FOOTNOTES
[1] Any discussion of Cooper must go back to Lounsbury, T. R. James Fenimore Cooper, American Men of Letters series, Boston, 1883. W. B. Clymer’s Cooper is mainly an abridgment of Lounsbury. James Fenimore Cooper (1913) by Mary E. Philips supplies anecdotal information and pictures.
[2] Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper. Edited by his Grandson, James Fenimore Cooper. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1922.
[3] Brownell, W. C. American Prose Masters, New York, 1909, p. 18.
[4] How little encouragement was held out is best related by himself: “So little was expected from the publication of an original work of this description, at the time that it was written, that the first volume of The Spy was actually printed several months before the author felt a sufficient inducement to write a line of the second.... As the second volume was slowly printing, from manuscript that was barely dry when it went into the compositor’s hands, the publisher intimated that the work might grow to a length that would consume the profits. To set his mind at rest, the last chapter was actually written, printed, and paged, several weeks before the chapters which preceded it were even thought of.”
[5] Loshe, L. D. The Early American Novel, New York, 1907, pp. 83–84.
[6] See Riverside edition, p. 21. “The recent fate of Andre has created much irritation on both sides.” Cf. also pp. 68, 208, 298, 301.
[7] Brownell, W. C. op. cit., p. 14.
[8] Van Doren, Carl, op. cit., p. 28.
[9] See Fisher, Sidney G. The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of the American Revolution; Proceedings of the American Philosophical Soc., Vol. LI, No. 204, April–June, 1912. See also references in footnote 29, page 27 of this thesis.
[10] Van Doren, Carl, op. cit., p. 15.
[11] For the attitude of English critics toward American writings see Cairns, W. B. British Criticisms of American Writings, 1815–1833, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 14. Madison, 1922.
[12] Erskine, John, op. cit., p. 65.
[13] The Pioneers (Houghton Mifflin ed.). Introduction, xxxiii, states Cooper’s intention to generalize; it further states his theory of fiction: “Rigid adhesion to truth, an indispensable requisite in history and travels, destroys the charm of fiction; for all that is necessary to be conveyed to the mind by the latter had better be done by delineations of principles, and of characters in their classes, than by a too fastidious attention to originals.”
[14] Richard Jones, a hanger-on, who conceals his dependent state by a kind of horse-play raillery of his patron and occasionally mixes toddy evidently was taken over from the bachelor in Bracebridge Hall.
[15] Van Doren, op. cit., p. 30.
[16] Introduction, xxxvii, note: “Though forests still crown the mountains of Otsego, the bear, the wolf, and the panther are nearly strangers to them.” See also p. 35.
[17] Introduction to The Pioneers, i.
[18] That this was already realized may be seen from the review in The North American Review, 15:250.
[19] Portifolio 15 (1823) 230: “Natty Bumppo, ... we think, has been modelled from the effigies of old Daniel Boone, who abandoned the society of his kindred and built a hut among the Indians; and persisted in moving further into the interior as civilization invaded his wild domains.... 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.”
[20] See Chapter V.
[21] Not only did he write five sea novels, a History of the Navy, and articles about the navy, but even in his land novels sailors were frequently introduced, and The Prairie, for example, is viewed as a sea of sand upon which the prairie schooners sail. The Pathfinder makes use of his experiences upon Lake Ontario.
[22] Introduction to The Pilot, xv.
[23] Atlantic Monthly, 100:337.
[24] Conrad, Joseph. Notes on Life and Letters (1921), p. 78. The entire article, “Tales of the Sea,” should be read for its tribute to Cooper’s insight into the poetry of the sea.
[25] North American Review, 1824:314, “By implicating the tale with our naval history, the author possesses himself of one of the few positions from which our national enthusiasm is accessible.”
[26] Introduction, xxii.
[27] Erskine, op. cit., p. 71. As early as 1800 there had appeared The Life and History of Paul Jones, the English Corsair. See Seitz, Don C. Paul Jones, a complete bibliography. New York (1917).
[28] How much this book has been neglected may be inferred from the fact that Lounsbury gives it but two paragraphs: Erskine cuts these down to one, and others are content with one condemnatory sentence.
