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.