REFERENCES:
W. C. Bryant: A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper, 1852.
T. R. Lounsbury: James Fenimore Cooper, ‘American Men of Letters,’ fourth edition, 1884.
W. B. Shubrick Clymer: James Fenimore Cooper, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1900.
I
HIS LIFE
James Cooper was the eleventh of the twelve children of William and Elizabeth (Fenimore) Cooper, of Burlington, New Jersey. He was born in that picturesque town by the Delaware on September 15, 1789. The name James, given him in honor of his grandfather, had also been borne by his first American ancestor, who is said to have come from Stratford-on-Avon, in 1679. In fulfilment of a promise to his mother (whose family had become extinct in the male line), the novelist, in 1826, changed his name to Fenimore-Cooper.
At the close of the Revolutionary War, William Cooper acquired large tracts of land on Otsego Lake in New York, settled there in 1790, founded the village still known as Cooperstown, and built for himself a stately home to which he gave the name of Otsego Hall. He was the first judge of the county and a member of Congress, a man of strong character and agreeable address.[7]
Cooper’s boyhood was passed amid picturesque natural surroundings, on the edge of civilization, the scene of The Deerslayer and The Pioneers. He attended the village school, prepared for college with the rector of St. Peter’s Church, Albany, entered Yale in the second term of the Freshman year (Class of 1806), and was dismissed in the Junior year for some boyish escapade the nature of which is unexplained.
It was decided that he should enter the navy. There was then no training school, and boys took the first lessons in seamanship in the merchant marine. Cooper spent a year before the mast in the ‘Sterling,’ sailing from New York to London, thence to Gibraltar, back to London, and from London to Philadelphia. His experiences are set forth in the early chapters of Ned Myers. The ‘Sterling’ lost two of her best hands by impressment as soon as she reached English waters. Cooper’s indignation at these outrages afterwards found voice through the lips of Ithuel Bolt in the story entitled Wing-and-Wing.
He was commissioned midshipman on January 1, 1808, and served awhile on the ‘Vesuvius.’ In the following winter he was one of the party sent to Oswego to build a brig for the defence of the lake, and became acquainted with the regions described in The Pathfinder. In the summer of 1809 he had charge of the gun-boats on Lake Champlain, and in the autumn was ordered to the sloop of war ‘Wasp.’
He left the service on his betrothal with Miss Susan DeLancey of Mamaroneck, New York, whom he married on January 1, 1811. For a few years he lived the life of a landed proprietor, dividing his time between Cooperstown, Scarsdale, and Mamaroneck. The dulness of a novel he was reading aloud to his wife provoked him to say that he could write a better one himself. Challenged to prove it, he produced Precaution (1820), a story of English life, following conventional lines. It was apprentice work. The effort of composition taught Cooper that he could write, but not that he could write well. He had no conceit of the book, and refused it a place in his collected writings.
In 1821 The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground, was published; its unqualified good fortune made Cooper a professed man of letters. From that time on until his death, twenty-nine years later, he produced books with uninterrupted regularity.
The Spy was followed by The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna, 1823; The Pilot, a Tale of the Sea, 1824; Lionel Lincoln, or the Leaguer of Boston, 1825; The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757, 1826. But one of this group of four can be pronounced a failure and two have had a success almost phenomenal in the history of letters.
Cooper shared the American passion for seeing foreign lands. The proceeds of authorship enabled him to carry out a plan he had formed of spending some time abroad. With his family and servants (a party of ten in all), he set sail from New York on June 1, 1826. He proposed to be gone five years. He overstayed that time by two years and five months. From May, 1826, to about January, 1829, he held the ‘nominal position’ of American consul at Lyons. His journeyings were made in a leisurely way after the fashion of the time. Eighteen months were spent in Paris and the vicinity, four months in London, and a few weeks in Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland. The winter of 1828–29 was passed in Florence, and was followed by a voyage to Naples. After spending some months at Sorrento and Naples, he settled in Rome for the winter of 1829–30. Thence to Venice, Munich, Dresden, and finally back to Paris.
He published while abroad The Prairie, 1827; The Red Rover, 1828; Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor, 1828; The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, 1829; The Water-Witch, or the Skimmer of the Seas, 1830; The Bravo, 1831; The Heidenmauer, or the Benedictines, 1832; The Headsman, or the Abbaye des Vignerons, 1833.
In November, 1833, Cooper returned to America. That and several ensuing winters were passed in New York, the summers in Cooperstown. Later he made Otsego Hall his permanent home.
