“During the spring of 1826 Cooper followed a deputation of Pawnee and Sioux from New York to Washington to study their origin for The Prairie.”[43] The sources which he drew upon Cooper never indicated directly but it may be pretty safely inferred that he looked into the Journals of Lewis and Clarke, that he used Long, and perhaps saw Mackenzie.[44] From these he learned of the wild horses, the buffalo herds, the prairie dogs, flocks of migratory birds, prairie fires, and mounted Pawnee, Tetons, Konzas, Omahas, and Osages that were to be found on these endless plains. Among these he placed a squatter from Kentucky, treking with his family and brother-in-law by prairie schooner across the Nebraska prairie.[45] As Cooper knew nothing of the life at first hand he was obliged to draw upon his imagination more largely than heretofore. This he did as easily in Paris where he was at the time residing as he might have done at home in New York. As usual he reintroduced many of his characters from his preceding work. Hawkeye reappeared as the aged trapper, given somewhat more to moralizing.[46] Mahtoree was a slightly milder Magua mounted on horseback. The Pawnee Hard Heart was another Uncas, and the psalmist became a pedant in search of genus and species. The lovers were already married and were kept in the background. The “pursuit-rescue” device to advance the plot was continued but was employed with less vigor. In every way the tone of the story is a more subdued one. Only an assault by Indians, a stampede by buffalo, the prairie fire, and the consternation over the treachery of the brother-in-law disturb the author’s brooding over the epic-vastness of the plains.
Whatever Cooper may have owed to Scott at the beginning of his career, he owed little to him now. His poetical rendering of the prairie landscape with its elemental figures was a far cry from the landscapes of Scott in the style of Mrs. Radcliffe and from his treatment of characters. Perhaps the greatest change of all was in Cooper’s central figure, the squatter. Instead of making him heroic, Cooper showed him untroubled by vision, restless to shake off the restraints of law and society. His wife, “a shabby, inarticulate prairie Hecuba,” was Cooper’s first attempt to depict the wife or mother, and has remained, with Ruth in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, his most noteworthy portrait of a woman. Although Cooper’s story went back but twenty-three years, its manners were those of a time and condition remote from his own. Constructed as it was from historical sources it has further qualification for inclusion here. Its poetic rendering of the atmosphere of that time and place has given an effective if not accurate idea of the prairie, an idea which Easterners have until recently retained.
Cooper’s next novel, The Red Rover (1828), was perhaps his best sea tale but it was not historical, all details having been invented “without looking for the smallest aid from traditions or facts.” Hard upon it came another Indian tale, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829). In this novel Cooper turned aside from his Leatherstocking series, for such his Indian tales had come to be, to the red man’s last stand against his white opponent in New England in the seventeenth century. Some of his imitators,[47] Miss Child, Mrs. Cheney, and Miss Sedgwick, had directed attention to early New England life, and Cooper now turned in the same direction, selecting the period of King Philip’s war as the basis for his novel of Puritan life. The account of Eunice Williams’s Indian captivity at Deerfield had become classic, and Increase Mather and Hubbard had each given his narrative of the Indian war with the bias of those who knew the “heathen” chiefly as an enemy. Irving’s short tale, Philip of Pokanoket (1814) had served as a corrective to this legend. The episode of Goffe, the regicide, had been treated by Stiles in his History of the Judges. In fiction, James McHenry, one of Cooper’s earliest imitators, had dealt with Goffe in a Gothic romance, The Spectre of the Forest (1823). Scott in his Peveril of the Peak (1823), had called attention to it.[48] As a national romancer, Cooper doubtless felt it incumbent upon him to make yet another excursion into New England material.
In the arrangement of his story, Cooper reversed his usual plan, by making the first half almost wholly fictitious, and putting into the last half the historical material concerning Goffe, and the extermination of Philip’s Indian cohorts. The leading episode of the first volume, an Indian assault upon a settler’s block-house, was probably suggested by the analogous attack on the feudal castle in Ivanhoe. Cooper found it difficult to supply a central character as the Puritans were to him uncongenial. In Captain Heathcote he created a man of piety, forced to the Connecticut frontier by disagreeable and petty religious squabbles. The story deals with his domestic life, his constant fear of attack, and the final assault of Indians who destroyed his home and kidnapped his daughter. It also treats of a general renewal of hostilities after an interval of several years during which American enterprize built up the village of Hartford; of the timely warning by the mysterious stranger, resulting in the overthrow of Philip; and of the restitution of the wept-for daughter who clings to her Indian mate. For the historical background Cooper selected, probably from Trumbull,[49] a few items regarding the early settlement of Hartford in 1635, which he used for the openings of his volumes; and then, omitting the early years of the war as unsuited to his purpose, selected for the dramatic climax the final hounding and defeat of Canonchet in 1675. A mysterious stranger, introduced as Submission, is employed in the dénouement to warn the villagers of the final assault in which he meets his death. The reader of The Spy and The Pilot, already acquainted with Cooper’s method of introducing historical characters, had no difficulty in recognizing Goffe, the regicide.
