s.

There was a time when the organs, or pretended organs, of public opinion in this country were all united and loud in their praises of Cooper as the greatest novelist of the age, denominating him, with as little taste as judgment, the ‘American Scott’; but for some years past they seem to have been almost equally united and loud in decrying him as a man, and in depreciating his merits as an author. He has ventured to think and write as a freeborn American, to intimate that the American national character is not exactly perfect nor regarded as exactly perfect by European nations, and that there is room for improvement; he has even gone so far as to point out some of our faults, to tell us that good-breeding is not necessarily incompatible with patriotism, that there is no necessary connection between ill-manners and democracy, and that a man may be a gentleman without ceasing to be a republican. In doing this he has given mortal offence to the two extremes of American society; —on the one hand, to the radicals, who are for levelling all distinctions, and making all equal, not only before God and the state, but before reason and fortune, in natural gifts and acquired possessions; and on the other, to our gutter aristocracy,* who, conscious of no inherent nobility, or intrinsic claims to notice or an honorable social position, wish to substitute artificial for natural diversities of social rank and condition, and have them supported by some legal recognition or sanction. But, in all this, it may be that he deserves praise rather than censure, and that we should do better to understand and follow his counsels than to be angry with him for having given them.

* By gutter aristocracy, we do not mean those who have risen from a low origin or condition, and by their talents and worth attained to honorable distinction; but those who have remained in the gutter, and become distinguished by the gold they have contrived to collect around them.

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41. Herman Melville on Cooper 1849–52

Herman Melville (1819–91) returned from four years in the South Seas (1841–44) to become an author of great sea fiction (Moby Dick 1851, Benito Cereno 1856, Billy Budd 1924), a novelist of American life (Pierre 1852, The Confidence-Man 1857) and, in his later years, a poet of considerable distinction without a public. See Introduction, p. 33. (a) Review of The Sea Lions, Literary World, v (April 1849), 370. An attractive title, truly. Nor does this last of Cooper’s novels disappoint the promise held forth on the title-page. The story opens on the sea-coast of Suffolk county, Long Island; and turns mainly on the mysterious existence of certain wild islands within the Antarctic Circle, whose precise whereabouts is known but to a choice few, and whose latitude and longitude even the author declares he is not at liberty to make known. For this region, impelled by adverse, if not hostile motives, the two vessels, the Sea Lions, in due time sail, under circumstances full of romance. After encountering a violent gale, described with a force peculiarly Cooper’s, they at last reach the Antarctic seas, finding themselves walled in by ‘thrilling regions of thickribbed ice.’ Few descriptions of the lonely and the terrible, we imagine, can surpass the grandeur of the many scenes here depicted. The reader is reminded of the appalling adventures of the United States Exploring Ship in the same part of the world as narrated by Wilkes,1 and of Scoresby’s Greenland narrative. In these inhospitable regions the hardy crews of the Sea Lions winter—2 not snugly at anchor under the lee of a Dutch shore, nor baking and browning over the ovens by which the Muscovite warms himself—but jammed

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in, masoned up, bolted and barred, and almost hermetically sealed by the ice. To keep from freezing into crystal, they are fain to turn part of the vessel into fuel. All this, and much more of a like nature, is told in a style singularly plain, downright, and truthful. At length, after many narrow escapes from icebergs, ice-isles, fields and floes of ice, the mariners, at least most of them, make good their return to the North, where the action of the book is crowned by the nuptials of Roswell Gardiner, the hero, and Mary Pratt, the heroine. Roswell we admire for a noble fellow; and Mary we love for a fine example of womanly affection, earnestness and constancy. Deacon Pratt, her respected father, is a hard-handed, hard-hearted, psalmsinging old man, with a very stretchy conscience; intent upon getting into heaven, and getting money by the same course of conduct, in defiance of the scriptural maxim to the contrary. There is a good deal of wisdom to be gathered from the story of the Deacon. Then we have one Stimson, an old Kennebunk boatsteerer, and Professor of Theology, who, wintering on an iceberg, discourses most unctuously upon various dogmas. This honest old worthy may possibly be recognised for an old acquaintance by the readers of Cooper’s novels. But who would have dreamt of his turning up at the South Pole? One of the subordinate parts of the book is the timely conversion of Roswell, the hero, from a too latitudinarian view of Christianity to a more orthodox, and hence a better belief. And as the reader will perceive, the moist, rosy hand of our Mary is the reward of his orthodoxy. Somewhat in the spirit of the Mohametan, this; who rewards all the believers with a houri. Upon the whole we warmly recommend the Sea Lions; even those who more for fashion’s sake than anything else, have of late joined in decrying our national novelist, will in this last work, perhaps, recognise one of his happiest. (b) Extract from a notice of The Red Rover, Literary World, vi (March 1850), 277. At the present day we deem any elaborate criticism of Cooper’s Red Rover quite unnecessary and uncalled-for. Long ago, and far inland, we read it in our uncritical days, and enjoyed it as much as thousands of the rising generation will, when supplied with such an entertaining volume in such agreeable type. (c) Extract from Melville’s letter to the Cooper Memorial Committee (Memorial of Cooper, New York, 1852, 30). I never had the honour of knowing, or even seeing, Mr. Cooper personally; so that, through my past ignorance of his person, the man, though dead, is still as living to me as ever. And this is much; for his works are among the earliest I can remember, as in my boyhood producing a vivid and awakening power upon my mind. It always much pained me, that for any reason, in his latter years, his fame at home should have apparently received a slight, temporary clouding, from some very paltry 1 Charles Wilkes’ Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1849) was a major source for Th e Sea Lions. 2

William Scoresby, An Account of the Arctic Regions (1820).

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accidents, incidents more or less to the general career of letters. But whatever possible things in Mr. Cooper may have seemed to have in some degree provoked the occasional treatment he received, it is certain that he possessed not the slightest weaknesses but those which are only noticeable as the almost infallible indices of pervading greatness. He was a great, robust-souled man, all whose merits are not even, yet fully appreciated. But a grateful posterity will take the best care of Fenimore Cooper.

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42. The Cooper Memorial 1852

The letters and addresses read at the public gathering to commemorate Cooper on 25 February 1852 were published in the Memorial of Cooper (New York, 1852), pp. 7, 16, 32, 33, 34.

(a) Extracts from letters written to the Cooper Memorial Committee. Washington Irving:

The death of Fenimore Cooper, though anticipated, is an event of deep and public concern, and calls for the highest expression of public sensibility. To me it comes with something of a shock; for it seems but the other day that I saw him at our common literary resort at Putnam’s, in full vigour of mind and body, a very ‘castle of a man,’ and apparently destined to outlive me, who am several years his senior. He has left a space in our literature which will not easily be supplied. George Bancroft:

Great as [Cooper] was in the department of romantic fiction, he was not less deserving of praise in that of history. In Lionel Lincoln he has described the battle of Bunker Hill better than it is described in any other work. In his Naval History of the United States, he has left us the most admirable composition of which any nation could boast on a similar subject. Richard H.Dana:

Many of us can remember how we were stirred on the first appearance of the Spy, and how we connected the man with his work—for then our writers were few, and what they wrote brought them with the interest and life of individuality before our minds. We have all since that time threaded the forests with Cooper, and sailed with him overthe seas. But do we not (at least at such a time as this) love more to dwell upon his open, manly, energetic nature, and upon that self-reliance and civil courage (much too rare amongst us) which would, with equal freedom, speak out in the face of the people, whether they were friendly or adverse?

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R.W.Emerson:

I never had the good fortune to see Mr. Cooper; but I have, in common with almost all who speak English, an old debt to him of happy days, on the first appearance of the Pioneers. H.W.Longfellow:

I was in no country of Europe where the name of Cooper was not familiarly known. In some of them he stands as almost the sole representative of our literature.

(b) Extracts from William Cullen Bryant’s ‘Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper,’ pp. 40, 70. We may learn, from the history of [Cooper’s] life, to employ the faculties we possess with useful activity and noble aims; we may copy his magnanimous frankness, his disdain of every thing that wears the faintest semblance of deceit, his refusal to comply with current abuses, and the courage with which, on all occasions, he asserted what he deemed truth, and combated what he thought error. His character was like the bark of the cinnamon, a rough and astringent rind without, and an intense sweetness within. Those who penetrated below the surface found a genial temper, warm affections, and a heart with ample place for his friends, their pursuits, their good name, their welfare. They found him a philanthropist, though not precisely after the fashion of the day; a religious man, most devout where devotion is most apt to be a feeling rather than a custom, in thehousehold circle; hospitable, and to the extent of his means, liberal-handed in acts of charity. They found, also, that though in general he would as soon have thought of giving up an old friend as of giving up an opinion, he was not proof against testimony, and could part with a mistaken opinion as one parts with an old friend who has been proved faithless and unworthy. In short, Cooper was one of those who, to be loved, must be intimately known.

43. Francis Parkman on Cooper 1852

The influence of Fenimore Cooper on Parkman’s historical works is apparent in Parkman’s subject, descriptive set pieces and dramatic handling of Indian materials. See Introduction, pp. 33–5. Francis Parkman (1823–1893), member of a prominent Boston family, journeyed west to observe Indians and frontiersmen in 1846, published his account of his journey (The Oregon Trail 1849), and devoted the remainder of his life to his magnificent eight-volume history France and England in North America (1851–92) which chronicles the struggle of European powers for possession of the North American continent. (a) Extract from Parkman’s letter to the Cooper Memorial Committee (Memorial of Cooper, New York, 1852, 34–5). I have always felt a special admiration for Cooper’s writings. They were my chosen favourites as a boy, and though it is at least nine or ten years since I opened them, yet the scenes and characters of several of his novels have been so stamped by the potency of his art upon my mind that I sometimes find it difficult to separate them distinctly from the recollections of my own past experiences. I may say, without exaggeration, that Cooper has had an influence in determining the course of my life and pursuits. (b) Parkman’s article, ‘The Works of James Fenimore Cooper’. North American Review, lxxiv (January 1852), 147–61. No American writer has been so extensively read as James Fenimore Cooper. His novels have been translated into nearly every European tongue. Nay, we are told—but hardly know how to believe it—that they may be had duly rendered into Persian at the bazaars of Ispahan. We have seen some of them, well thumbed and worn, at a little village in a remote mountainous district of Sicily; and in Naples and Milan, the bookstalls bear

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witness that L’Ultimo dei Mohecanni is still a popular work. In England, these American novels have been eagerly read and transformed into popular dramas; while cheap and often stupidly mutilated editions of them have been circulated through all her colonies, garrisons, and naval stations, from New Zealand to Canada. Nor is this widely spread popularity undeserved. Of all American writers, Cooper is the most original, the most thoroughly national. His genius drew aliment from the soil where God had planted it, and rose to a vigorous growth, rough and gnarled, but strong as a mountain cedar. His volumes are a faithful mirror of that rude transatlantic nature, which to European eyes appears so strange and new. The sea and the forest have been the scenes of his countrymen’s most conspicuous achievements; and it is on the sea and in the forest that Cooper is most at home. Their spirit inspired him, their images were graven on his heart; and the men whom their embrace has nurtured, the sailor, the hunter, the pioneer, move and act upon his pages with all the truth and energy of real life. There is one great writer with whom Cooper has been often compared, and the comparison is not void of justice; for though, on the whole, far inferior, there are certain high points of literary excellence in regard to which he may contest the palm with Sir Walter Scott. It is true, that he has no claim to share the humor and pathos, the fine perception of beauty and delicacy in character, which adds such charms to the romances of Scott. Nor can he boast that compass and variety of power, which could deal alike with forms of humanity so diverse; which could portray with equal mastery the Templar Bois Guilbert, and the Jewess Rebecca; the manly heart of Henry Morton, and thegentle heroism of Jeanie Deans. But notwithstanding this unquestioned inferiority on the part of Cooper, there were marked affinities between him and his great contemporary. Both were practical men, able and willing to grapple with the hard realities of the world. Either might have learned with ease to lead a regiment, or command a line-of-battle ship. Their conceptions of character were no mere abstract ideas, or unsubstantial images, but solid embodiments in living flesh and blood. Bulwer and Hawthorne—the conjunction may excite a smile—are writers of a different stamp. Their conceptions are often exhibited with consummate skill, and, in one of these examples at least, with admirable truthfulness; but they never cheat us into a belief of their reality. We may marvel at the skill of the artist, but we are prone to regard his creations rather as figments of art than as reproductions of nature, —as a series of vivified and animate pictures, rather than as breathing men and women. With Scott and with Cooper it is far otherwise. Dominie Sampson and the Antiquary are as distinct and familiar to our minds as some eccentric acquaintance of our childhood. If we met Long Tom Coffin on the wharf at New Bedford, we should wonder where we had before seen that familiar face and figure. The tall, gaunt form of Leatherstocking, the weather-beaten face, the bony hand, the cap of fox-skin, and the old hunting frock, polished with long service, seem so palpable and real, that, in some moods of mind, one may easily confound them with the memories of his own experiences. Others have been gifted to conceive the elements of far loftier character, and even to combine these elements in a manner equally truthful; but few have rivalled Cooper in the power of breathing into his creations the breath of life, and turning the phantoms of his brain into seeming realities. It is to this, in no small measure, that he owes his widely spread popularity. His most successful portraitures are drawn, it is true,

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from humble walks and rude associations; yet they are instinct with life, and stamped with the impress of a masculine and original genius. The descriptions of external nature with which Cooper’s works abound bear a certain analogy to his portraitures of character. There is no glow upon his pictures, no warm and varied coloring, no studied contrast of light and shade. Their virtue consists in their fidelity, in the strength with which they impress themselves upon the mind, and the strange tenacity with which they cling to the memory. For our own part, it was many years since we had turned the pages of Cooper, but still we were haunted by the images which his spell had evoked; —the dark gleaming of hill-embosomed lakes, the tracery of forest boughs againstthe red evening sky, and the raven flapping his black wings above the carnage field near the Horican. These descriptions have often, it must be confessed, the grave fault of being overloaded with detail; but they are utterly mistaken who affirm, as some have done, that they are but a catalogue of commonplaces, —mountains and woods, rivers and torrents, thrown together as a matter of course. A genuine love of nature inspired the artist’s pen; and they who cannot feel the efficacy of its strong picturing have neither heart nor mind for the grandeur of the outer world. Before proceeding, however, we must observe that, in speaking of Cooper’s writings, we have reference only to those happier offspring of his genius which form the basis of his reputation; for, of that numerous progeny which of late years have swarmed from his pen, we have never read one, and therefore, notwithstanding the ancient usage of reviewers, do not think ourselves entitled to comment upon them. The style of Cooper is, as style must always be, in no small measure the exponent of the author’s mind. It is not elastic or varied, and is certainly far from elegant. Its best characteristics are a manly directness, and a freedom from those prettinesses, studied turns of expression, and petty tricks of rhetoric, which are the pride of less masculine writers. Cooper is no favorite with dilettanti critics. In truth, such criticism does not suit his case. He should be measured on deeper principles, not by his manner, but by his pith and substance. A rough diamond, and he is one of the roughest, is worth more than a jewel of paste, though its facets may not shine so clearly. And yet, try Cooper by what test we may, we shall discover in him grave defects. The field of his success is, after all, a narrow one, and even in his best works he often oversteps its limits. His attempts at sentiment are notoriously unsuccessful. Above all, when he aspires to portray a heroine, no words can express the remarkable character of the product. With simple country girls he succeeds somewhat better; but when he essays a higher flight, his failure is calamitous. The most rabid asserter of the rights of woman is scarcely more ignorant of woman’s true power and dignity. This is the more singular, as his novels are very far from being void of feeling. They seldom, however—and who can wonder at it? —find much favor with women, who for the most part can see little in them but ghastly stories of shipwrecks, ambuscades, and bush fights, mingled with prolix descriptions and stupid dialogues. Their most appreciating readers may perhaps be found, not among persons of sedentary and studious habits, but among those of a moreactive turn, military officers and the like, whose tastes have not been trained into fastidiousness, and who are often better qualified than literary men to feel the freshness and truth of the author’s descriptions.