He soon became embroiled in quarrels with the press. While in Paris his defence of Lafayette’s position in what is known as the ‘Expenses Controversy’ had provoked from his native land criticism which Cooper resented. He angered a part of the inhabitants of Cooperstown by making clear to them that Three Mile Point (a wooded tract on the lake, long used by the villagers as a picnic ground) was not theirs, as they maintained, but a part of the Cooper estate. With no thought of robbing them of their pleasure park, he insisted on their understanding that they enjoyed its use by favor and not by right.
For this the country papers assailed him. Combative by nature, Cooper brought suits for libel and recovered damages. The novel spectacle of an author baiting the newspapers ‘caused remark.’ The city press joined in the attack, the ‘Courier and Enquirer,’ the ‘New York Tribune,’ the ‘Albany Evening Journal,’ edited by Thurlow Weed, who once said apropos of his skill in stirring up litigation: ‘There is something in my manner of writing that makes the galled jades wince.’ Verdicts were given in Cooper’s favor. More libels followed, more suits were brought, more damages recovered. A cry arose that the liberty of the press was endangered. Cooper did not think so. He was a bulldog; when he had once fastened his teeth in a Whig editor, nothing could make him let go. He continued his prosecutions until he made his detractors respect him. It took about six years to do it. Bryant has described with grim humor the novelist’s warfare with that leviathan the Press: ‘He put a hook into the nose of this huge monster,’ said Bryant admiringly.[8]
This warfare disturbed Cooper’s peace of mind, but in no wise interrupted his literary activity. The following list records by no means all that he wrote after 1834, but will suffice to show his right copious and often happy industry. Besides ten volumes of travels, Cooper published: A Letter to his Countrymen, 1834; The Monikins, 1835; The American Democrat, 1838; Homeward Bound, or the Chase, 1838; Home as Found, 1838; The History of the Navy of the United States of America, 1839; The Pathfinder, or the Inland Sea, 1840; Mercedes of Castile, or the Voyage to Cathay, 1840; The Deerslayer, or the First War Path, 1841; The Two Admirals, 1842; The Wing-and-Wing, or Le Feu-Follet, 1842; Wyandotté, or the Hutted Knoll, 1843; Ned Meyers, or a Life before the Mast, 1843; Afloat and Ashore, or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford, 1844; Miles Wallingford (the second part of Afloat and Ashore), 1844; Satanstoe, or the Littlepage Manuscripts, 1845; The Chainbearer, or the Littlepage Manuscripts, 1846; Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, 1846; The Redskins, or Indian and Injin, 1846; The Crater, or Vulcan’s Peak, 1847; Jack Tier, or the Florida Reefs, 1848; The Oak Openings, or the Bee Hunter, 1848; The Sea Lions, or the Lost Sealers, 1849; The Ways of the Hour, 1850.
The Spy was dramatized and played successfully.[9] Dramatizations were also made of The Pilot, The Red Rover, The Water-Witch, The Pioneers (‘The Wigwam, or Templeton Manor’), and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (‘Miantonomah and Narrahmattah’). An original comedy, ‘Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats,’[10] was withdrawn after four performances. No satisfactory account exists of Cooper’s earnings by literature. It is believed that in the later years he was obliged to write, if not for the necessities of life, at least for the comforts and luxuries.
The hostility provoked by his energetic criticisms subsided in time. There was even a project on foot in New York to pay him the compliment of a public dinner as a proof of returning confidence. His untimely illness put to one side the question of honors of this poor sort.
Cooper died at Otsego Hall on September 14, 1851.
II
HIS CHARACTER
Cooper was a democrat in theory but not in practice. The rude ‘feudalism’ in which his boyhood was passed fostered the aristocratic sentiment. A residence abroad, in the obsequious atmosphere with which the serving classes invest any one who has the appearance of wealth, aggravated it. No one could have been more heartily ‘American’ than Cooper; but he made distinctions and his countrymen abhorred the distinctions.
Pride of this not unreasonable sort may go hand in hand with genuine modesty. Cooper was more unpretentious than his enemies were willing to allow. With a reputation that would have opened many doors he made no capital of it; he had no mind ‘to thrust himself on all societies.’
He was never slow to make use of the inalienable American privilege of speaking one’s mind. In 1835 the theory of the entire perfection of the American character was seldom challenged, at least by a native writer. That Cooper should entertain doubts on the subject was thought monstrous. It was resented in him the more because of his manner. Opinions quite as radical might have been uttered wittily and the end accomplished. Cooper had little wit. His touch was heavy and he was in dead earnest. He lacked neither courage, nor honesty, nor highmindedness, nor generosity, nor yet judgment (if his temper was unruffled), but he was entirely wanting in tact, and largely wanting in geniality of the useful, if superficial, sort, which lessens the wear and tear of human intercourse.