[29] Lounsbury, T. R. op. cit., p. 49.
[30] Van Doren, op. cit., p. 32.
[31] Southern Literary Messenger, 1838:375, speaks of Lionel Lincoln’s popularity as unprecedented. “It was this production that created in Boston and throughout New England, a popularity for Mr. Cooper’s works, at one period so great, as to become among novel readers, almost a mania.” Cf. U. S. Literary Gazette I:340; North American Review 23:154.
[32] Introduction to The Last of the Mohicans, p. xviii. How seriously the subject took hold of Cooper his daughter elsewhere records: In her childhood there was nearly always an Indian book on her father’s table.
[33] North American Review, 26:373.
[34] Preface to The Deerslayer.
[35] See Appendix C.
[36] Last of the Mohicans, Riverside ed., p. 133.
[37] The Nation, 112:255.
[38] Roundabout Papers.
[39] Erskine, pp. 80–81. This view is suggested by Cooper’s own note to his text, Riverside ed., p. 4.
[40] Erskine, p. 81. “A beautiful conception of old-world grace and courtliness, which Cooper must have drawn with affection,” Erskine remarks, “yet with all of Montcalm’s adroitness, his management of the Indians and his tact in treating with a conquered foe—the reader is made to feel the moral slipperiness which the hearty Englishman resents with a national distrust of French traditional perfidy.”
[41] Riverside ed. Last of the Mohicans, pp. 211–12. Cooper’s only comment that I can find on the relation of the sister muses.
[42] Dwight, Timothy. Travels in New England and New York (1821), III, 362–376. After stating that Montcalm made no reasonable effort to check the Indians, he emphasizes the timidity and imbecility of Webb who lay at Fort Edward with 6,000 men, doing nothing. Dwight narrates as from Captain Noble, who was present, that when Sir William Johnson would gather volunteers from Webb’s garrison to proceed to Munroe’s assistance, Webb forbade it. Cooper’s rendering of the massacre is sharply criticized by Martin in his Montcalm en Canada, chaps. 4 and 5. Cf. also Rameau, La France aux Colonies, II, p. 306; N. H. Prov. Papers, VI, 604, 605, and Stone, W. L. Life and Times of Johnson.
[43] Phillips, Mary E. James Fenimore Cooper (1912), p. 129.
[44] Introduction to Last of the Mohicans, p. xviii.
[45] The analogy which the spectacle afforded in Cooper’s mind to the conquest of Canaan, has not been commented upon, but a case can be made for it from the biblical names he for the first time applied to nearly all the characters; from the bee-hunter in his land of honey, the encounters with the “Ishmaelites of the plains,” the Sioux, the stampede of the buffalo furnishing the terror of wild beasts, and the problem of the Red Sea transformed into that of prairie fire, with Leatherstocking the Moses to show how to circumvent this difficulty.
[46] This was fitting for an old man. Thackeray pronounced Leatherstocking the greatest character created in Fiction since the Don Quixote of Cervantes and he thought the death scene in The Prairie, in which the old trapper said “Here!” as surpassing anything he had met in English literature. Phillips, 1621. Thackeray imitated this scene in Colonel Newcome’s “Adsum!”
[47] For a full discussion of these, see next chapter.
[48] Like many other romantic stories, it rests upon insufficient authority, Cf. Fiske, John. The Beginnings of New England, p. 218; “The story rests chiefly upon the statements of Hutchinson, an extremely careful and judicious writer.... Goffe kept a diary which came into Hutchinson’s possession.... A paramount regard for Goffe’s personal safety would quite account for the studied silence of contemporary writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather.”
[49] The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Preface. (Houghton Mifflin ed.), p. xi.
[50] Lounsbury, op. cit., p. 75.
[51] Erskine, op. cit., p. 92.
[52] For example, “the kine had yielded their nightly tribute,” used four times. “Smoke” is called “the vapor that rolled upward;” a child is always spoken of as “the cherub,” etc.
[53] Southern Literary Messenger, 1838:373.
[54] The Cambridge History of American Literature, I, p. 306.