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The merit of a novelist is usually measured less by his mere power of description than by his skill in delineating character. The permanency of Cooper’s reputation must, as it seems to us, rest upon three or four finely conceived and admirably executed portraits. We do not allude to his Indian characters, which it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn; while the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome. Such as they are, however, they have been eagerly copied by a legion of the smaller poets and novel writers; so that, jointly with Thomas Campbell, Cooper is responsible for the fathering of those aboriginal heroes, lovers, and sages, who have long formed a petty nuisance in our literature. The portraits of which we have spoken are all those of white men, from humble ranks of society, yet not of a mean or vulgar stamp. Conspicuous before them all stands the well known figure of Leather-stocking. The life and character of this personage are contained in a series of five independent novels, entitled, in honor of him, The Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper has been censured, and even ridiculed, for this frequent reproduction of his favorite hero, which, it is affirmed, argues poverty of invention; and yet there is not one of the tales in question with which we would willingly part. To have drawn such a character is in itself sufficient honor; and had Cooper achieved nothing else, this alone must have insured him a wide and merited renown. There is something admirably felicitous in the conception of this hybrid offspring of civilization and barbarism, in whom uprightness, kindliness, innate philosophy, and the truest moral perceptions are joined with the wandering instincts and hatred of restraint which stamp the Indian or the Bedouin. Nor is the character in the least unnatural. The white denizens of the forest and the prairie are often among the worst, though never among the meanest, of mankind; but it is equally true, that where the moral instincts are originally strong, they may find nutriment and growth among the rude scenes and grand associations of the wilderness. Men as true, generous, and kindly as Leatherstocking may still be found among the perilous solitudes of the West. The quiet, unostentatious courage of Cooper’s hero had its counterpart in the character of Daniel Boone; and the latter had the same unaffected love of nature which forms so pleasing a feature in the mind of Leatherstocking. Civilization has a destroying as well as a creating power. It is exterminating the buffalo and the Indian, over whose fate too many lamentations, real or affected, have been sounded for us to renew them here. It must, moreover, eventually sweep from before it a class of men, its own precursors and pioneers, so remarkable both in their virtues and their faults, that few will see their extinction without regret. Of these men Leatherstocking is the representative; and though in him the traits of the individual are quite as prominent as those of the class, yet his character is not on this account less interesting, or less worthy of permanent remembrance. His life conveys in some sort an epitome of American history, during one of its most busy and decisive periods. At first, we find him a lonely young hunter in what was then the wilderness of New York. Ten or twelve years later, he is playing his part manfully in the Old French War. After the close of the Revolution, we meet him again on the same spot where he was first introduced to us; but now every thing is changed. The solitary margin of the Otsego lake is transformed into the seat of a growing settlement, and the hunter, oppressed by the restraints of society, turns his aged footsteps westward in search of his congenial solitudes. At length,

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we discover him for the last time, an octogenarian trapper, far out on the prairies of the West. It is clear that the successive stages of his retreat from society could not well be presented in a single story, and that the repetition which has been charged against Cooper as a fault was indispensable to the development of his design. The Deerslayer, the first novel in the series of the Leatherstocking Tales, seems to us one of the most interesting of Cooper’s productions. He has chosen for the scene of his story the Otsego lake, on whose banks he lived and died, and whose scenery he has introduced into three, if not more, of his novels. The Deerslayer, or Leatherstocking, here makes his first appearance as a young man, in fact scarcely emerged from boyhood, yet with all the simplicity, candor, feeling, and penetration, which mark his riper years. The old buccaneer in his aquatic habitation, and the contrasted characters of his two daughters, add a human interest to the scene, for the want of which the highest skill in mere landscape painting cannot compensate. The character of Judith seems to us the best drawn, and by far the most interesting, female portrait in any of Cooper’s novels with which we are acquainted. The story, however, is not free from the characteristic faults of its author. Above all, it contains, in one instance at least, a glaring exhibition of his aptitude for describing horrors. When he compels his marvellously graphic pen to depict scenes which would disgrace the shambles or the dissecting table,none can wonder that ladies and young clergymen regard his pages with abhorrence. These, however, are but casual defects in a work which bears the unmistakable impress of genius. The Pathfinder forms the second volume of the series, and is remarkable, even among its companions, for the force and distinctness of its pictures. For ourselves—though we diligently perused the despatches— the battle of Palo Alto and the storming of Monterey are not more real and present to our mind than some of the scenes and characters of The Pathfinder, though we have not read it for nine years; —the little fort on the margin of Lake Ontario, the surrounding woods and waters, the veteran major in command, the treacherous Scotchman, the dogmatic old sailor, and the Pathfinder himself. Several of these scenes are borrowed in part from Mrs. Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady; but in borrowing, Cooper has transmuted shadows into substance. Mrs. Grant’s facts—for as such we are to take them—have an air of fiction; while Cooper’s fiction wears the aspect of solid fact. His peculiar powers could not be better illustrated than by a comparison of the passages alluded to in the two books. One of the most widely known of Cooper’s novels is The Last of the Mohicans, which forms the third volume of the series, and which, with all the elements of a vulgar popularity, combines excellences of a far higher order. It has, nevertheless, its great and obtrusive faults. It takes needless liberties with history; and though it would be folly to demand that an historical novelist should always conform to received authorities, yet it is certainly desirable that he should not unnecessarily set them at defiance; since the incidents of the novel are apt to remain longer in the memory than those of the less palatable history. But whatever may be the extent of the novelist’s license, it is, at all events, essential that his story should have some semblance of probability, and not run counter to nature and common sense. In The Last of the Mohicans, the machinery of the plot falls little short of absurdity. Why a veteran officer, pent up in a little fort, and hourly expecting to be beleaguered by a vastly superior force, consisting in great part of

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bloodthirsty savages, should at that particular time desire or permit a visit from his two daughters, is a question not easy to answer. Nor is the difficulty lessened when it is remembered, that the young ladies are to make the journey through a wilderness full of Indian scalping parties. It is equally difficult to see why the lover of Alice should choose, merely for the sake of a romantic ride, to conduct her and her sister by a circuitous and most perilous by-path through the forests, when they might moreeasily have gone by a good road under the safe escort of a column of troops who marched for the fort that very morning. The story founded on these gross inventions is sustained by various minor improbabilities, which cannot escape the reader unless his attention is absorbed by the powerful interest of the narrative. It seems to us a defect in a novel or a poem, when the heroine is compelled to undergo bodily hardship, to sleep out at night in the woods, drenched by rain, stung by mosquitos and scratched by briars, — to forego all appliances of the toilet, and above all, to lodge in an Indian wigwam. Women have sometimes endured such privation, and endured it with fortitude; but it may be safely affirmed, that for the time, all grace and romance were banished from their presence. We read Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline’ with much sympathy in the fortunes of the errant heroine, until, as we approached the end of the poem, every other sentiment was lost in admiration at the unparalleled extent of her wanderings, at the dexterity with which she contrived to elude at least a dozen tribes of savages at that time in a state of war, at the strength of her constitution, and at her marvellous proficiency in woodcraft. When, however, we had followed her for about two thousand miles on her forest pilgrimage, and reflected on the figure she must have made, so tattered and bepatched, bedrenched and bedraggled, we could not but esteem it a happy circumstance that she failed, as she did, to meet her lover; since, had he seen her in such plight, every spark of sentiment must have vanished from his breast, and all the romance of the poem have been ingloriously extinguished. With Cooper’s heroines, Cora and Alice, the case is not so hard. Yet, as it does not appear that, on a journey of several weeks, they were permitted to carry so much as a valise or a carpet bag, and as we are expressly told, that on several occasions, they dropped by the wayside their gloves, veils, and other useful articles of apparel, it is certain, that at the journey’s end, they must have presented an appearance more adapted to call forth a Christian sympathy than any emotion of a more romantic nature. In respect to the delineation of character, The Last of the Mohicans is surpassed by several other works of the author. Its distinguishing merit lies in its descriptions of scenery and action. Of the personages who figure in it, one of the most interesting is the young Mohican, Uncas, who, however, does not at all resemble a genuine Indian. Magua, the villain of the story, is a less untruthful portrait. Cooper has been criticized for having represented him as falling in love with Cora; and the criticism is based on the alleged ground that passions of this kindare not characteristic of the Indian. This may, in some qualified sense, be true; but it is well known that Indians, in real life as well as in novels, display a peculiar partiality for white women, on the same principle by which Italians are prone to admire a light complexion, while Swedes regard a brunette with highest esteem. Cora was the very person to fascinate an Indian. The coldest warrior would gladly have received her into his lodge, and promoted her to be his favorite wife, wholly dispensing,

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in honor of her charms, with flagellation or any of the severer marks of conjugal displeasure. The character of Hawkeye or Leatherstocking is, in the Mohicans as elsewhere, clearly and admirably drawn. He often displays, however, a weakness which excites the impatience of the reader, —an excessive and ill-timed loquacity. When, for example, in the fight at Glenn’s Falls, he and Major Heywood are crouching in the thicket, watching the motions of four Indians, whose heads are visible above a log at a little distance, and who, in the expression of Hawkeye himself, are gathering for a rush, the scout employs the time in dilating upon the properties of the ‘long-barrelled, soft-metalled rifle.’ The design is, no doubt, to convey an impression of his coolness in moments of extreme danger; but under such circumstances, the bravest man would judge it the part of good sense to use his eyes rather than his tongue. Men of Hawkeye’s class, however talkative they may be at the camp-fire, are remarkable for preserving a close silence while engaged in the active labors of their calling. It is easy to find fault with The Last of the Mohicans; but it is far from easy to rival or even approach its excellences. The book has the genuine game flavor; it exhales the odors of the pine woods and the freshness of the mountain wind. Its dark and rugged scenery rises as distinctly on the eye as the images of the painter’s canvas, or rather as the reflection of nature herself. But it is not as the mere rendering of material forms, that these wood paintings are most highly to be esteemed. They are instinct with life, with the very spirit of the wilderness; they breathe the sombre poetry of solitude and danger. In these achievements of his art, Cooper, we think, has no equal, unless it may be the author of that striking romance, Wacousta or the Prophecy, whose fine powers of imagination are, however, even less under the guidance of a just taste than those of the American novelist. The most obvious merit of The Last of the Mohicans consists in its descriptions of action, in the power with which the author absorbs the reader’s sympathies, and leads him, as it were, to play a part in the scene.One reads the accounts of a great battle—aside from any cause or principle at issue—with the same kind of interest with which he beholds the grand destructive phenomena of nature, a tempest at sea, or a tornado in the tropics; yet with a feeling far more intense, since the conflict is not a mere striving of insensate elements, but of living tides of human wrath and valor. With descriptions of petty skirmishes or single combats, the feeling is of a different kind. The reader is enlisted in the fray, a partaker, as it were, in every thought and movement of the combatants, in the alternations of fear and triumph, the prompt expedient, the desperate resort, the palpitations of human weakness, or the courage that faces death. Of this species of description, the scene of the conflict at Glenn’s Falls is an admirable example, unsurpassed, we think, even by the combat of Balfour and Bothwell, or by any other passage of the kind in the novels of Scott. The scenery of the fight, the foaming cataract, the little islet with its stout-hearted defenders, the precipices and the dark pine woods, add greatly to the effect. The scene is conjured before the reader’s eye, not as a vision or a picture, but like the tangible presence of rock, river, and forest. His very senses seem conspiring to deceive him. He seems to feel against his cheek the wind and spray of the cataract, and hear its sullen roar, amid the yells of the assailants and the sharp crack of the answering rifle. The scene of the strife is pointed out to travellers as if this fictitious

