A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,

. . . . . . . .

When pain and anguish wring the brow,

A ministering angel thou!

In the ordinary situations in Cooper’s novels his “females” were things to patronize and flatter,—for flattery never goes unattended by her sardonic companion,—but in times of stress they showed heroic powers of endurance. The three introduced in the first chapter of “The Spy” were endowed, according to the text, with “softness and affability,” “internal innocence and peace,” and expressed themselves by blushes and timid glances. The two “lovely beings” of “The Last of the Mohicans” are even more fulsomely described. “The flush which still lingered above the pines in the western sky was not more bright nor delicate than the bloom” on Alice’s cheeks; and Cora was the fortunate possessor of “a countenance that was exquisitely regular and dignified, and surpassingly beautiful.” In the passage that follows they are not referred to simply, but always with a bow and a smile--“the reluctant fair one,” “the dark-eyed Cora,” and as they finally disappear on horseback through the woods, the reader is expected not to laugh at the final ridiculous tableau of “the light and graceful forms of the females waving among the trees.” Of course the readers to whom Cooper addressed this did not laugh. They realized that in speaking of women he was simply using the conventional language of the day, which was not intended to mean what it said; that he was introducing a pair of normal, lovely girls, and that the best to be required of a normal girl was that she should be lovely—“only this and nothing more.” There was no evidence that Cora and Alice had minds; they were not expected to; instead they had warm hearts and “female beauty.” Lowell was probably not unfair in his comment:

And the women he draws from one model don’t vary,

All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.

But it must be admitted that in Cooper’s time the model was a prevailing one, and that it was only in his old age that women began in any large numbers to depart from it.

Cooper was all his life a more and more conscious observer and critic of American character and American conditions. As a result his stories take hold of the reader for the very simple reason that they are based on actual life, and real people. They had, moreover, and still have, the added advantage that they are based on a life that was fascinatingly unfamiliar to the great majority of his readers, and so, though realistic in their details, they exert the appeal of distant romance. All through the eighteenth century, and particularly through the last third of it, literature had been inclining to dwell on the joys of life in field and forest. Addison and his followers had handed on the spell of the old ballads of primitive adventure. Pope had dabbled with the “poor Indian” and Goldsmith had written his celebrated line about “Niagara’s ... thundering sound.” Collins and Gray had harked back to the romantic past, and Burns and Wordsworth had confined their poems to the peasantry among whom they lived. Irving’s reply to “English Writers on America” (see p. 120) alluded to the frequency of books on distant lands and peoples. So when Cooper began publishing his stories of adventure in untrodden lands, he found an attentive public not only in America but in England, and not only in England but all over Europe, where, as soon as his novels appeared, they were reprinted in thirty-four different places.

With the literary asset of this invaluable material Cooper combined his ability to tell an exciting story. There is nothing intricate or skillful about his plots as pieces of composition. In fact they seldom if ever come up to any striking finish. They do not so much conclude as die, and as a rule they “die hard.” They are made up of strings of exciting adventures, in which characters whom the reader likes are put into danger and then rescued from it. “The Last of the Mohicans” has its best material for a conclusion in the middle of the book, with the thrilling restoration of Alice and Cora to their father’s arms at Fort William Henry; but the story is only half long enough at that point, so the author separated them again by means of the massacre and carried it on more and more slowly to the required length and the deaths of Cora and the last of the Mohicans. For “The Spy,” the last chapter was actually written, printed, and put into page form some weeks before the latter part had even been planned. Cooper’s devices for starting and ending the exciting scenes seem often commonplace, partly because so many later writers have imitated him in using them. Mark Twain, in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” said derisively that the “Leatherstocking Tales” might well have been named “The Broken Twig” series, because villain and hero so often discover each other as the result of a misstep on a snapping branch. He might have substituted “A Shot Rang Out” as his title, on account of the frequency with which episodes are thus started or finished. Bret Harte’s burlesque in his “Condensed Novels” shows how broadly Cooper laid his methods open to attack from the scoffers. Yet the fact remains that few who have come to scoff could have remained to rival Cooper. He has enlisted millions of readers in dozens of languages; he has fascinated them by the doings of woodsmen who were as mysteriously skillful as the town-bred Sherlock Holmes; he has thrilled by the genuine excitement of deadly struggles and hairbreadth ’scapes; and the sale of his books, a hundred years after he first addressed the public, would gladden the heart of many a modern novelist.