A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak,

Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,

Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

In 1826 Cooper went abroad with his family, staying on the other side for nearly six and a half years. His reputation was well established, and he left with the best wishes of his countrymen and the respect of the many foreigners who knew him through his books. He was an ardent believer in his own land and in the theory of its government, and at the same time he was an admirer, as he had been taught to be, of the dignity and the traditions of the Old World. It was to be expected that he would grow wiser with travel and that his later works, while retaining all their interest as stories, would be enriched by a deeper and mellower feeling for humankind. But he had already displayed one weakness which was destined to increase in him until it almost wholly offset his virtues with his readers. He was positive to the last degree in the opinions he held, and brutally untactful in expressing them. If he had ever heard of the soft answer that turneth away wrath, he felt contempt for it. Thus, for example, in the preface to “The Pioneer” he referred to the least of authors’ ills, the contradiction among critics: “There I am, left like an ass between two locks of hay; so that I have determined to relinquish my animate nature, and remain stationary, like a lock of hay between two asses.” The fruit of travel was naturally a more vivid sense of the differences between American and European ways, a fertile crop of opinions, a belligerent assertion of them, and an unhappy series of quarrels with all sorts of Americans—business men, editors, naval officers, congressmen, and the majority of his readers, a vast army of representatives of the upper ten thousand and the lower.

During the first three years abroad he went on, under the headway gained at home, with three novels of American themes—one in the “Leatherstocking” series, one on Puritan life in New England, and one sea story. Then he went off on a side issue and sacrificed the next ten years to controversial books which are very interesting side lights on literary history but very defective novels. The whole sequence started with Cooper’s resentment at the “certain condescension in foreigners” which was to make Lowell smart nearly forty years later. To meet this, and particularly the condescension of the English, he left the field of fiction to write “Notions of the Americans; Picked up by a Traveling Bachelor.” It failed of its purpose because it was too complacent about America and now and then too offensive about England, but the underlying trouble with it was its aggressive tone. A man could hardly make friends for America when he was in the temper to write of Englishmen, “We have good reason to believe, there exists a certain querulous class of readers who consider even the most delicate and reserved commendations of this western world as so much praise unreasonably and dishonestly abstracted from themselves.” Cooper never could refrain from “the retort of abuse” against which Irving had advised in “The Sketch Book.” Then followed three novels located in Venice, Germany, and Switzerland,—“The Bravo,” “The Headsman,” and “The Heidenmauer,”—all designed to show how charming was Old World tradition and how mistaken was its undemocratic scheme of life. They were failures, like “Precaution,” because Cooper could not write an effective novel which attempted to prove anything. It was his gift to tell a good story well and to build it out of the material in the midst of which he had grown up.

By the time he was ready to come back to America he had become kinked and querulous. The story of his controversies is too long for detailing in this chapter. The chief literary result of it is the pair of stories “Homeward Bound” and “Home as Found.” The point of them, for they again were written to prove something, was to expose the crudities of a commercialized America. There is no question that the country was crude and raw (see pp. 111–114). A period of such rapid development was bound to produce for the time poor architecture, bad manners, shifty business, superficial learning, and questionable politics. Many other critics, home and foreign, were telling the truth about America to its great discomfort. Cooper’s picture of Aristabulus Bragg was probably not unfair to hundreds of his contemporaries:

This man is an epitome of all that is good and all that is bad, in a very large class of his fellow citizens. He is quick-witted, prompt in action, enterprising in all things in which he has nothing to lose, but wary and cautious in all things in which he has a real stake, and ready to turn not only his hand, but his heart and his principles, to anything that offers an advantage. With him, literally, “Nothing is too high to be aspired to, nothing too low to be done.” He will run for governor or for town clerk, just as opportunities occur, is expert in all the practices of his profession, has had a quarter’s dancing, with three years in the classics, and turned his attention toward medicine and divinity, before he finally settled down to law. Such a compound of shrewdness, impudence, common-sense, pretension, humility, cleverness, vulgarity, kind-heartedness, duplicity, selfishness, law-honesty, moral fraud, and mother wit, mixed up with a smattering of learning and much penetration in practical things, can hardly be described, as any one of his prominent qualities is certain to be met by another quite as obvious that is almost its converse. Mr. Bragg, in short, is purely a creature of circumstances.

The weakness of Cooper’s criticisms on America is not that they were unjust, but that they were so evidently ill-tempered and bad-mannered. He made the utter mistake of locating the returning Europeans, the accusers of America, in Templeton Hall, which was the name of his own country place. He involved them in his own quarrel with the villagers over the use of a picnic ground belonging to him, and thus loaded on himself all the priggishness which he ascribed to them. The public was only too ready to take it as a personal utterance when he made one of them say:

I should prefer the cold, dogged domination of English law, with its fruits, the heartlessness of a sophistication without parallel, to being trampled on by every arrant blackguard that may happen to traverse this valley in his wanderings after dollars.

It is a misfortune that most men and women who are willing to risk repute for the freedom to think and speak are eccentric in other respects. They are unusual first of all in having minds so independent that they presume to disagree with the majority even in silence. They are more unusual still in having the courage to disagree aloud. When they have said their say, however, their neighbors begin to carp at them, respectable people to pass by on the other side, and the newspapers to distort what they have said and then abuse them for what they never uttered. The honest and truly reckless talkers, stung to the quick, feel injured and innocent, talk extravagantly, rely more and more on their own judgments and less and less on the facts, and sooner or later lose their influence, if they do not become outcasts. In the end they have the courage and honesty with which they started, a few deploring friends, and a thousand enemies who hate them with an honest and totally unjustified hatred. It is a tragic round which all but the most extraordinary of free speakers seem doomed to travel. And Cooper did not escape it. Yet he did have the remarkable strength and good fortune to pass out of this vale of controversy toward the end of his life. With 1842 his campaign against the public ceased—and theirs against him. He spent his last years happily at Cooperstown and slowly returned into an era of good feeling. It was in these later years that Lowell paid him the well-deserved tribute quoted above. He was really a great patriot. If his love of America led him into this sea of troubles, it was the same love that made him the successful writer of a masterly series of American stories. It is the native character of the man that is worth remembering, and the native quality of his books that earned him a wide and lasting fame.