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combat were a real event of history. Mills, factories, and bridges have marred the native wildness of the spot, and a village has usurped the domain of the forest; yet still those foaming waters and black sheets of limestone rock are clothed with all the interest of an historic memory; and the cicerone of the place can show the caves where the affrighted sisters took refuge, the point where the Indians landed, and the rock whence the despairing Huron was flung into the abyss. Nay, if the lapse of a few years has not enlightened his understanding, the guide would as soon doubt the reality of the battle of Saratoga, as that of Hawkeye’s fight with the Mingoes. The Pioneers, the fourth volume of the series, is, in several respects, the best of Cooper’s works. Unlike some of its companions, it bears every mark of having been written from the results of personal experience; and indeed, Cooper is well known to have drawn largely on the recollections of his earlier years in the composition of this novel. The characters are full of vitality and truth, though, in one or two instances, the excellence of delineation is impaired by a certain taint of vulgarity. Leatherstocking, as he appears in The Pioneers, must certainlyhave had his living original in some gaunt, gray-haired old woodsman, to whose stories of hunts and Indian fights the author may perhaps have listened in his boyhood with rapt ears, unconsciously garnering up in memory the germs which time was to develop into a rich harvest. The scenes of the Christmas turkeyshooting, the fish-spearing by firelight on Otsego lake, the rescue from the panther, and the burning of the woods, are all inimitable in their way. Of all Cooper’s works, The Pioneers seems to us most likely to hold a permanent place in literature, for it preserves a vivid reflection of scenes and characters which will soon have passed away. The Prairie, the last of the Leatherstocking Tales, is a novel of far inferior merit. The story is very improbable, and not very interesting. The pictures of scenery are less true to nature than in the previous volumes, and seem to indicate that Cooper had little or no personal acquaintance with the remoter parts of the West. The book, however, has several passages of much interest, one of the best of which is the scene in which the aged trapper discovers, in the person of a young officer, the grandson of Duncan Heywood and Alice Munro, whom, half a century before, he had protected when in such imminent jeopardy on the rocks of Glenn’s Falls and among the mountains of Lake George. The death of Abiram White is very striking, though reminding the reader too much of a similar scene in the Spy. The grand deformity of the story is the wretched attempt at humor in the person of Dr. Obed Battius. David Gamut, in The Mohicans, is bad enough; but Battius outherods Herod, and great must be the merit of the book which one such incubus would not sink beyond redemption. The novel, which first brought the name of Cooper into distinguished notice, was The Spy; and this book, which gave him his earliest reputation, will contribute largely to preserve it. The story is full of interest, and the character of Harvey Birch is drawn with singular skill. The Pilot is usually considered the best of Cooper’s sea tales. It is in truth a masterpiece of his genius; and although the reader is apt to pass with impatience over the long conversations among the ladies at St. Ruth’s, and between Alice Dunscombe and the disguised Paul Jones, yet he is amply repaid when he follows the author to his congenial element. The description of the wreck of the Ariel, and the death of Long Tom Coffin,

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can scarcely be spoken of in terms of too much admiration. Long Tom is to Cooper’s sea tales what Leatherstocking is to the novels of the forest, —a conception so original andforcible, that posterity will hardly suffer it to escape from remembrance. The Red Rover, The Water-Witch, and the remainder of the sea tales, are marked with the same excellences and defects with the novels already mentioned, and further comments would therefore be useless. The recent death of the man who had achieved so much in the cause of American literature has called forth, as it should have done, a general expression of regret; and the outcries, not unprovoked, which of late have been raised against him, are drowned in the voice of sorrow. The most marked and original of American writers has passed from among us. It was an auspicious moment when his earlier works first saw the light; for there was promise in their rude vigor, —a good hope that from such rough beginnings the country might develop a literary progeny which, taking lessons in the graces, and refining with the lapse of years, might one day do honor to its parentage; and when the chastened genius of Bryant arose, it seemed that the fulfilment of such a hope was not far remote. But this fair promise has failed, and to this hour the purpose, the energy, the passion of America have never found their adequate expression on the printed page. The number of good writers truly American, by which we mean all those who are not imitators of foreign modes, might be counted on the fingers of the two hands; nor are the writers of this small class, not excepting even Bryant himself, in any eminent degree the favorites of those among their countrymen who make pretensions to taste and refinement. As in life and manners the American people seem bent on aping the polished luxury of another hemisphere, so likewise they reserve their enthusiasm and their purses for the honeyed verse and the sugared prose of an emasculate and supposititious literature. Some French writer, —Chateaubriand, we believe, —observes that the only portion of the American people who exhibit any distinctive national character are the backwoodsmen of the West. The remark is not strictly true. The whole merchant marine, from captains to cabinboys, the lumbermen of Maine, the farmers of New England, and indeed all the laboring population of the country, not of foreign origin, are marked with strong and peculiar traits. But when we ascend into the educated and polished classes, these peculiarities are smoothed away, until, in many cases, they are invisible. An educated Englishman is an Englishman still; an educated Frenchman is often intensely French; but an educated American is apt to have no national character at all. The condition of the literature of the country is, as might be expected, in close accordance with these peculiarities of its society. With but fewexceptions, the only books which reflect the national mind are those which emanate from, or are adapted to, the unschooled classes of the people; such, for example, as Dr. Bird’s Nick of the Woods, The Life of David Crockett, The Big Bear of Arkansas, with its kindred legends, and, we may add, the earlier novels of Cooper. In the politer walks of literature, we find much grace of style, but very little originality of thought, —productions which might as readily be taken for the work of an Englishman as of an American. This lack of originality has been loudly complained of, but it seems to us inevitable under the circumstances. The healthful growth of the intellect, whether national or individual, like healthful growth of every other kind, must proceed from the action of

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internal energies, and not from foreign aid. Too much assistance, too many stimulants, weaken instead of increasing it. The cravings of the American mind, eager as they are, are amply supplied by the copious stream of English current literature. Thousands, nay, millions of readers and writers drink from this bounteous source, and feed on this foreign aliment, till the whole complexion of their thoughts is tinged with it, and by a sort of necessity they think and write at second hand. If this transatlantic supply were completely cut off, and the nation abandoned to its own resources, it would eventually promote, in a high degree, the development of the national intellect. The vitality and force, which are abundantly displayed in every department of active life, would soon find their way into a higher channel, to meet the new and clamorous necessity for mental food; and in the space of a generation, the oft-repeated demand for an original literature would be fully satisfied. In respect to every department of active life, the United States are fully emancipated from their ancient colonial subjection. They can plan, invent, and achieve for themselves, and this, too, with a commanding success. But in all the finer functions of thought, in all matters of literature and taste, we are still essentially provincial. England once held us in a state of political dependency. That day is past; but she still holds us in intellectual dependency far more complete. Her thoughts become our thoughts, by a process unconscious, but inevitable. She caters for our mind and fancy with a liberal hand. We are spared the labor of self-support; but by the universal law, applicable to nations no less than individuals, we are weakened by the want of independent exercise. It is a matter of common remark, that the most highly educated classes among us are far from being the most efficient either in thought or action. The vigorous life of the nation springs from the deep rich soilat the bottom of society. Its men of greatest influence are those who have studied men before they studied books, and who, by hard battling with the world, and boldly following out the bent of their native genius, have hewn their own way to wealth, station, or knowledge, from the ploughshare or the forecastle. The comparative shortcomings of the best educated among us may be traced to several causes; but, as we are constrained to think, they are mainly owing to the fact that the highest civilization of America is communicated from without instead of being developed from within, and is therefore nerveless and unproductive.

44. George Sand on Cooper 1856

Extract from ‘Fenimore Cooper’, Autour de la Table (Paris, 1856), 261–72 and 281–2. Like her friend Balzac, George Sand was a life-long admirer of Cooper’s romances. She had a sharp eye for the best passages in Cooper’s later works. Translation by D.B.Wood. See Introduction, pp. 42–3. George Sand, pseudonym of Madame Amandine Dupin (1804– 76), was an outspoken feminist and socialist, author of Lélia (1833), Consuelo (1842) and Elle et Lui (1858), the mistress of Alfred de Musset and of Frederic Chopin, and probably the most prolific authoress in world literature. Cooper has often been compared to Walter Scott. It is a great honour of which Cooper is not unworthy; but it has also been claimed that Cooper was merely an accomplished and felicitous imitator of the great master: such is not my own feeling. Cooper could, indeed must, have been influenced by Scott’s form,by his method. What more apt example could he have taken? A style, when it is good, immediately becomes public property; but style is only the clothing of an idea, and one is imitating no-one by dressing in the fashion of one’s own age. Originality is not stifled by appropriate and wellmade clothing; on the contrary, it moves the more freely in it. Scott will always remain in the front rank for having discovered this excellent genre, the only one appropriate to the stories and descriptions which he proposed to treat. I do not think that he would have actually searched for it for a single moment; it came of itself, like a body in perfect harmony with the spirit of his genius. In imagining the simultaneous and fully realised activity of a large group of true-to-life characters, he must have conceived in one flash of perception the setting which places them all in the foreground and, as they say of painting, in their right perspective. In allowing them more than merely a few stray characteristics and costumes, that is to say, giving each a fully formed character and idiom logically suited to his circumstances and social sphere, he must have seen the action of each individual developing of itself, at a pace neither too hurried nor too ponderous, in order to coincide with the general action of the drama. This fluency of treatment, which always manages to keep up interest without having to resort to gimmicks, represents the greatest possible accomplishment: that which the reader is scarcely aware of and which has cost the author no effort, as it has poured forth from the depths of his

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inspiration, the limpid wave of the performance bursting onto an already well-worn channel in the vast and solid bedrock of the mind. Cooper must have recognised that this art of grouping, moving apart, bringing together, and finally reintegrating incidents and characters, was likewise the only one which suited the nature of his own ideas; for if there is nothing of the imitator in what he did, there is at least some analogy and similarity in the nature of his talent and that of Walter Scott. We shall readily enough ascertain the differences which establish his distinctive qualities; let us look first at the points of agreement. Like the mighty Scott, the simple and unaffected Fenimore is a ruminative man; in him, as in his master, the problem of inspiration is resolved in thought and observation. These are the two great poets of the middle class, in the sense that it is to that class above all that they belong. They have no grudge against God or society; no eccentricities, no sacred joys like Shakespeare and Byron. They do not aspire so high.They are the possessors of a gentle passion and an unassuming genius. They made themselves storytellers and novelists without mistaking the proper level of their achievement. They take it too seriously not to ennoble it. They are of the same breed, they are almost brothers, in that the foundation of their power is this wisdom, this doggedness, this apparent simple good-heartedness which characterises industrial society and a practical education. And yet they are poets; and, in the very midst of the delineation of contemporary manners, they will be carried away by an ideal of individual liberty which is the shining centre of the work; just as in those Flemish interiors, where everything seems to want to express the everyday reality of life, a warm ray of sunlight comes to transform the most commonplace figure, the most insignificant detail of the domestic scene. As with the Flemish painters, therefore, it is by their use of colour that the tranquil compositions of the two northern novelists brought to life. In detail, nothing seems left to the imagination. Yet, the imagination, which is the ideal, inner light of the artist, always comes to illuminate their canvasses. With Walter Scott, it is the bohemian rebel who fits in with social life, the superstitious Scotsman gifted with second sight, the pale lady of the old chronicles, who come to unsettle the mind, to disturb the surface of everyday life, to build up the drama through fear and sorrow, and create a great gulf of fantastic light in the landscapes of the dream. But it is above all the gypsy fortune-teller who stands out like a ghost, who rises like a statue, in Scott’s Border landscape. She protests against blind law, against unyielding justice and self-regarding propriety. She subdues evil with a dreadful energy and curses fate with a terrifying eloquence. Wretched and misguided daughter of the satanic outcast, she is nevertheless the guardian spirit of her worthy family, and it seems that between this ruthless society which rejects her and the Providence which she disarms, she has a leading part and shines forth as the central figure of the drama. With Cooper, equally, the dream is realised in a figure larger than life; but it is precisely in drawing this analogy with Walter Scott’s procedure that I am struck by the clearly defined individuality of Cooper. This well-loved figure who, in the novels, first goes by the name of the Spy, then the Bravo, and finally the Hunter of the Plains, is the complete revelation of Cooper’s deepest thought, the constant ideal which, without overwhelming him, penetrates the innermost recesses of his mind. There is the superiority

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of the individual over thesociety of his time, and perhaps over Scott himself as poet, even though as a skilful and masterly craftsman Scott is supreme. This generous, naive and idealistic pattern of the wanderer of the wilderness, this Nathaniel Bumppo, who appears by turns under the name of the Scout, Guide, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Long Rifle and Leatherstocking, is a creation which raises Cooper above himself. As soon as his imagination comes to rest on this being whose main existence is outside the settlement way of life, it fixes itself there and lets go only reluctantly. Consequently what the mere description of the solitudes of the New World made us glimpse as a well-drawn, if somewhat lifeless outline, is filled with colour, warmth and vitality by being seen through the eyes of the solitary seeker. It is he who, without actually describing anything, depicts the true sublimity of nature: his calm ecstasy seizes us almost unawares and communicates itself to us in order to show us, as if in an enchanted glass, the magnificent scenes his excited eye reflects. And it is not because of some unusual talent that this figure brings out the charm and power of his surroundings: Cooper’s talent is straightforward and, as we say, unsophisticated. His naiveties sometimes come rather close to overstepping the mark: his style was not originally his own, he found it ready-made and made use of it with less sweep and assurance than did his master; but it is by depth of feeling that he comes to equal him, to such an extent sometimes that one is not quite sure that (in this respect alone) he does not surpass him a little. This figure of Nathaniel is thus truly the reflection of Cooper’s poetic soul. In those of his novels where he does not appear, there are qualities of an inferior, if not altogether unimportant order, which sometimes weary us by being over-scrupulously observed. In The Crater, in The Sea Lions etc., the excitement of the journeys and the interest of the adventures hold our attention only as would well-documented official reports, as competent and well-substantiated accounts of the actual facts. The form of these narratives is so logical and so correct, that it excludes every descriptive nuance, every attempt on the part of the author to persuade his reader to share his emotion. It is necessary to recognise however that in several places in these narratives, the emotion is communicated by the very fact that it does not demand attention and seek to render the magnificence of the scenes by the eloquence of words. I do not know anything better done, in this kind of work, than the picture of the polar seas, in the chapter where the two schooners, ‘the sea lions’, leave the seal island to find a way across the ice-floes and gigantic ice-packs. The feeling of cold, ofdoubt, of gloom, of peril and of desolation envelops us. One seems to hear the sharp and sinister noise of the blocks of ice which the ship’s bows run up against and thrust aside. This is no longer a fictional or theatrical danger brought to a climax for effect; this is a danger foreseen and foretold, but which because of its well-founded illusion of reality completely engrosses the reader’s attention and becomes as painful for him as something which actually happened. And it is by this extraordinary restraint of literary means, it is by this fine propriety of image and expression, that the narrator affects you thus. In Satanstoe (one of Cooper’s best novels…), another kind of journey on the ice, the sleigh ride on the river, presents a description of a sudden thaw all the more thrilling because, thanks to the confidence and clarity of the observations, it is among the most intelligible. These descriptions, in the form of straightforward and matter-of-fact report, are among Cooper’s finest qualities.