A philosopher divides famous men into two classes: those who are admired in their own homes (as well as in the world), and those who are admired anywhere but at home. Cooper belonged to the first class rather than the second. This proud, irascible, contentious, dogmatic man of letters enjoyed the unswerving loyalty and deep affection of every member of his family. And from this his biographer argues an essential sweetness of nature.
Cooper somewhere says: ‘Men are as much indebted to a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances for the characters they sustain in this world, as to their personal qualities.’ It was his ill-luck to have the accidents of his character often mistaken for the character itself.
III
THE WRITER
Cooper’s English at best, though fluent and spirited, is without grace; at worst it is clumsy and intractable. This writer of world-wide fame is singularly wanting in literary finish. He is not careless but colorless, not slovenly but neutral. He succeeds almost without the aid of what is commonly called ‘style.’ He is read for what he has to say, not for the way in which he says it. There are surprises in store for the reader, but they are not to be found in the perfect word, the happy phrase, or the balance of a sentence, but always in the unexpected turn of an adventure, in a well-planned episode abounding in incident, in the release of mental tension following the happy issue out of danger. As was said of another copious writer, ‘he weaves a loose web;’ one might add that it is often of coarse fibre. In few writers of eminence is form so subservient to contents. The defect was due to haste, to the natural and lordly contempt of a spontaneous story-teller for the niceties of rhetoric.
IV
ROMANCES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION THE SPY, LIONEL LINCOLN
Life in that unhappy strip of country known during the Revolution as ‘the neutral ground,’ Westchester County, New York, is the subject of The Spy. Here frequent and bloody encounters took place between skirmishers from the opposing armies. Marauding bands, ostensibly ‘loyal’ or ‘patriotic,’ though often composed of banditti, made life a misery and a terror to peaceably inclined householders. Cooper wrote from first-hand traditions. The family of his wife had been loyalists, and the most famous of Westchester County raiders was a DeLancey.
The chief character is Harvey Birch, the Spy. Professing to be in the employ of the British, he is the most trusted of Washington’s secret agents. His devotion to his chief is a passion, almost a religion. Mean of appearance, niggardly in his mode of life, he is capable of the last degree of personal sacrifice. His patriotism is of the most exalted kind, since it can have no proportionate reward. He must live (perchance die) detested by the people for whom he risks his life daily. Cooper makes us deeply interested in this uncouth being, who, persecuted to the point of despair, and even brought to the gallows, finds always a way of escape. Birch gambled with his life in stake. It was a desperate throw when he destroyed the bit of paper signed by Washington.
The romantic hero of the story is Peyton Dunwoodie, a youth whose ‘dark and sparkling glance’ played havoc with the hearts of impressionable ladies. But Peyton was true, and loved but one. More to the modern taste are the humors of Lawton and Sitgreaves, of Sergeant Hollister and Betty Flanagan. ‘Mr. Harper’ is impressive, and the mystery of his character well sustained. The ladies of ‘The Locusts’ have the quaint charm inseparable from other-day manners and costume. To be sure one of them, who seems likely to die of love, is mercifully killed by a random bullet, and another becomes a maniac. Novel-readers wanted a deal for their money in 1821. But Frances Wharton is a likable little creature, though her talk does not in the least resemble that of Miss Clara Middleton.
As an Irish bishop said of Gulliver’s Travels, the book contains improbabilities. The device of a masque which converts young Henry Wharton into the counterfeit presentment of an old gray-headed negro is far-fetched. The Spy was not intended to be a realistic novel.
Cooper projected another story on the background of the Revolution. Lionel Lincoln, for all the work put on it, was not a success. It had merits among which the merit of spontaneity is not conspicuous. Had the failure been less apparent, the novelist might have been tempted to continue the ‘Legends of the Thirteen Republics.’
V
THE LEATHER-STOCKING TALES AND OTHER INDIAN STORIES
A French critic once remarked that nothing was so like a chanson de geste as another chanson de geste. Readers have deplored the fact that nothing was so like a Leather-Stocking tale as another Leather-Stocking tale. But The Pioneers, the first of the series in order of composition, bears little resemblance to the others, and as a picture of life in a New York village at the end of the Eighteenth Century has a historical value. The narrative is firm in texture. The characters are thirty in number, and every man in his humor. The Judge, Cousin Richard, Mr. Grant the clergyman, all the town oddities, Monsieur Le Quoi, Major Hartmann, Doolittle, Kirby, and Benjamin are real and humanly interesting. The dialogue is fresh, racy, and appropriate. There is no effort at compression; winter evenings were long in 1824.