As an historical novel, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish was a failure. Cooper was too much a victim of his early bigoted training to enter with sympathy into the life of the Puritans. Their religious fanaticism combined with worldly discretion in exploiting the natives he illustrated repeatedly. The head and front of their offending he attributed to their hypocritical pastor, the Reverend Meek Wolfe, who may or may not have been intended as a caricature of Cotton Mather. On this incapacity of Cooper’s to depict the founders of New England, Professor Lounsbury has said: “Paradoxical as the assertion may seem, he was too much like the Puritans to do them justice;”[50] which Professor Erskine has wisely corrected by adding,[51] “In so far as Puritanism coincided with his nature, he portrayed it admirably in this novel; he lets the reader see the practical vigor, the exalted piety, and the domestic affection of Mark Heathcote and his comrades, for these virtues he can recognize, as he could recognize the common piety and the common sense of The Pilgrim’s Progress. But the mastering vision that burns like flame in the Puritan temper, impelling it to strenuous action, was entirely hidden to Cooper, if we can judge by his writings....” What further contributed to its failure, and is not so apparent unless approached from the standpoint of the historical novel is Cooper’s infelicity in dealing with manners so remote in time. What people wore, apart from broadswords, he failed to mention. His Wampanoags were fundamentally not different from the Hurons he presented in The Last of the Mohicans. As in no previous book he frequently lapsed into a strained circumlocutory style that appears to have been meant for the picturesque language of old romance.[52] The braggadocio with which the second volume, written in Paris, opened, together with the ill-temper displayed toward the Puritan type, was to bring Cooper into disfavor at home and abroad. As the next decade of his work was controversial, or upon European subjects, this chapter may well come to a close here, deferring the discussion of Cooper’s later, regional novels until some other time.
In the decade from 1821 to 1831—his most fruitful period—Cooper was more consistently an historical novelist than has been recognized. In The Spy he represented more fairly than contemporary historians the actual nature of the Revolutionary conflict. The Pioneers immortalized the passing of the frontier, while The Pilot was our first historical novel of the sea. Lionel Lincoln was an earnest of national romance, to which he returned in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. In The Last of the Mohicans he set down memorably the passing of the first American. America was his theme, nothing more, nothing less. For this task he lacked the historical acumen of Scott. Of American history in general and of New York history, in particular, he had a tolerable understanding. His life had fortunately been sufficiently varied and representative not to necessitate getting up his local coloring with infinite toil. In one or two cases—so rapid were social changes—he could depend on aged eye-witnesses for a reasonably accurate idea of a former day.
His American predecessors taught him practically nothing. From Scott he learned the general formula for his work. Like him he turned to native scene as the groundwork for his romance. From him, also, he learned to give larger place to romantic theme than to restoration of the past. From him he borrowed the ultraromantic hero and most of the conventional types of character that he repeated with little variation in successive novels.
But all this was at the beginning. Once started he was less influenced by foreign authors and subjects than any of his contemporaries. In his first book he substituted for lairds, a pedlar, and in place of a castle he used the Wharton farm-house. Save for his delineation of certain types, his second book was completely indigenous. In his third, he outdid the Scotchman himself in giving the very life of the sea. The Gothic tradition which ran through much of Scott, Cooper retained only in Lionel Lincoln, finding a more rational substitute in the terror inspired by the Indians; and, in the mystery of the sea and the wilderness, a new source of awe. Because he was not steeped in history and because America’s brief existence did not make it necessary to delve into antiquity, he substituted adventure for archaism. He showed 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 war of the crusaders; that the Indian warrior equally with the turbaned Saracen, was the theme of the romancer; and that heroes 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.”[53] His was the romantic tale of adventure. That is not to say, however, that “his invention was not without a solid basis; he is not to be neglected as an historian.... No one fixed the current heroic traditions of his day more firmly to actual places.”[54]
Cooper was prolix, as Scott was prolix, but that, it has been said, was a secret of his illusion. In technical faults Cooper’s work abounded; what he enjoyed was to walk cross-country, and little he cared whether his boots were polished or no. At its best his style had the rapid motion and color so much needed in the historical novel of action. Naturally a fighter, he could give his story the fire and life which such a novel should have. He wrote far better than was required of him.
While he was not the historical novelist that Scott was, he was Scott’s most influential successor, and as Thackeray said, his country deserves well of him. For the epitome in fiction of early American life one goes not to Irving or Hawthorne but to Cooper. His representation of it as the conquest of nature by the pioneer has been considered so characteristic that the historical novel as he conceived it dominated the writing of American fiction practically up to the Civil War.