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One senses there an observer who, from his own experience, has tried to give an account of everything, the effects and the causes, the details and the picture as a whole. Thus one’s interest is held by the force of truth. The narrator has the calm objectivity of a mirror which reflects the great crises of nature, without adding any frills out of his own head, and, I repeat, this course flexibly taken, constitutes at times an important property which we perhaps underestimate a little. But this truthfulness of emotional colour does not even so represent the beautiful, which is the splendour of truth, and of which the American Cooper feels the need as much as artists on the other side of the Atlantic. An instinctive enemy of what we call ‘fine style’, and of the kind of Byronism which he frankly makes fun of, he needed a nobler expression of the truth than was afforded by the celebration of national sentiment. In his sea novels, he described well enough the adventurous spirit of the men who sailed in search of new worlds, their untroubled energy among the unheard-of-dangers of the great ocean voyages, of the capture of bounty and settlement in the dreadful solitude of distant islands. There he told too of clashes with pirates, the exploits of the pirates themselves, the watchful bravery of their natural adversaries, the guardians of national property; and then, too, the great industriousness of these roving colonists who, whether in the name of their country or with an eye to their own fortune, stepped out over every reef in the universe; over snowfields as readily as volcanoes, everywhere conquerors of primitive life, of nature itself in its most formidable vastnesses. This personification of the American genius in the seamen of Cooper’s novels represents already a great work, a lofty and accomplished task. How patient they are, how stubborn, farsighted, hardworking, ingenious, inventive, full of inspiration in moments of peril, and of calm, resignation and hope in times of disaster! It is impossible to deny that these men were the forerunners, the messengers and missionaries of the civilisation of a great people to a primitive world; and America owes almost as much to Cooper as to Franklin and Washington: for if these great men created the Union, by skill in legislation and force of arms, it was Cooper, the unassuming storyteller, who broadcast the news of it across the seas by the interest of his tales and the fidelity of his patriotic feelings. But, once more, this conscientious truthtelling does not contain the whole spirit of Cooper. He had, in spite of his respect and love for the society to which he belonged, that propensity for aloofness, for poetic reverie and the feeling of natural liberty, which characterises all true artists. That wonderful peacefulness of the wide open spaces in the middle of which American society had taken root, had so overwhelmed him at times, that, in spite of himself, the encroachments of agriculture and trade on these virgin lands filled his heart with a deep sense of sadness. And then, the noble side of certain of the savage tribes; the power of the instincts and the feelings of the Indians; the freedom of the primitive man in a land which was as free and uncultivated as himself, —there indeed was a magnificent spectacle, and the poet needed all his powers of social reasoning and patriotic will not to curse the victory of the white man, to weep at the merciless destruction of the Indian and the plundering of his natural environment: the forest and the prairie free of the axe and the plough.

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A European poet of this period would not have hesitated to hang his mournful harp amongst the willows of the riverbank in order to pour his curses on civilisation and the iniquities which fatefully serve its purposes. An American was bound to be reluctant to stigmatise these iniquities from which the very strength and independence of his people had been born. Cooper shut away within himself this feeling of sorrow and pity, and then —some solitary figure of a hunter passing perhaps across the scene at the right moment, —there appeared in his mind’s eye the good, the devoted, the pure, the fine and intrepid Nathaniel. To him he gave his feelings and attributed his dreams, his enthusiastic love for the splendours of solitude, his yearning for the ideal of primitive life, of natural religion and absolute liberty. And to this white man, initiated into the delights of the wilderness, he dared to allow friends among the savages. The Mohican is also a great imaginative figure, and, in making him an ally of the whites and a sort of convert to Christianity, Cooper was able, without too great an affront to the pride of his country, to plead the cause of the Indians. More faithful and besides better informed than Chateaubriand, who depended largely on guesswork and presupposition, he made us penetrate into the reality as well as into the poetry of primitive life, into its homeric virtues, its fearful nobility, its sublime barbarity; and, in the calm but resonant voice of the novelist, the American let loose from his breast this conscience-stricken cry; In order to be what we are, we had to kill a great people and devastate a mighty land.’ Cooper, speaking to us himself, through the mouth of Nathaniel, left us in no doubt in this respect, and the intention is clear. At every point in the books, the old philosopher cries out: ‘I say nothing against your civilisation, against your arts, your monuments, your trade, your religions, your priests. I don’t doubt for a moment that all that is beautiful and good; but here, in my wilderness, I live in a more beautiful temple than your churches; I contemplate more sublime monuments than those raised up by man; I understand the deity better than your priests; I condemn no-one, I believe that the red man and the white man are equal before God. I am happier, wealthier, richer than all of you; I have fewer needs, fewer cares and fewer diseases. I find fewer enemies than brothers among the savages, and those who surround you with traps and ambushes do no more than take just reprisal against you who have tracked them down and crucified them like cattle.’ If Cooper did not say all this in so many words through his protagonist, he makes it so well understood that there can be no mistaking him in the matter. The hunter has no personal enemies among any of the dreaded tribes which threaten the white settlements in the wilderness. It is always to defend or save some friend of his own people that he gets into trouble with the Indians. When he has saved all those to whom he felt himself necessary, he goes, by preference, to grow old and to die among the Pawnees. (And let me say, in passing, that the account of the old trapper’s death is one of the most beautiful things which our literary age has produced.) Hence Cooper glimpsed and felt within, beyond that actual and utilitarian existence which represents the material power of North America, something less worldly wise and more enduring than outward appearances, public opinion and official beliefs: he sensed civilisation entering the primitive way of life by other means than shot and fire-water;

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conquest by the spirit and not by the sword and brutalisation. This fateful situation of a power acquired at the cost of suffering, murder and fraud, pierced his heart with a deep, philosophical remorse; and, in spite of the tranquillity of his constitution and talent, it floated like a psalm of death over the scattered and mutilated remains of the great families and the great forests of the vanquished land. It is this impulse of wonder and regret which must have inspired his most beautiful pages, and it is because of this that, at certain times, he has ventured more and excited more than Walter Scott, whose calm impartiality is less spiritedly challenged. Scott is still the lofty bard who laments, too, the great days of Scotland; but the hymn he sings (and sings more skillfully, it must not be misunderstood) has less to bear. He mourns for a nation, a power, above all an aristocratic way of life. What Cooper sings for and laments is a noble people exterminated; a serene natural world laid waste; he mourns all nature and all mankind…. Cooper has had and continues to have an absolute crowd of imitators. The success of his American novels in Europe has hatched out in the same style hundreds of accounts of voyages, sea adventures, fights with Indians, and colonial settlements in the wilderness, and there have even been attempts to reproduce the stately figure of Nathaniel. Thanks to these imitators, we can travel at any time in the imagination through the most distant solitudes, and understand the ways of the most ferocious creatures and the strangest men. But whatever instruction and delight we may be able to find in these narratives, Cooper’s imitators would be wrong to suppose that in continuing so they can replace him. We need have no regrets that, for the lack of a strong and powerful personality, a writer gives himself over to the imitation of a good master. If the writer possesses an observant and retentive mind, and a fund of memories of interesting journeys and dramatic sights, he is still read with curiosity; and even if he has little artistic skill, he at least popularizes some useful ideas. But it is enough to read only the earliest of the works to feel the incomparable superiority of their prototype. It may be that today they are more skilful than Cooper in his own genre; they have penetrated further into the wilderness; they have seen more, and know more about the writer’s trade; they have become, in America, a kind of competition. But, whatever they do, they are not themselves and they are not Cooper. They are more lively and spill over withdramatic incidents; but, even for all that, they do not touch the heart, they scarcely so much as satisfy the mind; and that great wealth of wholesome truth, that purity of spirit and form, that calm independence of a fertile and life-giving genius, they do not have, and cannot inject themselves with.

45. Bret Harte parodies Cooper 1867

‘Muck-A-Muck: A Modern Indian Novel After Cooper’ was first published in Condensed Novels (New York, 1867). The text given below is reproduced from Harte’s Complete Works (Boston and New York, 1921), I, 78–85. Bret Harte (1836–1902), American short-story writer, was born in Albany, New York, went to California in 1854, became a leading San Francisco journalist, and edited the Overland Monthly, in which he published his famous local-colour stories of western life. Harte’s parody is less devastating and funny than Twain’s brilliant essay, but he knew his Cooper intimately and knew, too, how the ‘Western’ had developed after Cooper’s time. See Introduction, pp. 35–6. CHAPTER I It was toward the close of a bright October day. The last rays of the setting sun were reflected from one of those sylvan lakes peculiar to the Sierras of California. On the right the curling smoke of an Indian village rose between the columns of the lofty pines, while to the left the log cottage of Judge Tompkins, embowered in buckeyes, completed the enchanting picture. Although the exterior of the cottage was humble and unpretentious, and in keeping with the wildness of the landscape, its interior gave evidence of the cultivation and refinement of its inmates. An aquarium, containing goldfishes, stood on a marble centretable at one end of the apartment, while a magnificent grand piano occupied the other. The floor was covered with a yielding tapestry carpet, and the walls were adorned with paintings from the pencils of Van Dyke, Rubens, Tintoretto, Michael Angelo, and the productions of the more modern Turner, Kensett, Church, and Bierstadt. Although Judge Tompkins had chosen the frontiers of civilization as his home, it was impossible for him to entirely forego the habits and tastes of his former life. He was seated in a luxurious armchair, writing at a mahogany escritoire, while his daughter, a lovely young girl of seventeen summers, plied her crotchet-needle on an ottoman beside him. A bright fire of pine logs flickered and flamed on the ample hearth.

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Genevra Octavia Tompkins was Judge Tompkins’s only child. Her mother had long since died on the Plains. Reared in affluence, no pains had been spared with the daughter’s education. She was a graduate of one of the principal seminaries, and spoke French with a perfect Benicia accent. Peerlessly beautiful, she was dressed in a white moiré antique robe trimmed with tulle. That simple rosebud, with which most heroines exclusively decorate their hair, was all she wore in her raven locks. The Judge was the first to break the silence. ‘Genevra, the logs which compose yonder fire seem to have been incautiously chosen. The sibilation produced by the sap, which exudes copiously therefrom, is not conducive to composition.’ ‘True, father, but I thought it would be preferable to the constant crepitation which is apt to attend the combustion of more seasoned ligneous fragments.’ The Judge looked admiringly at the intellectual features of the graceful girl, and half forgot the slight annoyances of the green wood in the musical accents of his daughter. He was smoothing her hair tenderly, when the shadow of a tall figure, which suddenly darkened the doorway, caused him to look up. CHAPTER II It needed but a glance at the new-comer to detect at once the form and features of the haughty aborigine, —the untaught and untrammeled sonof the forest. Over one shoulder a blanket, negligently but gracefully thrown, disclosed a bare and powerful breast, decorated with a quantity of three-cent postage-stamps which he had despoiled from an Overland Mail stage a few weeks previous. A cast-off beaver of Judge Tompkins’s, adorned by a simple feather, covered his erect head, from beneath which his straight locks descended. His right hand hung lightly by his side, while his left was engaged in holding on a pair of pantaloons, which the lawless grace and freedom of his lower limbs evidently could not brook. ‘Why,’ said the Indian, in a low sweet tone, —‘why does the Pale Face still follow the track of the Red Man? Why does he pursue him, even as O-kee chow, the wild cat, chases Ka-ka, the skunk? Why are the feet of Sorrel-top, the white chief, among the acorns of Muck-a-Muck, the mountain forest? Why,’ he repeated, quietly but firmly abstracting a silver spoon from the table, —‘why do you seek to drive him from the wigwams of his fathers? His brothers are already gone to the happy hunting-grounds. Will the Pale Face seek him there?’ And, averting his face from the Judge, he hastily slipped a silver cakebasket beneath his blanket, to conceal his emotion. ‘Muck-a-Muck has spoken,’ said Genevra softly. ‘Let him now listen. Are the acorns of the mountain sweeter than the esculent and nutritious bean of the Pale Face miner? Does my brother prize the edible qualities of the snail above that of the crisp and oleaginous bacon? Delicious are the grasshoppers that sport on the hillside, — are they better than the dried apples of the Pale Faces? Pleasant is the gurgle of the torrent, Kish-Kish, but is it better than the cluck-cluck of old Bourbon from the old stone bottle?’