The book holds one by the scenes and characters rather than by the ‘fable.’ The mystery of ‘Edwards,’ and the coming to life of old Major Effingham, are well enough; but the strength of the story is in the episodes, such as that where Hiram Doolittle, supported by Jotham and Kirby, tries to serve the warrant on Natty Bumppo, in the trial of the old hunter, or the capital scene where Natty is put into the stocks, and the chivalrous major-domo, Benjamin, insists on sharing his punishment, and cheering the heart-broken old man with comfortable and picturesque words. Presently Doolittle came to enjoy the fruit of his victory. Venturing too near, he found himself in the tenacious grasp of the irate major-domo. Benjamin’s legs were stationary, but his fists were free, and he proceeded to work away with ‘great industry’ on Mr. Doolittle’s face, ‘using one hand to raise up his antagonist, while he knocked him over with the other;’ he scorned to strike a fallen adversary.
The Pioneers would merit a high place in American fiction were it only on account of that original character, Natty Bumppo, or ‘Leather-Stocking.’ He is natural, easy, attractive. In the other books (always excepting The Prairie), there is more of invention. Putting it in another way, the first Natty Bumppo is like a study from life, while the others often leave the impression of being studies from the first study.
By changing the background, the costume, the accessories, and making his hero younger or older, Cooper found him available for more exciting dramas than that played in Templeton.
Leather-Stocking next appears as ‘Hawkeye,’ the scout, in The Last of the Mohicans, a narrative based on the massacre of Fort William Henry in 1757, and, all things considered, the most famous of Cooper’s novels. It is an out-and-out Indian story, good for boys and not bad for men, being vigorous, brilliant, and packed with adventure. The capture, by a band of Montcalm’s marauding Iroquois, of the two daughters of the old Scottish general, their rescue by Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and Uncas, their recapture, the pursuit and the thrilling events in the Indian villages, form the staple of a book which without exaggeration may be called world-renowned.
If The Last of the Mohicans suffers from one fault more than another, it is from a superabundance of hair-breadth escapes. The novelist heaps difficulties on difficulties, all of which appear insurmountable, and are presently surmounted with an ease that makes the reader half angry with himself for having worried.
As might have been expected, in growing younger Natty has grown theatrical; he appears too exactly at the critical moment to perform the deed of cool bravery expected of him. It could hardly be otherwise; The Last of the Mohicans is a romance, and in romances such things must be. Chingachgook, that engaging savage, has for so many years met the romantic ideal of the American Indian that it is unlikely he will ever be disturbed in his place in the reader’s esteem. His rôle of white man’s friend was played in The Prairie by Hard-Heart, the young Pawnee chief.
The Prairie has an originality all its own. This strange and sombre tale brings together an oddly assorted group of people, some of whom—the squatter and his family in particular—are drawn with rude strength. There are weak points in the plot. The carefully guarded tent with its hidden occupant is a poor device for compelling attention. Dr. Battius, endlessly talkative about genus and species, is a tiresome personage. The justification of the story as a work of art is to be sought in the descriptions of the ‘desert,’ in the impressions given of immeasurable distance and illimitable space, the abode of mystery and terror. The passages describing the stampede of a herd of buffalo, the night surprise of the trapper and his friends by the Sioux, the escape of Hard-Heart from the torture-stake, are all done with a masterly stroke.
Natty Bumppo figures in The Prairie as an old man of eighty-seven. His eye has lost its keenness of vision and his hand its steadiness. But the heart is undaunted (‘Lord, what a strange thing is fear!’) and the mind fertile in expedients. At times the trapper appears in almost superhuman proportions; he is mythical, like a hero of antiquity. The attachment between the ancient hunter and his dog is exquisitely described. In the beautiful account of Leather-Stocking’s last hour no touch is more poetic than that where the dying man discovers that the faithful Hector is dead. He will not say that a Christian can hope to meet his hound again; but he asks that Hector be buried beside him; no harm, he thinks, can come of that.