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‘Ugh!’ said the Indian, —‘ugh! good. The White Rabbit is wise. Her words fall as the snow on Tootoonolo, and the rocky heart of Muck-a-Muck is hidden. What says my brother the Gray Gopher of Dutch Flat?’ ‘She has spoken, Muck-a-Muck,’ said the Judge, gazing fondly on his daughter. ‘It is well. Our treaty is concluded. No, thank you, —you need not dance the Dance of Snowshoes, or the Moccasin Dance, the Dance of Green Corn, or the Treaty Dance. I would be alone. A strange sadness overpowers me.’ ‘I go,’ said the Indian. ‘Tell your great chief in Washington, the Sachem Andy, that the Red Man is retiring before the footsteps of the adventurous pioneer. Inform him, if you please, that westward the star of empire takes its way, that the chiefs of the Pi-Ute nation are forReconstruction to a man, and that Klamath will poll a heavy Republican vote in the fall.’ And folding his blanket more tightly around him, Muck-a-Muck withdrew. CHAPTER III Genevra Tompkins stood at the door of the log-cabin, looking after the retreating Overland Mail stage which conveyed her father to Virginia City. ‘He may never return again,’ sighed the young girl, as she glanced at the frightfully rolling vehicle and wildly careering horses, — ‘at least, with unbroken bones. Should he meet with an accident! I mind me now a fearful legend, familiar to my childhood. Can it be that the drivers on this line are privately instructed to dispatch all passengers maimed by accident, to prevent tedious litigation? No, no. But why this weight upon my heart?’ She seated herself at the piano and lightly passed her hand over the keys. Then, in a clear mezzo-soprano voice, she sang the first verse of one of the most popular Irish ballads:— ‘O Arrah ma dheelish, the distant dudheen Lies soft in the moonlight, ma bouchal vourneen: The springing gossoons on the heather are still, And the caubeens and colleens are heard on the hill.’ But as the ravishing notes of her sweet voice died upon the air, her hands sank listlesslyrg her side. Music could not chase away the mysterious shadow from her heart. Again she rose. Putting on a white crape bonnet, and carefully drawing a pair of lemon-colored gloves over her taper fingers, she seized her parasol and plunged into the depths of the pine forest. CHAPTER IV Genevra had not proceeded many miles before a weariness seized upon her fragile limbs, and she would fain seat herself upon the trunk of a prostrate pine, which she previously dusted with her handkerchief. The sun was just sinking below the horizon, and the scene was one of gorgeous and sylvan beauty. ‘How beautiful is nature!’ murmured the

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innocent girl, as, reclining gracefully against the root of the tree, she gathered up her skirts and tied a handkerchief around her throat. But alow growl interrupted her meditation. Starting to her feet, her eyes met a sight which froze her blood with terror. The only outlet to the forest was the narrow path, barely wide enough for a single person, hemmed in by trees and rocks, which she had just traversed. Down this path, in Indian file, came a monstrous grizzly, closely followed by a Californian lion, a wild cat, and a buffalo, the rear being brought up by a wild Spanish bull. The mouths of the three first animals were distended with frightful significance, the horns of the last were lowered as ominously. As Genevra was preparing to faint, she heard a low voice behind her. ‘Eternally dog-gone my skin ef this ain’t the puttiest chance yet!’ At the same moment, a long, shining barrel dropped lightly from behind her, and rested over her shoulder. Genevra shuddered. ‘Dern ye—don’t move!’ Genevra became motionless. The crack of a rifle rang through the woods. Three frightful yells were heard, and two sullen roars. Five animals bounded into the air and five lifeless bodies lay upon the plain. The well-aimed bullet had done its work. Entering the open throat of the grizzly it had traversed his body only to enter the throat of the California lion, and in like manner the catamount, until it passed through into the respective foreheads of the bull and the buffalo, and finally fell flattened from the rocky hillside. Genevra turned quickly. ‘My preserver!’ she shrieked, and fell into the arms of Natty Bumpo, the celebrated Pike Ranger of Donner Lake. CHAPTER V The moon rose cheerfully above Donner Lake. On its placid bosom a dug-out canoe glided rapidly, containing Natty Bumpo and Genevra Tompkins. Both were silent. The same thought possessed each, and perhaps there was sweet companionship even in the unbroken quiet. Genevra bit the handle of her parasol, and blushed. Natty Bumpo took a fresh chew of tobacco. At length Genevra said, as if in halfspoken reverie:— ‘The soft shining of the moon and the peaceful ripple of the waves seem to say to us various things of an instructive and moral tendency.’ ‘You may bet yer pile on that, miss,’ said her companion gravely. ‘It’s all the preachin’ and psalm-singin’ I’ve heern since I was a boy.’ ‘Noble being!’ said Miss Tompkins to herself, glancing at the stately Pike as he bent over his paddle to conceal his emotion. ‘Reared in this wild seclusion, yet he has become penetrated with visible consciousness of a Great First Cause.’ Then, collecting herself, she said aloud: ‘Me-thinks ’t were pleasant to glide ever thus down the stream of life, hand in hand with the one being whom the soul claims as its affinity. But what am I saying?’ —and the delicate-minded girl hid her face in her hands. A long silence ensued, which was at length broken by her companion.

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‘Ef you mean you’re on the marry,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I ain’t in no wise partikler.’ ‘My husband!’ faltered the blushing girl; and she fell into his arms. In ten minutes more the loving couple had landed at Judge Tompkins’s. CHAPTER VI A year has passed away. Natty Bumpo was returning from Gold Hill, where he had been to purchase provisions. On his way to Donner Lake rumors of an Indian uprising met his ears. ‘Dern their pesky skins, ef they dare to touch my Jenny,’ he muttered between his clenched teeth. It was dark when he reached the borders of the lake. Around a glittering fire he dimly discerned dusky figures dancing. They were in war paint. Conspicuous among them was the renowned Muck-a-Muck. But why did the fingers of Natty Bumpo tighten convulsively around his rifle? The chief held in his hand long tufts of raven hair. The heart of the pioneer sickened as he recognized the clustering curls of Genevra. In a moment his rifle was at his shoulder, and with a sharp ‘ping’ Muck-a-Muck leaped into the air a corpse. To knock out the brains of the remaining savages, tear the tresses from the stiffening hand of Muck-a-Muck, and dash rapidly forward to the cottage of Judge Tompkins, was the work of a moment. He burst open the door. Why did he stand transfixed with open mouth and distended eyeballs? Was the sight too horrible to be borne? On the contrary, before him, in her peerless beauty, stood Genevra Tompkins, leaning on her father’s arm. ‘Ye’r not scalped, then!’ gasped her lover. ‘No. I have no hesitation in saying that I am not; but why this abruptness?’ responded Genevra. Bumpo could not speak, but frantically produced the silken tresses. Genevra turned her face aside. ‘Why, that’s her waterfall!’ said the Judge. Bumpo sank fainting to the floor. The famous Pike chieftain never recovered from the deceit, and refused to marry Genevra, who died, twenty years afterwards, of a broken heart. Judge Tompkins lost his fortune in Wild Cat. The stage passes twice a week the deserted cottage at Donner Lake. Thus was the death of Muck-a-Muck avenged.

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46. Mark Twain’s classic demolition of Cooper 1895

Mark Twain, ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses’, North American Review, clxi, (July 1895), 1–12. Cooper was doubtless one of Tom Sawyer’s favourite authors. See Introduction, 36–7, 48. Mark Twain, pseudonym for Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), made himself into an American comic legend through individual stage performances and through works such as ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog’ (1867), Innocents Abroad (1869) and Tom Sawyer (1876). Considering himself a literary realist, Twain also wrote compelling autobiographical narratives (Roughing It 1872, Life on the Mississippi 1883), as well as the increasingly bitter novels for which he is now most remembered: Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916). The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper’s novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these sales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art. —Prof. Lounsbury. The five tales reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention. …One of the very greatest characters in fiction, ‘Natty Bumppo.’ … The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest, were familiar to Cooper from his youth up. —Prof. Brander Matthews. Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced by America. —Wilkie Collins. It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins, to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

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Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record. There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction— some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require: 1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air. 2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop. 3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale. 4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale. 5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it. 6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in Deerslayer tale, as ‘Natty Bumppo’s’ case will amply prove. 7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in theend of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale. 8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as ‘the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,’ by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale. 9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale. 10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

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11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated. In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall 12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it. 13. Use the right word, not its second cousin. 14. Eschew surplusage. 15. Not omit necessary details. 16. Avoid slovenliness of form. 17. Use good grammar. 18. Employ a simple and straightforward style. Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale. Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequentlywas his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series. I am sorry there is not room to put in a few dozen instances of the delicate art of the forest, as practiced by Natty Bumppo and some of the other Cooperian experts. Perhaps we may venture two or three samples. Cooper was a sailor—a naval officer; yet he gravely tells us how a vessel, driving toward a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a particular spot by her skipper because he knows of an undertow there which will hold her back against the gale and save her. For just pure woodcraft, or sailor-craft, or whatever it is, isn’t that neat? For several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so—and so on, till it finally gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some ‘females’ — as he always calls women—in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know again if he doesn’t strike out promptly

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and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain through the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy? If Cooper had any real knowledge of Nature’s ways of doing things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. For instance: one of his acute Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago, I think), has lost the trail of a person he is tracking through the forest. Apparently that trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor I could ever have guessed out the way to find it. It was very different with Chicago. Chicago was not stumped for long. He turned a running stream out of its course, and there, in the slush in its old bed, were that person’s moccasin-tracks. The current did not wash them away, as it would have done in all other like cases—no, even theeternal laws of Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader. We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper’s books ‘reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention.’ As a rule, I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews’s literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless your heart, Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and I don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse. It would be very difficult to find a really clever ‘situation’ in Cooper’s books; and still more difficult to find one of any kind which he has failed to render absurd by his handling of it. Look at the episodes of ‘the caves;’ and at the celebrated scuffle between Maqua and those others on the table-land a few days later; and at Hurry Harry’s queer water-transit from the castle to the ark; and at Deerslayer’s half hour with his first corpse; and at the quarrel between Hurry Harry and Deerslayer later; and at—but choose for yourself; you can’t go amiss. If Cooper had been an observer, his inventive faculty would have worked better, not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper’s proudest creations in the way of ‘situations’ suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer’s protecting gift. Cooper’s eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly. He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly. Of course a man who cannot see the commonest little everyday matters accurately is working at a disadvantage when he is constructing a ‘situation.’ In the Deerslayer tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide, where it flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along for no given reason, and yet, when a stream acts like that it ought to be required to explain itself. Fourteen pages later the width of the brook’s outlet from the lake has suddenly shrunk thirty feet, and become ‘the narrowest part of the stream.’ This shrinkage is not accounted for. The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has alluvial banks, and cuts them; yet these bends are only thirty and fifty feet long. If Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer he would have noticed that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than short of it. Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide in the first place, for no particular reason; in the second place, he narrowed it to less than twenty to accommodate some Indians. He bends a ‘sapling’ to the form of an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its foliage. They are ‘laying’ for a settler’s scow or ark which is coming upthe stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled against the stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake; its rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes the ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions

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‘it was little more than a modern canal boat.’ Let us guess, then, that it was about 140 feet long. It was of ‘greater breadth than common.’ Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide. This leviathan had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as itself, and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space to spare on each side. We cannot too much admire this miracle. A low-roofed log dwelling occupies ‘two-third’s of the ark’s length’ —a dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say—a kind of vestibule train. The dwelling has two rooms—each forty-five feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us guess. One of them is the bed-room of the Hutter girls, Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor, in the day time, at night it is papa’s bed chamber. The ark is arriving at the stream’s exit, now, whose width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the Indians—say to eighteen. There is a foot to spare on each side of the boat. Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by? No; other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvellous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them. The ark is 140 feet long; the dwelling is 90 feet long. The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It will take the ark a minute and a half to pass under. It will take the 90-foot dwelling a minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did. Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judged, he let go and dropped. And missed the house! That is actually what he did. He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been 97 feet long, he would have made the trip. The fault was Cooper’s,not his. The error lay in the construction of the house. Cooper was no architect. There still remained in the roost five Indians. The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did— you would not be able to reason it out for yourself. No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No. 2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still further astern of it. Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it. Then No. 4 jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern. Then even No. 5 made a jump for the boat—for he was a Cooper Indian. In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar ship is not spacious. The scow episode is really a sublime burst of invention; but it does not thrill, because the inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of fictitiousness and general improbability over it. This comes of Cooper’s inadequacy as an observer. The reader will find some examples of Cooper’s high talent for inaccurate observation in the account of the shooting match in The Pathfinder. ‘A common wrought nail was driven lightly into the target, its head having been first touched with paint.’ The color of

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the paint is not stated—an important omission, but Cooper deals freely in important omissions. No, after all, it was not an important omission; for this nail is a hundred yards from the marksman and could not be seen by them at that distance no matter what its color might be. How far can the best eyes see a common house fly? A hundred yards? It is quite impossible. Very well, eyes that cannot see a house fly that is a hundred yards away cannot see an ordinary nail head at that distance, for the size of the two objects is the same. It takes a keen eye to see a fly or a nail head at fifty yards—one hundred and fifty feet. Can the reader do it? The nail was lightly driven, its head painted, and game called. Then the Cooper miracles began. The bullet of the first marksman chipped an edge of the nail head; the next man’s bullet drove the nail a little way into the target—and removed all the paint. Haven’t the miracles gone far enough now? Not to suit Cooper; for the purpose of this whole scheme is to show off his prodigy, Deerslayer-Hawkeye-Long-Rifle-LeatherStocking-Pathfinder-Bumppo before the ladies. ‘Be all ready to clench it, boys!’ cried out Pathfinder, stepping into his friend’s tracks the instant they were vacant. ‘Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is gone, and what I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquitos’s eye. Be ready to clench!’ The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way and the head of the nail was buried in the wood, covered by the piece of flattened lead. There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a ducal salary Wild West show to-day, if we had him back with us. The recorded feat is certainly surprising, just as it stands; but it is not surprising enough for Cooper. Cooper adds a touch. He has made Pathfinder do this miracle with another man’s rifle, and not only that, but Pathfinder did not have even the advantage of loading it himself. He had everything against him, and yet he made that impossible shot, and not only made it, but did it with absolute confidence, saying, ‘Be ready to clench.’ Now a person like that would have undertaken that same feat with a brickbat, and with Cooper to help he would have achieved it, too. Pathfinder showed off handsomely that day before the ladies. His very first feat was a thing which no Wild West show can touch. He was standing with the group of marksmen, observing—a hundred yards from the target, mind: one Jasper raised his rifle and drove the centre of the bull’s-eye. Then the quartermaster fired. The target exhibited no result this time. There was a laugh. ‘It’s a dead miss,’ said Major Lundie. Pathfinder waited an impressive moment or two, then said in that calm, indifferent, know-it-all way of his, ‘No, Major—he has covered Jasper’s bullet, as will be seen if any one will take the trouble to examine the target.’ Wasn’t it remarkable! How could he see that little pellet fly through the air and enter that distant bullet-hole? Yet that is what he did; for nothing is impossible to a Cooper person. Did any of those people have any deep-seated doubts about this? No; for that would imply sanity, and these were all Cooper people.

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The respect for Pathfinder’s skill and for his quickness and accuracy of sight (the italics are mine) was so profound and general, that the instant he made this declaration the spectators began to distrust their own opinions, and a dozen rushed to the target in order to ascertain the fact. There, sure enough, it was found that the quartermaster’s bullet had gone through the hole made by Jasper’s, and that, too, so accurately as to require a minute examination to be certain of the circumstance, which, however, was soon clearly established by discovering one bullet over the other in the stump against which the target was placed. They made a ‘minute’ examination; but never mind, how could theyknow that there were two bullets in that hole without digging the latest one out? for neither probe nor eyesight could prove the presence of any more than one bullet. Did they dig? No; as we shall see. It is the Pathfinder’s turn now; he steps out before the ladies, takes aim, and fires. But alas! here is a disappointment; an incredible, an unimaginable disappointment—for the target’s aspect is unchanged; there is nothing there but that same old bullet hole! ‘If one dared to hint at such a thing,’ cried Major Duncan, ‘I should say that the Pathfinder has also missed the target.’ As nobody had missed it yet, the ‘also’ was not necessary; but never mind about that, for the Pathfinder is going to speak. ‘No, no, Major,’ said he, confidently, ‘that would be a risky declaration. I didn’t load the piece, and can’t say what was in it, but if it was lead, you will find the bullet driving down those of the Quartermaster and Jasper, else is not my name Pathfinder.’ A shout from the target announced the truth of this assertion. Is the miracle sufficient as it stands? Not for Cooper. The Pathfinder speaks again, as he ‘now slowly advances towards the stage occupied by the females:’ ‘That’s not all, boys, that’s not all; if you find the target touched at all, I’ll own to a miss. The Quartermaster cut the wood, but you’ll find no wood cut by that last messenger.’ The miracle is at last complete. He knew—doubtless saw—at the distance of a hundred yards—that his bullet had passed into the hole without fraying the edges. There were now three bullets in that one hole— three bullets imbedded processionally in the body of the stump back of the target. Everybody knew this—somehow or other—and yet nobody had dug any of them out to make sure. Cooper is not a close observer, but he is interesting. He is certainly always that, no matter what happens. And he is more interesting when he is not noticing what he is about than when he is. This is a considerable merit. The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people’s mouths would be to believe that

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there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man’s mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevances, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there. Cooper was certainly not a master in the construction of dialogue. Inaccurate observation defeated him here as it defeated him in so many other enterprises of his. He even failed to notice that the man who talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on the seventh, and can’t help himself. In the Deerslayer story he lets Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book talk sometimes, and at other times the basest of base dialects. For instance, when some one asks him if he has a sweetheart, and if so, where she abides, this is his majestic answer: ‘She’s in the forest—hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain— in the dew on the open grass—the clouds that float about in the blue heavens—the b irds that sing in the woods—the sweet springs where I slake my thirst—and in a ll the glorious gifts that come from God’s Providence!’ And he preceded that, a little before, with this: ‘It consarns me as all things that touches a fri’nd consarns a fri’nd.’ And this is another of his remarks: ‘If I was Injin born, now, I might tell of this, or carry in the scalp and boast of the expl’ite afore the whole tribe; or if my inimy had only been a bear’ —and so on. We cannot imagine such a thing as a veteran Scotch Commander-in-Chief comporting himself in the field like a windy melodramatic actor, but Cooper could. On one occasion Alice and Cora were being chased by the French through a fog in the neighborhood of their father’s fort: ‘Point de quartier aux coquins!’ cried an eager pursuer, who seemed to direct the operations of the enemy. ‘Stand firm and be ready, my gallant 60ths!’ suddenly exclaimed a voice above them; ‘wait to see the enemy; fire low, and sweep the glacis.’ ‘Father! father!’ exclaimed a piercing cry from out the mist; ‘it is I! Alice! thy own Elsie! spare, O! save your daughters!’ ‘Hold!’ shouted the former speaker, in the awful tones of parental agony, the sound reaching even to the woods, and rolling back in solemn echo. ‘’Tis she! God has restored me my children! Throw open the sally-port; to the field60ths, to the

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field; pull not a trigger, lest ye kill my lambs! Drive off these dogs of France with your steel.’ Cooper’s word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn’t say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate word. I will furnish some circumstantial evidence in support of this charge. My instances are gathered from half a dozen pages of the tale called Deerslayer. He uses ‘verbal,’ for ‘oral’; ‘precision,’ for ‘facility’; ‘phenomena,’ for ‘marvels’; ‘necessary,’ for ‘predetermined’; ‘unsophisticated,’ for ‘primitive’; ‘preparation,’ for ‘expectancy’; ‘rebuked,’ for ‘subdued’; ‘dependant on,’ for ‘resulting from’; ‘fact,’ for ‘condition’; ‘fact,’ for ‘conjecture’; ‘precaution,’ for ‘caution’; ‘explain,’ for ‘determine’; ‘mortified,’ for ‘disappointed’; ‘meretricious,’ for ‘factitious’; ‘materially,’ for ‘considerably’; ‘decreasing,’ for ‘deepening’; ‘increasing,’ for ‘disappearing’; ‘embedded,’ for ‘enclosed’; ‘treacherous,’ for ‘hostile’; ‘stood,’ for ‘stooped’; ‘softened,’ for ‘replaced’; ‘rejoined,’ for ‘remarked’; ‘situation,’ for ‘condition’; ‘different,’ for ‘differing’; ‘insensible,’ for ‘unsentient’; ‘brevity,’ for ‘celerity’; ‘distrusted,’ for ‘suspicious’; ‘mental imbecility,’ for ‘imbecility’; ‘eyes,’ for ‘sight’; ‘counteracting,’ for ‘opposing’; ‘funeral obsequies,’ for ‘obsequies.’ There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now—all dead but Lounsbury. I don’t remember that Lounsbury makes the claim in so many words, still he makes it, for he says that Deerslayer is a ‘pure work of art.’ Pure, in that connection, means faultless—faultless in all details— and language is a detail. If Mr. Lounsbury had only compared Cooper’s English with the English which he writes himself—but it is plain that he didn’t and so it is likely that he imagines until this day that Cooper’s is as clean and compact as his own. Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote. I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that Deerslayer is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that Deerslayer is just simply a literary delirium tremens. A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are —oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

292

47. Conrad on Cooper 1898

Extract from Joseph Conrad, ‘Tales of the Sea’, first printed in Outlook, 4 June, 1898. This text reproduced from Notes on Life and Letters (London, 1921), pp. 74– 8. Like Melville, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) knew and learned from Cooper’s sea fiction; in this tribute he compares Cooper with the English sea novelist Frederick Marryat. See Introduction, p. 40. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct. He is not invincibly young and heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage. For James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the framework, it was an essential part of existence. He could hear its voice, he could understand its silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception alone. His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea. But he loved the sea andlooked at it with consummate understanding. In his sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its immense solitudes. His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon. They embrace the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise and the menace of the sea. He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method may be often faulty, but his art is genuine. The truth is within him. The road to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that— only it is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. He has the knowledge of simple hearts. Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the significance of a type. It is hard to believe that Manual and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head, Captain Tuck of the packet-ship Montauk, or Daggett, the tenacious commander of the Sea Lion of Martha’s Vineyard, must pass away some day and be utterly forgotten. His sympathy is large, and his humour is as genuine—

294 FENIMORE COOPER

and as perfectly unaffected—as is his art. In certain passages he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision. He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time. If he pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment. Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave to so many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career. Through the distances of space and time those two men of another race have shaped also the life of the writer of this appreciation. Life is life, and art is art—and truth is hard to find in either. Yet in testimony to the achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one and the profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other—to which he had surrendered—have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the wear of laborious years. He has never regretted his surrender.

Appendix

LIST OF AMERICAN REVIEWS OF COOPER’S WORKS: 1820–51 The following list includes all the important journal articles, reviews and notices of Cooper’s works which the editors have been able to locate. Fleeting or empty references to Cooper have not been included, nor have any newspaper articles. The reviews are listed chronologically by work, and known authors of reviews are named. Precaution (1820) Literary and Scientific Repository and Critical Review, 11 (April 1821), 371–5. The Spy (1821)

Port Folio, xiii (February 1822), 90–101. Sarah Hale. Niles’ Weekly Register, xxiii (May 1822), 192. North’ American Review, xv (July 1822), 250–82. W.H.Gardiner. The Pioneers (1823)

Port Folio, xv (March 1823), 230–48. Niles’ Weekly Register, xxiv (April 1823), 34. New-York Mirror, i (August 1823), 12–13. North American Review, xxiii (July 1826), 150–97. W.H.Gardiner. The Pilot (1824)

Port Folio, xvii (February 1824), 132–46. United States Literary Gazette, i (April 1824), 6. North American Review, xviii (April 1824), 314–29, W.Phillips. New-York Mirror, ii (December 1824), 151. Lionel Lincoln (1825)

296 APPENDIX

United States Literary Gazette, i (March 1825), 337–40. New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine, i (June 1825), 39–50. The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine, ii (March 1826), 285–92. United States Literary Gazette, iv (May 1826), 87–94. North American Review, xxiii (July 1826), 150–97. W.H.Gardiner. The Red Rover (1827)

Port Folio, xxii (October 1827), 324–33. Western Monthly Review, i (February 1828), 603–8. North American Review, xxvii (July 1828), 139–54. Grenville Mellen. Literary World, vi (March 1850), 276–7. Herman Melville. Notions of the Americans (1828)

New-York Mirror, vi (August 1828), 55 and vi (September 1828), 67, 77. Ladies’ Magazine, i (September 1828), 431. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829)

Southern Review, v (February 1830), 207–26. The Water-Witch (1830)

New-York Mirror, viii (December 1830), 190–1. Ladies’ Magazine, iv (January 1831), 44–7. North American Review, xxxii (April 1831), 508–23. O.W.B.Peabody. The Bravo (1831)

Ladies’ Magazine, v (January 1832), 42–6. New-England Magazine, ii (January 1832), 83–5. American Monthly Review, i (February 1832), 147–53. Southern Review, viii (February 1832), 382–99. Christian Examiner, xii (March 1832), 78–90. New-York Mirror, x (February 1832), 262. The Heidenmauer (1832)

New-York Mirror, x (October 1832), 107. American Monthly Review, ii (November 1832), 411–15. New-England Magazine, iii (November 1832), 423–4. The Headsman (1833)

Metropolitan Magazine, i (October 1833), 409–10. Ladies’ Magazine, vi (November 1833), 520–4.

APPENDIX 297

New-York Mirror, xi (November 1833), 143. New-England Magazine, vi (January 1834), 88–9. A Letter to His Countrymen (1834)

New-England Magazine, vii (August 1834), 154–6. Southern Literary Messenger, i (May 1835), 478, 482–3. American Quarterly Review, xvii (June 1835), 425–30. The Monikins (1835)

Knickerbocker Magazine, vi (August 1835), 152–3. New-England Magazine, ix (August 1835), 136–7. Sketches of Switzerland, Parts 1 and 2 (1836)

Southern Literary Messenger, ii (May 1836), 401–3. New-York Mirror, xiii (June 1836), 399. Knickerbocker Magazine, viii (July 1836), 102–3. North American Review, xliii (July 1836), 280. J.G.Palfrey. American Quarterly Review, xx (September 1836), 228–44. Southern Literary Messenger, ii (October 1836), 720–21. Edgar Allan Poe. Gleanings in Europe: France (1837)

New-York Mirror, XIV (March 1837), 285. American Monthly Magazine, n.s. iii (April 1837), 401–5. Knickerbocker Magazine, ix (April 1837), 421–2. Southern Literary Messenger, iii (April 1837), 272. American Quarterly Review, xxi (June 1837), 522–3. North American Review, xlvi (January 1838), 1–19. F.Bowen. Gleanings in Europe: England (1837)

American Monthly Magazine, n.s. iv (October 1837), 391–3. Knickerbocker Magazine, x (October 1837), 350–2. New-York Mirror, xv (January 1838), 239. Gentleman’s Magazine, ii (February 1838), 131. Knickerbocker Magazine, xi (February 1838), 184–5. Knickerbocker Magazine, xi (April 1838), 380–6. Gleanings in Europe: Italy (1838)

New-York Mirror, xv (June 1838), 407. American Monthly Magazine, n.s. vi (July 1838), 75–84. The American Democrat (1838)

Knickerbocker Magazine, xi (May 1838), 461–3.

298 APPENDIX

Cooper’s review of Lockhart’s Life of Scott (1838)

New-York Mirror, xvi (November 1838), 164–5. Knickerbocker Magazine, xii (November 1838), 471. Knickerbocker Magazine, xii (December 1838), 508–20. Homeward Bound (1838)

New-York Mirror, xvi (August 1838), 63. Gentleman’s Magazine, ii (August 1838), 216–18. Knickerbocker Magazine, xii (September 1838), 263–7. North American Review, xlvii (October 1838), 488–9. F.Bowen. Southern Literary Messenger, iv (November 1838), 724–34. Home As Found (1838)

New-York Mirror, xvi (December 1838), 192. Gentleman’s Magazine, iv (January 1839), 66. New York Review, iv (January 1839), 209–21. Knickerbocker Magazine, xiii (February 1839), 172–3. Southern Literary Messenger, v (March 1839), 169–78. History of the Navy (1839)

Corsair, i (May 1839), 168–9. Corsair, i (July 1839), 316. North American Review, xlix (October 1839), 432–67. A.S.Mackenzie. The Pathfinder (1840)

Southern Literary Messenger, vi (March 1840), 229–30. New-York Mirror, xvii (March 1840), 305–6. Ladies’ Companion, xii (April 1840), 296. Knickerbocker Magazine, xv (April 1840), 344–5. New-York Review, vi (April 1840), 479–80. Gentleman’s Magazine, vi (April 1840), 200. Knickerbocker Magazine, xv (May 1840), 448–9. Godey’s Lady’s Book, xx (May 1840), 239. Knickerbocker Magazine, xvii (January 1841), 72–7. Mercedes of Castile (1840)

New-York Mirror, xviii (December 1840), 191. Arcturus, i (January 1841), 90–2. Evert Duyckinck. Graham’s Magazine, xviii (January 1841), 47–8. Edgar Allan Poe. Ladies’ Companion, xiv (January 1841), 148. Godey’ Lady’s Book, xxii (January 1841), 47.