Thirteen years after the publication of The Prairie appeared The Pathfinder, and one year after that The Deerslayer. The series was now complete, forming ‘something like a drama in five acts.’ The Pathfinder shows Natty in mature manhood, and (for the comfort of all who require this test of their heroes of fiction) a victim of unrequited love. Exposed to the wiles of the most treacherous of all Mingos, Cupid, the quondam hunter, hunted in turn, takes defeat like the man he is. In The Deerslayer the chronicle is completed with a group of scenes from Natty’s youth. On the shores of Otsego Lake, while defending old Hutter’s aquatic home, the young man learns the first lessons in the art of war.
Cooper wrote yet other Indian stories. Two may be taken note of in this section: The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, a narrative of the Connecticut settlements in ‘King Philip’s’ time, and Wyandotté, an episode of frontier life in 1775. The latter is realistic. Cooper was on his own ground and knew the Willoughby Patent and the Hutted Knoll much as he knew ‘Templeton’ and Otsego Lake. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish is pure romance. In spite of the labored speech of the Puritan settlers and the metaphorical flights of Metacom and Conanchet, the story is enthralling. That is a genuinely pathetic scene where Ruth Heathcote seeks to awaken in the mind of Narramattah, her lost daughter, now the wife of the Narragansett chief, some faint memory of her childhood, and the account of Conanchet’s death at the hands of the Mohicans is a strong and dramatic piece of writing.
VI
THE SEA STORIES FROM THE PILOT TO MILES WALLINGFORD
The Pilot is an imaginary episode in the life of John Paul Jones. Cooper has given his hero a poetic character. ‘Mr. Gray’ applies science to the problem before him up to the critical moment, and then trusts to intuition, to his genius, and finds wind and wave owning him their master. The new note is in the vivid descriptive passages, couched in terms of practical seamanship, but so graphically put that the most ignorant of lubbers can be depended on to read with a quickened pulse. Notable among these are the rescue of the frigate from the shoals, and the fight between the ‘Alacrity’ and ‘Ariel.’
There is much human nature in the speech of the men if not of the women. The dialogue between Borroughcliffe and Manual would not shame books more celebrated for humor than The Pilot. Vast refreshment can be found in the racy and picturesque talk of Long Tom Coffin, the most original character in Cooper’s gallery of seamen; also in that of Boltrope, who from an early ‘prejudyce’ against knee-breeches (he somehow always imagined Satan as wearing them) never became fully reconciled to the ship’s chaplain until that worthy left off ‘scudding under bare poles’ and garbed himself like other men. Dillon, the lawyer, is too obviously the scoundrel. As the ‘Cacique of Pedee,’ however, he serves a good end. His kinsman, Colonel Howard, walks the stage with dignity, a worthy specimen of the loyalist of the American Revolution, and typical of the class for whom Cooper had much sympathy.
The young women are far from being lay figures. They have beauty, intelligence, courage, even audacity. That they are too perfect in feature, form, manner, was a defect common to all fiction of the time; the art of making a heroine of a plain woman was in its infancy. Cooper, who could describe a girl, had always a deal of trouble to make her talk. Did he never listen to the conversation of those interesting creatures known, in the parlance of his day, as ‘females’? Would Alice Dunscombe, meeting her lover after a separation of six years, have used the phrases Cooper put into her lips? All these young women might with justice have complained that the speaking parts assigned them were not representative. But they were at the author’s mercy and did as they were told.
Cooper’s principal biographer, to whom we are all vastly indebted, says that ‘the female characters of his earlier novels are never able to do anything successfully but faint.’ This is unfair. Katherine Plowden, a brunette beauty, whom Professor Lounsbury has allowed himself to forget, goes habited en garçon to seek her lover, and does not faint when she finds him, only laughs like the gay Rosalind she is.
The story of ‘Mr. Gray the pilot’ is good, but The Red Rover is better. Cooper gave the public something new in pirates. The old-fashioned corsair, in theatrical phrase, looked his part. He swore horribly, was awful to behold, black-whiskered, visibly blood-stained, a walking stand of arms, like the monsters described in Esquemeling’s Buccaneers of America. Unlike L’Olonnois, of evil memory, the captain of the ‘Dolphin’ is almost a Brummell; his cabin is a boudoir, and he has the wit to eschew the old-fashioned device of skull and cross-bones. One is inclined, however, to laugh when the pirate ‘throws his form on a divan’ and bids music discourse. The Rover was somewhat given to posing, and in moments of deep thought wore a ‘look of faded marble.’