APPENDIX 299

The Deerslayer (1841)

New-York Mirror, xix (September 1841), 295. Southern Literary Messenger, vii (October 1841), 742–3. United States Magazine and Democratic Review, ix (October 1841), 404–5. New York Review, ix (October 1841), 537–8. Graham’s Magazine, xix (October 1841), 191. Knickerbocker Magazine, xviii (October 1841), 349–52. Ladies’ Companion, xv (October 1841), 310. Godey’s Lady’s Book, xxiii (October 1841), 189. The Two Admirals (1842)

Knickerbocker Magazine, xix (June 1842), 586–7. Graham’s Magazine, xix (June 1842), 356. The Wing-and-Wing (1842) Democratic Review, xi (December 1842), 665–6. Graham’s Magazine, xxi (December 1842), 342. Godey’s Lady’s Book, xxvi (January 1843), 59. The Battle of Lake Erie (1843)

Democratic Review, xiii (October 1843), 330–1. Wyandotté (1843)

Graham’s Magazine, xxiv (November 1843), 261–4. Edgar Allan Poe. Afloat and Ashore (1844)

Graham’s Magazine, xxv (August 1844), 192. Knickerbocker Magazine, xxiv (December 1844), 571–2. The Redskins (1846)

American Whig Review, iv (September 1846), 276–81. Charles A. Bristed. Democratic Review, xix (September 1846), 237. Christian Examiner, xlii (January 1847), 105–6. The Crater (1847)

Democratic Review, xxi (November 1847), 438–447. Godey’s Lady’s Book, xxvi (January 1848), 69. Jack Tier (1848)

Literary World, iii (April 1848), 189. Godey’s Lady’s Book, xxxvi (June 1848), 360. The Oak Openings (1848)

300 APPENDIX

Democratic Review, xxiii (November 1848), 372–4. The Sea Lions (1849)

Literary World, iv (April 1849), 370. Herman Melville. Brownson’s Quarterly Review, n.s. iii (July 1849), 397–408. The Ways of the Hour (1850)

Literary World, vi (April 1850), 368–70. Democratic Review, xxvi (May 1850), 479. North American Review, lxxi (July 1850), 121–35. F.Bowen. General reviews of Cooper’s works and art North American Review, xxvi (April 1828), 373–6. Lewis Cass. New-York Mirror, viii (February 1831), 252–4. Charles Sealsfield. North American Review, xxxv (July 1832), 190–1. W.H.Prescott. American Quarterly Review, xvii (June 1835), 407–30. North American Review, xlvi (January 1838), 1–19. F Bowen. Southern Literary Messenger, iv (June 1838), 373–8. Graham’s Magazine, xxv (August 1844), 90–3. Rufus Griswold. William Gilmore Simms, ‘The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper,’ in Views and Reviews in American Literature, New York, 1845. Literary World, iv (May 1849), 393–4. Democratic Review, xxv (July 1849), 51–5. American Whig Review, xi (April 1850), 406–17. G.W.Peck. International Magazine, iii (April 1851), 1–7. International Magazine, iv (November 1851), 453–60. Dr Francis. North American Review, lxxiv (January 1852), 147–61. Francis Parkman.

Bibliography

The bibliography lists selected works which describe the critical recognition of Fenimore Cooper. It also lists works, not primarily on Cooper, which have been helpful in writing the Introduction. ABCARIAN, RICHARD, ‘Cooper’s Critics and the Realistic Novel’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, viii (1966), 32–41. ABCARIAN, RICHARD, ‘The Literary Reputation of James Fenimore Cooper in America: 1820– 1955’, unpublished dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1961. BARBA, PRESTON A., ‘Cooper in Germany’, Indiana University Studies, ii (1914), no. 21, pp. 52– 104. BEARD, JAMES F., JR (ed.), The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, 6 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1960–8. CAIRNS, WILLIAM B., ‘British Criticisms of American Writings: 1815– 1833’, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, xiv ( 1922), 112–57. CHARVAT, WILLIAM, ‘Cooper as Professional Author’, New York History xxxv (1954), 496–511. CHARVAT, WILLIAM, The Origins of American Critical Thought: 1810– 1835, Philadelphia, 1936. CLAVEL, MARCEL, Fenimore Cooper and His Critics. Aix-en-Provence, 1938. FERGUSON, JAMES D., American Literature in Spain, New York, 1916, 32–54. MOTT, FRANK LUTHER, A History of American Magazines, New York, 1930. NEUHAUSER, R., ‘James Fenimore Cooper and Russia’, Proceedings: Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages, XVII, 75–85. SIMMONS, ERNEST, English Literature and Culture in Russia, Cambridge, Mass., 1935. SPENCER, BENJAMIN T., The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign, Syracuse, N.Y., 1957. THORP, WILLARD, ‘Cooper Beyond America’, New York History, xxxv ( 1954), 522–39. WAPLES, D.M., The Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper, New Haven, 1938. WOODRESS, JAMES L., JR, ‘The Fortunes of Cooper in Italy’, Studi Americani, ii ( 1965), 53–76.

302

Index

This index is divided into three sections: I. Cooper’s writings; II. Cooper: topics and characteristics; III. General. Last of the Mohicans, The, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 25, 26, I. 33, 81 passim, 115, 117, 126, 163, 203, 204, COOPER’S 207, 208, 265 passim, 295 WRITINGS

Chainbearer, The, 16 Crater, The, 16, 18, 19, 28, 32, 273, 299

Leather-Stocking Tales, The, 3, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 30 passim, 35, 203, 239, 263, 284; see also Deer-slayer, Last of the Mohicans, Pathfinder, Pioneers, Prairie Legends of the Thirteen Republics, 126 Letter to His Countrymen, A, 11, 13, 14, 173, 296 Letters and Journals (ed. Beard), 37, 38 Lionel Lincoln, 5, 5, 6, 10, 73, 79, 81, 99, 102, 104, 124, 236, 259, 295 Littlepage Manuscripts, 18, 19, 28, 242; see also Chainbearer, Redskins, Satanstoe

Deerslayer, The, 4, 16, 17, 27, 217, 264, 283, 283 passim, 298

Mercedes of Castile, 18, 24, 211, 221, 298 Monikins, The, 11 passim, 19, 181, 296

Gleanings in Europe: England, 13, 15, 20, 21, 28, 38, 185, 241, 297 Gleanings in Europe: France, 14, 38, 296 Gleanings in Europe: Italy, 297

Naval History of the United States, 259 Notions of the Americans, 11, 13, 20, 21, 22, 28, 143, 167, 295

Afloat and Ashore, 4, 299 American Democrat, The, 18, 37, 297 Battle of Lake Erie, The, 299 Bravo, The, 11, 13, 13, 19, 19, 21, 28, 35, 38, 157, 163, 173, 175, 179, 199, 204, 236, 295

Oak Openings, The, 19, 299 Headsman, The, 13, 24, 169, 179, 296 Heidenmauer, The, 11, 13, 179, 296 History of the Navy, 16, 38, 297 Home as Found, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 16, 19, 193, 297 Homeward Bound, 15, 16, 189, 297 Hutted Knoll, see Wyandotté

Pathfinder, The, 17, 25, 27, 30, 31,33 passim, 199, 203, 205, 207, 265, 283, 298 3, 273, 299 Pilot, The, 1, 4, 5, 5, 7, 9, 20, 28, 29, 69, 79, 99, 102, 115, 124, 130, 153, 157, 163, 187, 203, 204, 207, 234, 268, 295 Pioneers, The, 1, 3 passim, 8, 22, 26, 31, 32, 61, 79, 99, 102, 104, 117, 124, 124, 126, 161, 163, 203, 207, 259, 267, 295;

Jack Tier, 299

303

304 INDEX

FC on, 109 Prairie, The, 5, 8, 8, 9, 22, 28, 32, 33, 113, 126, 129, 133, 140, 161, 203, 204, 207, 268 Precaution, 13, 20, 55, 79, 99, 123, 214, 295 prefaces, 8, 9, 11, 88 Red Rover, The, 4, 7 passim, 20, 29, 31, 32, 119 passim, 135, 163, 183, 203, 204, 207, 269, 295; FC on, 9 Redskins, The, 18, 29, 239, 299 Satanstoe, 16, 22, 31, 32, 38, 273 Sea Lions, The, 16, 25, 31, 32, 38, 251, 273, 299 Sketches of Switzerland, 14, 24, 39, 221, 296 Spy, The, 1, 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 19, 20, 21, 45, 57, 61, 69, 79, 79, 80, 99, 102, 124, 161, 163, 175, 183, 207, 231, 236, 259, 268, 295; FC on, 2 Two Admirals, The, 298 Wallingford Novels, 19; see also Afloat and Ashore Water-Witch, The, 5, 7, 8, 10, 33, 38, 269, 295 Ways of the Hour, The, 16, 19, 19, 299 Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The, 3, 8, 8, 9, 38, 204, 295 Wing-and-Wing, The, 298 Works (American), 19, 25 Works (French), 22 Wyandotté, 16, 18, 24, 221, 299

II. COOPER: TOPICS AND CHARACTERISTICS action, adventure and battle scenes, 3, 4, 6, 8, 20, 52, 71, 75, 77, 87, 90, 92, 100, 101, 102, 107, 126, 153, 158, 265, 273 on America and Americans, 143, 173, 193, 237, 242, 249 as American writer, 19, 54, 80, 99, 117, 121, 140, 167, 237, 261, 269, 293

character, personal, 259 characters and characterisation: general, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 15, 17, 26, 57, 63, 79, 88, 96, 101, 109, 122, 125, 129, 139, 189, 196 5, 202, 226, 233, 236, 255, 262, 274, 283, 284, 291 comic, 5, 7, 15, 16, 31, 89, 96, 102, 208, 233, 236, 268 genteel and high-life, 3, 4, 25, 101, 167, 195, 274 heroes and men, 57, 64, 65, 67, 71, 84, 105, 117, 126, 135, 141, 203, 205, 207, 207, 217, 231, 234, 236, 249, 236, 272, 283, 287, 293 heroines and women, 3, 8, 20, 24, 31, 35, 57, 64, 89, 96, 101, 101, 103, 125, 157, 219, 226, 263, 264, 266 Indians, 5, 6, 8, 9, 17, 19, 34, 84, 90, 96, 104, 111, 116, 128, 137, 219, 227, 249, 263, 266, 274, 286 low-life, 3, 4, 6, 22, 35, 52, 77 7, 116, 124, 161, 199, 208, 263 as classic of children’s literature, 33, 36, 261 descriptions of landscape and nature, 3, 4, 5, 17, 19, 20, 25, 25, 26, 28, 30, 35, 53, 64, 101, 115, 116, 124, 129, 203, 207, 217, 262, 266, 293 detail, excessive and prolixity, 7, 19, 54, 57, 81, 133, 152, 161, 225, 284 dialogue, 9, 15, 20, 92, 104, 129, 191, 215, 219, 225, 233, 268, 283, 289 dullness, 14, 16, 65, 153, 158, 175, 191 early and later works compared, 19, 175, 179, 214, 217 excitement, see action as Flemish genre painter, 29, 32, 57, 272 grammar (bad), 3, 4, 26, 228, 228, 284, 290 as historical romance writer, 2, 2, 3, 5, 5, 6, 17, 19, 52, 54, 63, 73, 99, 211 imitations of his novels, 1, 26, 140, 275 improbabilities, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, 6, 8, 25, 25, 26, 54, 77, 79, 83, 89, 91, 94,

INDEX 305

102, 107, 125, 209, 221, 225, 265, 284, 285 passim injustice, and neglect of his work by reviewers, 10, 16, 165, 231, 251, 256

vocabulary and technicalities, 7, 29, 133

letters of, 10, 11, 11 libel suits, 11, 15

Addison, Joseph, 179 Alison, Archibald, 2 Allston, Washington, 4 American Monthly Review (Magazine), on FC, 13, 15, 295 passim American Quarterly Review, on FC, 5, 13, 296, 300 American Whig Review, on FC, 18, 299, 300 Annenkov, P.V., allusion to FC, 35 Arcturus, on FC, 18, 211, 298 Arnold, Matthew, on FC, 22 Atlantic Magazine, on FC, 1; reference, 249

narrative skill, 3, 4, 22, 90, 92, 111 originality, 28, 153, 225, 269 overproduction, 81 parodies of, 26, 28, 243, 276 pathos, lack of, 7, 53, 63, 291 plots, 3, 5, 5, 6, 8, 8, 15, 19, 31, 52, 93, 107, 129, 135, 141, 169, 181, 191, 207, 221, 231, 233 political criticism of his works, 11 passim, 16, 19, 173, 175 political matters in his works, 11, 14, 16, 16, 18, 183, 189, 251 popularity and sales, 1, 9, 12, 17, 18, 79, 87, 97, 137, 163, 256, 261; in Europe, 21, 30, 35, 175, 203, 219, 259 prolixity, see detail real people in novels, 6, 77, 82, 89, 102, 214 repetition of themes, 8, 161 republicanism, 1, 5, 10 passim, 16, 19, 20, 21, 119, 123, 143, 163, 185, 189, 251 reviews and reviewers, attitude to, 11, 11, 21, 173, 175 satire and social criticism, 13, 15, 19, 20, 145, 181, 191, 193 as sea writer, 5, 8, 8, 15, 19, 20, 24, 36, 69, 115, 124, 130, 140, 167, 179, 187, 201, 203, 255, 269, 273, 285, 293 style, 5, 20, 26, 57, 81, 93, 99, 129, 161, 185, 210, 214, 215, 228, 263, 273, 284 taste, lack of, 54, 147, 187 translations of his works, 21, 30, 31, 34, 35, 167, 201, 202, 204, 261 tributes to (Memorial Committee), 19, 25, 167, 256, 259