There is nothing fantastic in Wilder, the young captain, and nothing to be desired in his handling of the ‘Royal Caroline.’ The description of the flight before the strange cruiser is a splendidly nervous piece of writing. From the moment when the Bristol trader disentangles herself from the slaver’s side in the harbor of Newport until she becomes a wreck on the high seas and the diabolical pursuer passes like a hurricane, the interest is cumulative.
The book has its quota of garrulous old salts, some of whom talk too much, others not enough. ‘Mister Nightingale’ promises well, but has little of value to say after his discourse anent the quantity of sail a ship may carry in a white squall off the coast of Guinea. The reader will find amusement in the other characters, notably Fid and that strange being, Scipio Africanus.
The Water-Witch concerns a mysterious and beautiful smuggling brigantine with a wonderful gift for eluding Her Majesty’s revenue cruiser under command of Captain Ludlow. The time is the close of Lord Cornbury’s administration, the scene, New York harbor and the adjacent estuaries. The story is fantastic and melodramatic, and the dialogue stilted, even for Cooper. Compared with The Red Rover, a romance like The Water-Witch is hard reading. With such characters as Alderman Van Beverout, Alida de Barbérie, and ‘Seadrift’ with her epicene beauty, it is not surprising that The Water-Witch should have been dramatized.
The Two Admirals is an engaging picture of manly affection. He who has made the acquaintance of Sir Gervaise Oakes and his friend Richard Bluewater is to be congratulated, for a more sterling-hearted pair of worthies is seldom to be found. Other pleasant company may be had for the asking; the aged baronet Sir Wycherly Wychecombe, hospitable to excess, bemoaning the inconvenience of not having a satisfactory heir, and wondering why his brother never married, though he had never given himself the trouble to undergo the discipline of wedlock. Agreeable in their several ways are Mildred Dutton, Wycherly Wychecombe the young Virginian, and Galleygo the top man turned steward, he of the picturesque language. The story has a conventional plot, and one is supposed to be eager to know the validity of the Virginian’s claim to the ancient estate of the Wychecombes. The plot is in danger of being forgotten when Cooper carries his people to sea, and describes the action between French and English fleets off Cape la Hogue.
Wing-and-Wing relates the adventures of a French privateer in the Mediterranean in 1798. One has not to read far before becoming enamoured of the diabolical little lugger and her audacious captain. As creatures of romance go, the good-humored and handsome Raoul Yvard (alias ‘Sir Smees’) is real and attractive. His arguments with Ghita (they talk theology not at all after the manner of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s characters) move one to turn the pages hurriedly. Raoul may be forgiven; Ghita drove him to it, being orthodox and fond of proselyting. One can always take refuge with the vice-governatore and the podestà. These worthies are long-winded, but it were unfair to call them dull.
Ithuel Bolt, that long-legged, loose-jointed son of the Granite State, is new in Cooper’s gallery of seamen. He makes an interesting figure in the wine-shop at Porto Ferrajo, his chair, creaking under his weight, tipped back on two legs against the wall, the uprights digging into the plaster, his knees apart, ‘you fancy how,’ and his long arms over the backs of neighboring chairs, giving him a resemblance to a spread eagle. Next to the wine of the country, which he abuses while succumbing to its influence, he detests the saints. Filippo, the Genoese sailor, undertakes a feeble defence. Says the Yankee: ‘A saint is but a human—a man like you and me, after all the fuss you make about ’em. Saints abound in my country, if you’d believe people’s account of themselves.’ Cooper says that Bolt, after his return to America, became a deacon. This is no more incredible than the statement that he also became a teetotaler.
The pages of old reviews would probably show how Cooper’s delineation of Englishmen affected English readers. Our cousins over the water must have been difficult if they quarrelled with the spirit in which the portraits of Cuffe, Griffin, Winchester, and Clinch were painted, all being good men and true in their various capacities. In describing Nelson and the ‘Lady Admiraless’ the novelist undertook a difficult task. He was adroit enough to avoid bringing the famous beauty too often on the stage.
Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingford form a continuous story of almost a thousand pages. There is a mixture of love and adventure, the love being depicted as Cooper usually does it, neither better nor worse, and the sea-episodes as only Cooper could do them.
A capital passage in Afloat and Ashore is that describing the encounter with the savages off the coast of South America. Even more spirited are those chapters of Miles Wallingford in which the young captain of the ‘Dawn’ relates how he was overhauled successively by a British man-of-war, a French privateer, and a piratical lugger, and how he escaped them all only to be wrecked at last in the Irish Sea. Among a dozen or so of characters Marble is a typical Cooper seaman, a man of many resources, as witness how he outwitted Sennit. He was patriotic too, and on his first visit to London was chagrined at being obliged to admit that St. Paul’s was better than anything they had in Kennebunk.
VII
OLD-WORLD ROMANCE AND NEW-WORLD SATIRE THE BRAVO, THE HEIDENMAUER, THE HEADSMAN, HOMEWARD BOUND, HOME AS FOUND
The Bravo was the first of a group of stories on themes suggested to their author during his stay on the Continent. It deals with Venetian life during the decline of the Republic. Jacopo Frontoni, the reputed bravo, becomes party to the iniquitous system which conceals crimes committed in the interest of the oligarchy, by throwing the suspicion on himself, all to the end that he may save his aged father, unjustly imprisoned by the state. Under this odium Jacopo lives until life becomes unendurable. At the moment he is meditating flight he is himself enmeshed in the toils and dies by the hand of the public executioner. A power which holds that it can do no wrong has a short way with servants who might betray its tortuous policy.
Jacopo comes too near to being a saint. He would have been more lifelike had he been guilty of one at least of the twenty-five murders laid at his door. Even a hired assassin of the Fifteenth Century might show filial piety.
His fate more or less involves that of the old fisherman of the lagoons, Antonio, a representative of that helpless, oppressed class which is without rights save the right of being punished if it does not obey. Antonio is a nobly pathetic character, one of the finest to which Cooper’s imagination has given being. His patience, his love for the grandchild taken from him by the state to serve in the galleys, his courage in pleading before the Doge and even in the dread presence of the Council of Three that the boy may be given back to him until he has been formed in habits of virtue, are strong and beautiful traits.
Violetta and Don Camillo furnish the love motive, without which a romance of Venice were barren. We sympathize with them and rejoice in their escape. More than this the author could not ask.
That the story contains anachronisms admits of no doubt. It may be that the arraignment of the oligarchy is too unrelieved. On the other hand, the virtues of the narrative are many. The movement is rapid, the sentences clear, the various strands of interest artfully woven, and the conclusion inevitable and dramatic.
The Heidenmauer deals with the manners and the antagonisms of the time when the schism of Luther was undermining the Church. Far less engrossing than its predecessor and weighted with a cumbrous style, the book has its right valiant warriors and militant churchmen, its burghers, peasants, and other dramatis personæ of German romance. There are characters like Gottlob and old Ilse whose speech is always fresh and agreeable. The French abbé is voluble and might have been wittier. That one does not sit down to a table spread with an intellectual feast like that served in The Monastery or The Abbot, is no reason for disdaining the fare served in The Heidenmauer.
In The Headsman we follow the story of a highborn girl who has given her heart to a young soldier of fortune only to discover in him the son of that most loathed of beings, the official executioner of Berne. The office is hereditary, and were the youth’s real condition known the odious duties would in time fall on him. It is a foregone conclusion that Sigismund shall be found to be of noble birth, and Adelheid’s reward proportioned to the greatness of her soul. This is but one thread of a fairly complicated and romantic plot. The interest of the narrative is well sustained and the denouement unanticipated. None of these three romances is, strictly speaking, a novel of purpose, and the least attractive deserves friendlier critical treatment than is commonly accorded it.
In the same group may be placed Mercedes of Castile, which, if it cannot hold the attention by reason of the loves of Don Luis de Bobadilla and Mercedes, and the fate of the unfortunate Ozema, may be read (by whoever can take history well diluted with fiction) for the story of Columbus’s first voyage.
The Monikins contrasts the ways of men with the ways of monkeys, much to the disadvantage of men. Really it is no duller than some of the professed satire of the present day; it is merely longer and more desperately serious.
Homeward Bound and Home as Found form two parts of a single novel. The satire of the first part is forgotten in the movement of the narrative, the sea-chase, the wreck off the African coast, the fight with the Arabs. The second part is a diatribe on New York and Cooperstown in particular, and America in general. The chief characters, the Effinghams, mean well, but ‘they have an unfortunate manner,’ and their disagreeable traits are not so piquant as to be entertaining. Steadfast Dodge, the editor, is almost as unreal as the Effinghams. Captain Truck is a genuine brother man, resourceful as master of the ‘Montauk,’ and not helpless when figuring (without his connivance) as a great English author, at Mrs. Legend’s literary soirée.
Horatio Greenough had the ‘Effingham’ books in mind when he wrote to Cooper: ‘I think you lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats as you do.’
VIII
TRAVELS, HISTORY, POLITICAL WRITINGS AND LATEST NOVELS
Cooper was a giant of productivity. Some brief comment has been made on twenty-three of his novels. It is impossible in the limits of this study to do much beyond giving the titles of his remaining books.