III. GENERAL

Balzac, Honoré de, inspired by FC, 31, 39; on FC, 23, 30, 31, 35, 35, 207 Bancroft, George, on FC, 259; reference, 19 Barba, Preston A., 21, 38 Barlow, Joel, 119 Beard, James F., jnr, on FC, 37 Belinsky, Vissarion G., on FC, 23, 33, 35, 199; reference, 163 Benjamin, Park, on FC, 15, 16; reference, 11 Berlioz, Hector, inspired by FC, 9 Bewley, Marius, on FC, 37 Bird, Robert M., 269 Blackburn, P.C., 40 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, on FC, 79; references, 20, 37 Boone, Daniel, 263 Bowen, Francis, on FC, 4, 189, 296 passim Boyd, James, 39 Bristed, Charles A., on FC, 299 Brown, Charles Brockden, compared or contrasted with FC, 29, 55, 100, 117, 140, 223; references, 2, 79, 119, 151, 151, 179 Brownell, William C., 36 Brownson’s Quarterly Review, on FC, 19, 251, 299

306 INDEX

Bryant William Cullen, on FC, 259; references, 4, 19, 28, 35, 269 Buffon, Georges Louis L. de, 181 Bulwer-Lytton, E.G., see Lytton Byron, George Gordon, Lord, compared or contrasted with FC, 8, 9, 17, 33, 167, 236, 271, 273; reference, 157 Campbell, Thomas, compared with FC, 263 Cass, Lewis, on FC, 6, 300 ‘Cassio’ (E.S.Gould), on FC, 11, 13, 173 Cervantes, Miguel de, 81 Channing, W.E., 151, 155 Charvat, William, on FC, 17, 38 Chase, Richard, on FC, 38 Chateaubriand, François René, compared or contrasted with FC, 34, 126, 275; references, 30, 269 Chekhov, Anton, allusion to FC, 33 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai G., allusion to FC, 35 Chopin, Frederic, 270 Christian Examiner, on FC, 13, 295, 299 Clemens, Samuel Langhorn, see Twain, Mark Colburn and Bentley (FC’s publishers), 20, 21 Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, on FC, 20, 113, 143 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on FC, 22; reference, 151 Collins, Wilkie, on FC, 283 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine, Marquis, 30 Conrad, Joseph, on FC, 23, 30, 36, 291; reference, 25 Cooper, William (FC’s father), 81, 82, 84 Corsair, on FC, 297 ‘Crayon, Geoffrey’ (Washington Irving), 140 Crèvecoeur, Michel G.J. de, 36, 153, 154 Critic, on FC, 57, 67 Crockett, David, 269 Dana, Richard Henry, jnr, on FC, 19, 259 Dargan, E.Preston, 39 Defoe, Daniel, 225 Dekker, George, 40 Democratic Review, on FC, 298, 299, 300 Dickens, Charles, compared or contrasted with FC, 242;

references, 13, 28 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, allusion to FC, 33; reference, 35 Dryden, John, 89 Dumas, Alexandre, compared or contrasted with FC, 199 Dunlop, William, 11 Dupin, Amandine, see Sand, George Duyckinck, Evart A., on FC, 18, 211, 298; reference, 19 Edgeworth, Maria, compared or contrasted with FC, 124; on FC, 22, 29, 57 Edinburgh Review, on FC, 13, 20, 21, 28, 147, 179; reference, 213 Edwards, Jonathan, 153, 155 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, on FC, 19, 259 English Review, on FC, 38 ‘F.A.S.’, on FC, 22, 31, 31, 32, 119; reference, 23 Fiedler, Leslie, 37 Flint, Timothy, 4 Francis, Convers, on FC, 19, 300 Franklin, Benjamin, 153 Freud, Sigmund, 36 Fussell, E.M., on FC, 37 Gardiner, W.H., on FC, 2 passim, 6, 7, 8, 45, 99, 295, 295; references, 10, 22, 23 Gentleman’s Magazine, on FC, 15, 16, 297, 298; reference, 21 Globe (Paris), on FC, 10, 22, 31, 34, 119; reference, 35 Godey’s Ladies Book, on FC, 298, 299 Godwin, Parke, compared or contrasted with FC, 117 Goethe, J.F.W., on FC, 22; reference, 119 Gogol, Nikolai, compared or contrasted with FC, 33, 34 Gorky, Maxim, on FC, 22, 33, 35, 38 Gosselin (FC’s French publisher), 22 Graham’s Magazine, on FC, 4, 221, 298 passim

INDEX 307

Grant, Anne McVickar, compared or contrasted with FC, 25, 265 Greeley, Horace, 11, 16 Greenwood, Grace (Sara J.Lippincott), 13 Griswold, Rufus, on FC, 300; references, 2, 19, 19 Grossman, James, on FC, 37 Hale, Sarah, on FC, 295 Hall, Basil, compared or contrasted with FC, 242 Hall, Samuel Carter, 11 Hart, James D., 13 Harte, Bret, on FC, 23, 24; parodies FC, 26, 51, 276 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, compared or contrasted with FC, 25, 223, 262; references, 2, 19, 37 Hazlitt, William, on FC, 23, 28, 29, 35, 151; reference, 157 House, Kay Seymour, on FC, 37 Howells, W.D., on FC, 36 Hudson River School (of painting), 4, 38 Hunt, Leigh, on FC, 28, 29, 157; references, 35, 151, 163 International Magazine, on FC, 300 Irving, Washington, compared or contrasted with FC, 10, 12, 29, 55, 57, 69, 117, 121, 214; on FC, 28, 259; references, 19, 79, 140, 151, 179 James, G.P.R., compared or contrasted with FC, 19; reference, 13 James, Henry, 2, 36, 37 Jones, H.M., 40 Jones, John Paul, 6, 71, 102, 124, 199 Junius, 175 Katkov, Mikhail N., 34 Kaul, A.N., on FC, 37 Keats, John, 157 Kennedy, John P., 19 ‘Knickerbocker, Diedrich’ (Washington Irving), 121

Knickerbocker Magazine, on FC, 4, 14, 16, 17, 181, 296 passim; references, 11, 13, 15, 21 Ladies’ Companion, on FC, 298 Ladies’ Magazine, on FC, 295, 296 Lafayette, Marie Joseph, Marquis de, 30 Lamb, Charles, 151 Lawrence, D.H., on FC, 22, 30, 32, 36, 38 Lermontov, Mikhail Y., allusion to FC, 23; compared or contrasted with FC, 33; reference, 35 Le Sage, Alain René, 130, 225 Lewis, Matthew G. (‘Monk’), 139 Lewis, R.W.B., 37 Literary and Scientific Repository, 295 Literary Gazette (and Journal of the Belles-Lettres), on FC, 8, 77, 111, 146 Literary World, on FC, 253, 295, 299, 300; references, 19, 211 Lockhart, John Gibson, on FC, 13, 20, 21, 28, 185; FC on, 15, 21, 297 London Magazine, on FC, 22, 81, 135 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, on FC, 19, 259; reference, 266 Lounsbury, Thomas, on FC, 12, 36, 283, 290 Lowell, James Russell, on FC, 4, 26, 249 Lukàcs, Georg, allusion to FC, 36 Lytton, Edward G.Bulwer, Lord; compared or contrasted with FC, 25, 201, 262; reference, 13 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 213 Mackenzie, A.S., on FC, 297 Macpherson, James, compared or contrasted with FC, 34 McWilliams, John P., 119 Magnolia, on FC, 231 Malthus, Thomas, 31, 127 Manzoni, Alessandro, compared or contrasted with FC, 34 Marryat, Frederick, compared or contrasted with FC, 291 Marshall, John, 176

308 INDEX

Matthews, Brander, on FC, 36, 283, 286 Matthews, Cornelius, 18 Maturin, Charles Robert, 137 Mellen, Grenville, on FC, 10, 137, 295 Melville, Herman, compared or contrasted with FC, 25; on FC, 23, 24 25, 27, 253, 295, 299; references, 19, 19, 37, 211 Mencken, H.L., 37 Metropolitan Magazine, on FC, 13, 169, 296 Meyers, Marvin, on FC, 37 Miller, Perry, 18, 38 Milton, John, 167, 236 Moore, Thomas, 154 Morning Chronicle, on FC, 239 Morse, Samuel F.B., 19, 173 Moscow Observer, on FC, 199 Museum of Foreign Literature, 13, 21 Musset, Alfred de, 270 Neal, John, compared or contrasted with FC, 223; on FC, 20, 79; references, 2, 79, 137 New-England Magazine, on FC, 7, 13, 13, 14, 173, 295, 296 New World, on FC, 15 New York American, on FC, 173, 175; reference, 21 New-York Mirror, on FC, 5, 7, 14, 15, 69, 161, 217, 295 passim; references, 11, 214 New-York Review and Atheneum, on FC, 5, 8, 15, 17, 73, 85, 193, 295, 297, 298 New Yorker, on FC, 16, 16; reference, 21 Nicholson, M.A., 39, 199 Niles’ Weekly Register, on FC, 1, 6, 295 North American Review, on FC, 4, 6 passim, 14, 16, 19, 25, 45, 99, 137, 167, 189, 261, 283, 295 passim; references, 2, 11, 16, 25, 249 Notes of the Fatherland, on FC, 34, 203 Outlook, on FC, 291 Overland Monthly, 276

Paris Review, on FC, 207 Parkman, Francis, on FC, 4, 19, 23 passim, 30, 261, 300; reference, 85 Parrington, V.L., on FC, 37 Paulding, James Kirke, on FC, 7 Peabody, O.W.B., on FC, 295 Peck, G.W., on FC, 300 Philbrick, Thomas, 25, 40 Philips, W., on FC, 295 Poe, Edgar Allan, on FC, 18, 23, 24, 221, 296, 298, 299; references, 25, 26, 27 Port Folio, on FC, 5, 7, 9, 61, 295; reference, 2 Porte, Joel, on FC, 38 Prescott, William H., on FC, 167, 300; references, 19, 45 Puckler-Muskau, Hermann von, compared with FC, 188 Punch, on FC, 243 Pushkin, Alexander, allusion to FC, 23, 33; references, 34, 35 Putnam and Co., 19, 259 Quarterly Review, on FC, 185; references, 20, 21, 145 Rabelais, François, 130 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 140 Radcliffe, Ann, compared or contrasted with FC, 99, 139 Randolph, John, 175 Raumer, Friedrich, compared or contrasted with FC, 188 Richardson, Samuel, compared or contrasted with FC, 29, 153; reference, 130 Ringe, Donald, on FC, 37 Ripley, George, 19 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, compared or contrasted with FC, 31, 34, 127; reference, 30 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, on FC, 23, 31, 124 Sand, George, on FC, 23, 31, 31, 270;

INDEX 309

references, 35, 85 Sarmiento, Domingo F., allusion to FC, 34, 39 Schlesinger, Arthur M., on FC, 37 Scoresby, William, 255 Scott, Sir Walter, compared or contrasted with FC, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 18, 20, 22, 22, 24, 28, 31 passim, 35, 35, 51, 52, 53, 57, 77 passim, 81, 82, 84, 87, 95, 99, 100, 113, 121 passim, 129, 137, 153, 157 passim, 163, 167, 179, 199, 203 passim, 226, 231, 233, 249, 251, 261, 270, 275; on FC, 29, 133; references, 1, 2, 28, 36, 38, 89, 139, 147, 185, 231 Sealsfield, Charles (Karl Postl), on FC, 4, 8, 9, 161, 300 Sedgwick, Catherine M., compared with FC, 9 Shakespeare, William, compared or contrasted with FC, 35, 52, 204, 206, 271; references, 92, 102, 140, 167 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 157 Simms, William Gilmore, compared or contrasted with FC, 223; on FC, 4, 12, 13, 38, 231, 300; references, 19, 19 Smith, Henry Nash, 37 Smith, Sydney, 1 Smollett, Tobias, compared or contrasted with FC, 20, 69, 124, 130 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, allusion to FC, 33 Southern Literary Messenger, on FC, 5, 15, 16, 16, 296 passim; references, 11, 221 Southern Review, on FC, 9, 295 Southworth, Emma, 13 Spectator, 213 Spiller, Robert E., on FC, 37 Sterne, Laurence, compared or contrasted with FC, 236 Stone, William Leete, 11 Story, Joseph, 176 Swift, Jonathan, compared or contrasted with FC, 14 Tatler, on FC, 157 Thackeray, William Makepeace, on FC, 28, 239;

parodies FC, 26, 28, 243; reference, 157 Thorpe, T.B., 269 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 2, 30 Tolstoy, Leo N., allusions to FC, 23, 33, 34 Trollope, Frances, compared or contrasted with FC, 242 Turgenev, Ivan, 35 Twain, Mark, on FC, 23, 27, 29, 36, 283; references, 24, 26, 28, 276 United States Literary Gazette, on FC, 6, 8, 11, 93, 295, 295 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, on FC, 18, 298 Voltaire, F.M.A. de, 147 Walpole, Horace, compared or contrasted with FC, 99, 100 Waples, Dorothy, on FC, 11 Webb, James Watson, 11, 16 Webster, Daniel, 13, 19, 176 Weed, Thurlow, 11, 16 Western Monthly Review, on FC, 4, 7, 10, 295 Westminster Review, on FC, 20 Wiley, Charles (FC’s publisher), 85 Wilkes, Charles, 255 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, compared or contrasted with FC, 214 Winters, Yvor, on FC, 38 Wood, D.B., 270 Wordsworth, William, 151 Wormeley, K.P., 207 Zola, Émile, 36