The History of the Navy of the United States of America begins with ‘the earliest American sea-fight’ (May, 1636), when John Gallop in a sloop of twenty tons captured a pinnace manned by thieving Indians, and closes with the War of 1812. The noteworthy features of the book are accuracy, independence, severity of style, and freedom from spread-eagleism. The brief Chronicles of Cooperstown, written in a plain way, has the natural interest attaching to the subject and the author.
A Letter to his Countrymen, partly autobiographical, is absorbing in its bitter earnestness. The Travelling Bachelor purports to be the letters of a cosmopolite, a man of fifty, to various members of his club, recounting his travels in the United States. The book is historical, statistical, argumentative. It treats of government, manners, art, literature, of fashions in dress and of peculiarities of speech. As an attempt on the part of a man of strong prejudices to take an objective view of his own country, it is singularly interesting. Were its seven hundred closely printed pages lightened with humor or relieved by any grace of expression, The Travelling Bachelor would be a vastly entertaining work.
The American Democrat is a collection of short essays, forty-five in number, on the American republic, liberty, parties, public opinion, property, the press, demagogues, the decay of manners, individuality, aristocrat and democrat, pronunciation, slavery, etc., etc. The tone of the comments is intentionally censorious, and often proves exasperating. Having been long absent from America, Cooper found himself to a certain degree ‘in the situation of a foreigner in his own country.’ On this account he was prepared to note peculiarities. Praise and blame are mingled. The American Democrat sets forth high ideals, as may be seen, for example, in the suggestive essay on party. The book is courageous but wanting in suavity.
Sketches of Switzerland and Gleanings in Europe, comprising ten volumes in the original editions, are studies of Continental and English life. They contain a multitude of spirited, pungent, and true observations. Lacking the ‘antiseptic of style,’ the books are no longer read.
Between 1845 and 1850 Cooper published eight novels. Three of the eight, Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins, are narratives supposed to be drawn from the ‘Littlepage Manuscripts.’ The first is not only the best, but is also one of the most genial of all Cooper’s novels. Corny Littlepage had attractive friends, such as the mettlesome youth Guert Ten Eyck, a splendid specimen of the free-handed, royally generous Dutch-American. Jason Newcome, on the other hand, embodies Cooper’s never latent hostility to New England. The pictures of old days in New York and Albany are brilliant and highly finished, and the encounter with the Indians in Cooper’s most spirited vein.
The Crater is a history of the adventures of Mark Woolston of Bristol, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who was shipwrecked on a volcanic island in the Pacific, and with the able seaman Bob Betts set himself to solve the problem of existence. What with gardening, poultry-raising, boat-building, tempests, earthquakes, exploration of neighboring islands, colonization, savages, and pirates, the book resolves itself into one of the infinite variations of Robinson Crusoe. After twenty-nine chapters of this sort of thing comes an absurd and irrelevant conclusion.
All the later novels, Jack Tier, The Sea Lions, Oak Openings, and The Ways of the Hour, are hard reading, yet the least happy of them has passages betraying the master’s hand. The Sea Lions stands out by virtue of the powerful descriptions of an Antarctic winter; but neither Captain Spike’s mission to the gulf, nor the revelation of fat, profane Jack’s true station and sex, nor yet the malapropisms of Mrs. Budd (she would say ‘It blew what they call a Hyson in the Chinese seas’), can make Jack Tier more than tolerable.
* * * * *
Cooper’s greatest achievements were his stories of the sea and the forest. His real creations are sailors, backwoodsmen, old soldiers, and Indians. Whether his red men are conceived in the spirit of modern ethnological science can matter but little now. They are neither so close to Chateaubriand’s idealized savage, nor so far from the real Indian as is generally believed. That Cooper had no skill in representing contemporary society is plain enough; but the failure of Home as Found need not have been as complete as it was. Haste and anger must bear the blame of that literary disaster. Where he deals with manners of the past, as in Satanstoe, he is often most felicitous. With his novel of The Bravo he was in line with the Romantic movement. How far he comprehended that movement, or was influenced by it, is a more intricate problem.
Modern literature can show but few authors more popular than Cooper. He has been praised extravagantly; but the fact that Miss Mitford thought him as good as Scott ought not to prejudice us against him. And he has been damned without measure; but over against Mark Twain’s unchivalrous attack on his great fellow countryman may be set the royally generous tributes of Balzac and of Dumas.